post number two

there has been a lot of changes to our group piece.

the most major of which is the change of our directorial vision and also the storyline. also, there was a change of skills from multi-media to sound.

let's start from the end of last post.

so, we had rehearsals with mime for the first time. before anything, we did exercises following a mime book, it was tough and interesting at the same time, we had to distort our bodies and also control them at the same time. isolation was key to mime and the actor needs to crucially control all of his muscles. so, we had the doing things in slow motion and also, freezing. another element to mime is in having imagination and thus, we each gave out scenarios and mimes them out differently, for example, imagine you were walking your dog in the park, he pooped and while you are cleaning up after him, he runs away, you chase him and at last you carry him back home.

i felt that this tested our ability to see the objects and feel it, even when it is not there and consequently, we practised with the wall. yes. the infamous wall. i think that these mime exercises were important however, as the director, i felt that our skills were sorely lacking and futhermore, we had not a teacher to tell us if were we right or wrong.

with this in mind, we started the first scene.

originally, i left the actors to do what they felt was the best for their characters and the scene. however, i felt that the scene lacked energy and thus, i had to stop the scene and added in my inputs, to tell them things that might get more energy and to tell them when they did not fulfill the emotions and feelings of the character. the only trouble was that no one did this for me, mostly, i told them what was wrong and gave my advise, but since i can't watch myself act,, i had no idea how to help myself. so i had to ask them to tell me what was erong with my performance and from there, i practiced.

another element that i had read about and introduced to the group was the use of the neutral mask. since we cannot make one or buy one, we made use of the white masks we found in the dressing room. i told the actors to act with the mask on to make them less dependent on their facial expression since mime essentially used the whole body. this reaped success as i could see that with the mask on, our movements were more concise and the meaning is conveyed even without the facial expression being seen.

the other part of our skill was not really focused on. i had given suggestions that for each part of the scene, we would flash a picture that would give another way of seeing the whole situation, however, it did not work that well. we could not find the right pictures and i think that the multi media is overshadowed by the mime. so , this is one of the main reasons that we changed the skills to sound, having 2 piano players on our group and also, the sound would be a better medium to enhance the atmosphere and mood of the mime play.

we showcased our ideas and the first scene to the class and we had the raised eyebrow from TGO. i felt a bit diasppointed because i had spend so much time and effort on this and the results left some thing to be desired. one of the major problems that i can tell is:

1) we are following to strictly a storyline that does not cater to mime.
2) an advice was that we could just use situations as the tradition of mime is mostly situational comedy, where we laught seeing the mime try to get his way out of a tricky-not necessarily out of this world-situation.
3) we were not adapt at the techniques of mime- need to practice more. advice= watch videos and practice from there. reading is not enough.
4) not funny enough and we should not try to mime out every sentence.
5) melvyn told me that some of us were not really miming, rather acting without words and in my scene with suryadi, i was overshadowed by him.

i guess i need to practice just a little more so as to not be overshadowed by the other mimes.

initially, we had a few changes to the storyline where gabriel the angel was changed to mimi, lucifer's minion because we thought that gabriel's role was too minor and susu's talents cannot be showcased fully.

before the showcase, i took up the job of the lights since mark was busy with the multimedia aspect, thus, i found myself with another job, lighting manager! i must really btush up my skills so that i can give the group fantastic lightings and score fabulously!

thus, with the advise:
1) be specific, what type of mime tradition are you using?
2) do you really know enough about mime?
3) the multimedia did not work, try sound.
4) use the situation to make things funny
5) watch mime vidoes.

we set out to create a better piece of work.

the next meeting.

i proposed for a change in the DV because our old one is not really suitable for a piece to be situational, so following some elements of our old DV, the new one is:

materialism in society today and how it is inherent in all social classes.

this i felt was something i could relate to, because in thins world, only money talks. and i felt that it would be easier to make out scenarios based on humans' desire to get richer.

after much deliberation, our new story is basically 4 characters, from different social classes and their goal is to get more money by any means possible. even though it is a story, i feel that each scene is a situation, all happens in a park and each scene, the characters play out their individual wants to get their goal:$$$!

as a director, after watching a lot of videos of mime on youtube, i think that i had the wrong impression of mime. i though it was all about being exaggerated, but i realised that it is not all about that. mostly, it is finding the comedy in the situation and playing it out for the audience.

i think that there is a mime company in singapore and i will try to ask them if they have the courses on mime for us.

in the meantime, i think that my group still largely functions well and we are cooperative with each other. only sometimes, susu and melissa needs a bit of encouragement to talk and voice out their ideas. other than that, we work well together.

more updates soon!