I'm just going to breakdown the process of creating the final project. Starting with picking the poem, then to the rehersal, the preformance and how I felt about the whole thing.
The beginning
We began by choosing a poem, I went into a group with Casey, Kasey and Lauren. We chose to do "The Red Cow". After reading the poem, I thought this would be a pretty fun play. We decided on rehersal times, and the next week we began working on our play. Between this time we were to think about color schemes and music. As I said in my main blog, I thought it would be neat to start the color scheme with a fun color like green or blue and mixing it into red after we slit the cows throat. However, because regardless of what happens during the play we all stay positive and unfased by killing the cow, I think changing the back color might be silly. We didn't talk much about the music. I had youtubed some music ideas but I was thinking more to go in the background as we did the whole poem. I didn't realize it was just for the introduction and fortunitly the one Jeremey provided complimented it well.
Our First Rehersal
I was a couple minutes late for our first rehersal- bad Suzy. But didn't miss much and was excited to get to work. We talked a little about what we had in mind but we were all pretty open minded about what to do with the poem. So this class we got over our first half of the poem. High energy! lots of movement! The levels constantly changing! This is looking pretty good to me. I think me, Lauren, Casey and Kasey are all pretty out going so the group should mesh well. We went through our lines and Jeremey told us what he had in mind. We tried different actions and people saying different lines and worked out kinks for the beginning bit. After the class finished our group went to the classroom and jotted down actions to remember and who was doing what. We talked about some ideas that we had and things that we could do to make it better. We decided to wait until next week and meet with the teacher again to get his opinion on the play, before moving forward in creating the poem.
The Second Rehersal
Met the group at 11 20 to start going over the last 2 paragraphs and put the final touches on the poem. Picked up a cow costume this morning!!! Yay! I think its going to be great. Lines are memorized and everyone seems ready to rumble. We got into the theatre and had a few kinks to work out. There were a few lines and actions forgotten but by the end I think everyone was pretty confident in the final project. We were kicked out of the blackbox by 12 but stayed in the classroom and went over the play again and again. Practice,practice, practice! We actually did the play "Italian style?" which is basically doing everything really faced paced. I tried to find more on this and discovered that apparently tempo is the italian word for movement, fun fact. So in this case our tempo was very fast. This was a drill to get our brains moving more quickly and to think less about what were doing and just do it. So we tried doing the preformance quickly a few times and then slowed it back down to normal pace. Im not sure if this really helped but it was an interesting technique to try. I believe we are ready to preform :)
Plus we had our outfits chosen - plaid shirts, blue jeans, big buckles, rubber boots and pigtails.
Annnnnnd the Final Preformance!
It was so awesome to see everyones preformances put together. Our play took maybe 2 minutes to preform and but took us a lot more time to prepare. There is more than just learning the lines and creating actions. There are people controlling lights, the door, and a person to direct you. In this case our director was Jeremey and I think the crowd was quite pleased, even if it was only a crowd of 8. All of us girls were on que with eachother and remembered our lines, I believe we brought high energy and positive attitudes with us. Im really glad we found a cow costume as that really brought the piece together. I had a lot of fun doing this and it was a great way to finish off the semester.
So In the end I thought the process was different than anything I'd ever done. I was mixed between excited and nervous. I learned how to get infront of a group and preform, because I'd never done that before. I dont think there was anything I would have changed within the group as I think we meshed well. One thing that was interesting was the different lighting throughout the show and how it can really draw your attention to places. Our lighting was a not dramatic but showed all four of us clearly. All though we couldn't see the audience at all. At the end of the play we had the lights drop and as they were going down we added a few comments to the poem. "pass the butter, more wine please, salt over here" to bring the play to a better close. I think thats all I have to say about the preformance.
The end.
