reflecting on comments

Task: how to create theatrical realities that works.

"Anónimo dijo...
Should a play be enjoyable for everyone? Can it?

If you want to know what your audience will like, then you have to study your audience and their preferences. What do they expect? What are they familiar with?

Do you want to make plays for your audience or would you rather make an audience for your plays? How can you get to this?

Roberto"

"Anónimo dijo...
The brain understands new information according to previous experiences. If you get too abstract then the brain has nothing to relate the new knowledge to, and so it just refuses to understand.

Keep it up.

Roberto"


First of all, it is nearly impossible to make a play in which someone can absolutely not relate with anything, since the brain can't actually create new things, but can only rearrange things that it already knows, from what is called memory. A human cannot imagine, even abstractly, a 4th dimension. It can be understood, but it can't be seen, imagined or drawn. It is impossible, since the brain has no information of it. What you put on a stage should work similarly then, you should put, depending on the audience, what they will be able to relate to.

Abstract thinking is then, just something that only you and yourself can relate to, and for others to relate to it you would have to put it on words that are socially interpretable, i mean, in a way that everyone can understand it. But how can you make your abstract thinking into a play that everyone can understand? it has to go beyond explaining it, it has to show it.

I will take as example the one act play we are doing. We are using many things people will relate to easily: the delivery guy, the lawyer, the handyman, etc, but we are adding a game to it, which people don't know, but as it is going to be developed and easy to catch, then they will be able to understand it. So that it is enjoyable, you can't say everything, because if you know what is going to happen next, it won't be interesting (quoting jorge wagensberg again). You have to add the unexpected.

But is making a play like this, following certains rules to entertain the public the correct way of making a play? I know we are still students and we can't really experiment, but isn't the theatre somewhere you have to experiment different things to find YOUR best way to do it? I bet every big playwrights experimented with their own way of doing theatre. Why do we give people what they expect?

A play can't be enjoyable by everyone. You can't make a play for everyone. When you do a play you have to know who the play is for, but then, why do we have to do the play for them? Why can't we do theatre for ourselves? When you put it like that, actors sound like they are just to entertain the audience... is that it? Entertaining the audience? What about making plays to entertain yourself, make plays for yourself, not for other people. can that be done?

When you are making a play, and you know the audience you are gonna have, then you make a play FOR that audience. But those are some cases, like ours, that students will be watching, most of them because they HAVE to since they have to do a play review afterwards >.>... but the point is that the play is meant for them, we can't do whatever we want. But in other cases, You can play a play for yourself, and people that want to see the play will go to see it. Therefore, my opinion of making a play is that is depends GREATLY on who is the play for, where it is gonna be staged and other circumstances.

Making a play with many limitations can be hard, unless you get really creative and implement something... like a game... and then the task makes it more fun to make, and it won't be as common for the audience, making the audience interested to find out what the game is, therefore, you should not spoil it from the beginning.

What matters most? Who the play is for? Or what the play is about? Because i guess you have to adapt the things for the audience that is going to see it, but then the play would, i repeat, be for the audience and not for you... When you make plays for yourself, would you still have an audience?

Theatre as a window to culture

before starting to talk about the play, i want to say something that came into my mind while thinking about the thursday we stayed to plan the one-act play. When we were told to say 1 thing that highlighted our "characters", like the 1 thing we had to do to act as the other one or something like that, we all said something bad about everyone else... and i didn't stoped to think about it until recently. We just laughed and went on talking, and didn't realised how that told us how we actually thought of the others. Is that how we really think of each other? Or we just weren't taking it seriously?

We are a team, and our final projects reside on how well we work as a team, if we think like this of each other, i don't think our one-act play is gonna come out well. We have to change this, but not fake it, "fake it till we make it" is not the answer.


Well then... going on to the play.
In my last blog i said that going to see a play could be like going too see yourself on the everyday life from another perspective. And that is one of the reasons why people feel sympathy and identified with the protagonist, which is mostly a human for this reason i suppose, and therefore 1 of the reasons the feudal lord was the protagonist and not the demons on the school play.

But moving on... now i realised that the festival in Paucartambo is not a play, but a performance. And therefore it works differently than a normal play, therefore i discard my hypothesis of feeling identified, and will have to work on a new one.

The school play (the one of the merchants... :D) is, we could say, a window to see another culture, because we are seeing japan through theatre. As i said in one of my previous blogs:
"Theatre seems a really interesting and useful way to find out more about the human mind. I found that fascinating."
And the mind varies a lot with each culture and society. So we could see much more than just a theatre tradition, we were looking at a whole culture on stage, which most people don't realize. And we are going to see the same in paucartambo, since its not just a festival, but its a whole culture performing. It is very interesting to analyse a culture through its theatre, although it's not gonna be precise, you have to gather other information to compare, and then see how much the performance resembles the culture. How is the culture of Paucartambo shown in the festival? and to what extent is it stretched and modified?

P.S. that will be my research question for Paucartambo

Miyuki y los 2 mercaderes

Giving your own sense to things. Wouldn't that stop applying if you already know from the beginning that the concept is?

We knew the concept of plate tectonics and equivocation all along, and that makes it quite difficult to make our ideas (the ones who were in the making process) differ from each other.
What is the difference between giving a sense to something, and making the something? How can make sense? Or you can't?

I wasn't thinking about this until roberto told us in one of our classes that things don't have sense, but you give sense to things. From the start, i thought that the sense/concept of the play was ONLY the ones we were making in on (plate tectonics and equivocation) but then i started to give the play a different sense, although it was difficult because the 2 thoughts got confused.

The music in kabuki was really interesting, because when i first starting with my research, i found out it was mainly percussion... a hell lot of it, apart from the shamisen (a 3 stringed guitar) and the nohkan (a bamboo flute), and so i thought it was gonna be a tough job getting the music done with the musicians, but when they came and had to play, it actually came out easily and fast, and although yeah... we could only use mostly percussion, we did some pretty neat music for the play, especially the entrances.

Learning kabuki was actually entertaining and interesting. The theatre tradition at the start seemed really annoying, but it was just really different to what we were used to, and after knowing more about it, it came out to be really cool, and i actually liked acting kabuki. The music wasn't the best approach to understanding it though, i did more by the handouts and my friends presentations, and the exam.

Kabuki, with its extravagant costumes, weird noises and really different type of acting will be something difficult to forget, because it was really amazing stuff we worked with, but i wonder, why do we find it so amazing? Is it REALLY as big as we see it? or is it just different? Because what we normally see in theatre is not so exagerated and does not contain makeup like this, or costumes, like this. So is our "normal" type of theatre, for someone used to kabuki all his life, as big and amazing as kabuki is for us? Or is it just different?

There doesn't seem to be a small kind of theatre, even peruvian theatre, which i thought years ago to be really boring and with no interesting history at all, found out about yuyachkani and now abou the paucartambo festival that can be treated as theatre... i actually never thought of it as theatre, but now that i do, i can compare it to kabuki... but that would be too difficult, as kabuki and paucartambo are really different. But the point is that theatre is never "worse" than others, just different. And studying different kind of theatre traditions help you to find more about the culture and and making those connections make it a lot more interesting, but how far does this connection between what you see on stage and the everyday life of people that live within that culture... i mean, you don't see people in peru running around with bull testicles or you don't see japanese people walking like they had a strange infection in their ass all over the place... >.>

But some parts of it can actually be related to the everyday life... then it is a really fascinating way of making connections, between what you see on the theatre of a culture, and the culture itself. Therefore, if you can connect the society and their culture to the theatre, then when people go to the theatre (of their own society) they feel identified? Are we gonna feel identified with the performers in Paucartambo? Is that one of the main aspects of theatre, to see yourself on stage and feel like you could be one of them? After all, the stage is (according to me) just another reality of the world we all live everyday, so why not? It is like a mirror that gives you a different perspective of yourself? Or a portrait of every surrounding you, as you feel identified with a actor and found connections between your reality and the stages reality? Could that be one of the main purposes of making theatre?