D-DAY AAAAAHHHHHHH

It was highly nerve-wrecking the few moments right before our assessment started! I felt so unconfident about my ability to facilitate the warm-up game and to perform as a music-actor (I sub with Bel to play both music and act in the scenes as well). Even though we did so many practices with a lot of different kinds of stories, I still felt those dreaded butterflies in my tummies!

And so the session started! Leticia started off by introducing who we are to our audience and soon, I was the one facilitating the warm-up game. I realised I could have done better during the game, because my instructions were a bit unclear. It was tough trying to shout the crowd's voice, and maybe I could have given the instructions as well as have done the demonstration before the members of the audience stood up.

After a really entertaining game of 'Fire, Hunter, Earthquake', the audience members are all warmed up to get up and enjoy the show!

It started off with me, telling my own story first, so that the audience members have a glimpse of how playback theatre is supposed to run.
 1) an audience of the member comes up and becomes the person who shares his/her story with the theatre group as well as the audience
 2) by the end of the story, the group of actors would have already come up with a short 1 -2 minutes scene based on the story they have just heard
 3) at the end of the scene, the conductor (the person who facilitates the entire show) asks for the opinions of the storyteller to see if the essence of the story was captured.

While I was planning for the scenes, I really had to think about capturing the essence while portraying the characters within a maximum of a minute or two, depending on how long the story is! And not only that, me and my group members had to choose one idea as fast as we can for the exact same problem, time! I would admit that we took longer than the other playback theatre groups to form a scene, but maybe that's just my perception because I was involved in devising the scene under high pressure, so every second seems longer than it actually is.

There were a couple of highs during our performance when I thought that my group did much better than I expected us to! Well, we did have our standards, but when we exceeded them and challenged them by stepping out of our comfort zones and doing our perfomances based on Peter's ever famous 'YES AND...', I felt a sense of achievement because we actually did an amazing job.

A few pointers we could follow:
Start
Capturing emotions while keeping the essence of the story
- Sometimes we are so focused on getting the essence of the story that we forget to add in the emotions of the story
Working with various genres
- Get out of the comfort zone! Many interesting stories are done out of the norm, i.e the non-naturalistic way.
Continue
Being energetic
- energy is the soul of the room, without energy, even the audience is lethargic and unable to even tell the stories that we need
Scaffold on the works of our other members
- impromptu works depend a lot on scaffolding and building your works based on the work of the other members 

Overall, I believe my groupmates had done a wonderful and brilliant performance! I couldn't have done it without them. Despite only having worked with them for the past two days, I could tell that our group dynamics changed drastically. We were able to get on the same frequency, maybe some glitches here and there, but all in all, our interpretations of the stories were more or less accurate and I'm really really glad we pulled through!

Thank you Bel, Leticia, 'Amirah, Amirah and Victor for being such amazing groupmates!!!! /floating hearts all over/

REWIND!

Video dump!

WE ALL LOVE VIDEOS YAY!

Here's how it goes, click play to watch the video, and then there will be my thoughts on the piece that we have just watched. And yes definitely, I will try to include the stories of the videos, subject to how well and how accurate I remembered it!

Theme: the happiest day of your life

First -
'The happiest day would be when I ended an abusive relationship. At that point, when I was still with her, I really loved her. I couldn't see why everyone told me to broke up with her. She was really loving and caring, and I could only see her as perfect. She did a couple of nasty things to me like slap me, kick me, hit me and pinch me but I sort of shrugged it off because the comfort that she gave me was overwhelming. It was a safety zone to me (highly ironic in that sense she's always hitting you), being with her. When I finally broke free from her, by dumping her, I was a bit reluctant and sad, but after a while of thinking, I was elated! She would have no control over me anymore, I was free.'

Me: hehe I rmb this story really well cause it was my good friend's story and because I was the one who told it AND because I was there when it happened haha

Even if I knew the story incredibly well, I couldn't believe at how amazing and powerful this piece is. The using of arms as a literal barrier in a relationship, the hauntingness of the whispers that repeatedly utters 'I love you' non-stop, and the fact that the abuse was evident while she was sitting in the chair. It was mesmerizing at how the gist of the story was portrayed, the feeling of being trapped, kept in by the lies of love. (WHOAHHHHH CHEEM-IFIED) But yes, it was definitely one of the better works I was involved in and I'm just overwhelmed by the awesomeness of this piece.

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Second -

The cat who lived.

The non-naturalistic ways of the actors portraying a cat is extremely entertaining! It was also highly interesting as to how they were able to capture the main emotion of the story, which is relief after a terrible event has passed. And plus, the actors made such adorable cats hahahahaha

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Third- 

I don't exactly remember what the story was about but I really think this was a good piece of work!

It was unclear at first who was fighting who in the story but after a while, when Victor came in, it was then I realised that Sha is 'loneliness'. Humanizing an emotion is also definitely one of the ways to make a piece really captivating and engaging! Along with extra 'haiya's and 'hee-ur!!!!' Yes definitely!

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Fourth -

(I will find a way to embed the video from another source later on)

Wonderful interpretation of Raeha's story. It was beautiful how the struggle comes to life and work becomes people, just grabbing you and pulling you in, without a care for what you f   eel. It was amazing how Okky showed the desperation through the futile attempts of breaking free and yes, her facial expressions of sadness and despair of not being able to go for her cousin's wedding. And the wedding was pictured by two people with their backs facing her, which makes it even deeper; the cousins initially did not know the struggle she was facing. They only knew she wasn't there. Finally, one of 'works' covered her with a black cloth, signifying that that was the end for her episode there and then, victory was theirs, and she was used at the expense of their victory. My interpretation might be a little bit more dramatic than the story Raeha told, but if I saw the performance without hearing the story, that is what I would think of what's happening.

And I guess being a literature student a few years back made me read into things more than others usually do. It's always a 'read between the lines' kind of thing.

Lights and sounds.

Before you begin the long reading, plug in your headphones and enjoy the video:

What you have just seen is one of the stages through which playback theatre is approached, and one of the main key points in playback is the music which accompanies the actors. This was one of the first tries me and my group had at using sounds to describe emotion or mood, and it was really surprising that we had successfully created a story just by music!

There were a few stages that Peter brought us through first before we were able to capture the intention of music in this particular form of theatre.

1) We started using sounds through the simple means of a soundscape; in which Peter tells us a story while we are all seated in a circle and we all added in sounds according to the story. For example, when he says 'And a wolf started howling in the distance', someone from the group would howl. Or in this case, since we were all really excited, about ten people howled. We had a round of this before we proceeded to split up into smaller groups of about 5-6 people.

2) Our next task was to recreate the entire story using ONLY sounds. Challenging? Yes. But considering we had a head start on the story, and we already had a rough gage on what sounds we wanted to use during the trial run, it was not impossible. It did take us some time to get focused into what kind of sounds we wanted to use. We experimented with the words we could use, the rhythms, the tunes we already knew and the pitch of our voices.


3) The third step is what the video is. Someone had to act out to our sound story and wow, it was definitely tough to try to get a connection to our actors via the sounds we make! We had to somehow guess what the actors were about to do and change our music according to what they were acting, and not only that, the actors too had to listen carefully to change their acting to the mood of our music. The musicians and the actors had to work together, listening and watching each other carefully to be able to create a successful playback.

Some of the instruments we used:

A guitar.

A ukulele. 

And a tin can yup

The next  thing we had to do was split into groups of four where two were the actors and two were the musicians and we had to re-create Peter's story on the happiest day of his life.

Here is Raeha's group with their rendition of the story!

It was definitely easier this time round to re-create the story, because not only do we have music, we are also allowed to add in our own dialogue to make the work more true to the emotions.

Another thing I noticed was that to do playback, you need to have a certain bond with your fellow group members. You know those kind when you look at your best friend and you both know EXACTLY what each other are thinking? Yes, that is very important. And this kind of bond is usually nurtured over the years. Playback rarely gives you enough time to discuss entirely what kind of plot you are going to go with, so you have to trust your teammates guts, and yours, to make the recreation a success. A lot of 'yes and....'s have to be incorporated into playback because in the real thing, it's just a lot of improvisation and building up on the ideas of other people, which sometimes isn't really an easy thing to do when you don't have the same frequency as the others in your group. It requires a lot of dynamics, sorry I meant, impromptu dynamics in playback.

Story; noun or verb

Story

(stôr'ē, stōr'ē)
n., pl., -ries.

1.   An account or recital of an event or a series of events, either true or fictitious, as:

a.    An account or report regarding the facts of an event or group of events: The witness changed her story under questioning.

b.    An anecdote: came back from the trip with some good stories.

c.    A lie: told us a story about the dog eating the cookies.

2.    

a.    A usually fictional prose or verse narrative intended to interest or amuse the hearer or reader; a tale.

b.    A short story.

3.   The plot of a narrative or dramatic work.

4.   A news article or broadcast.

5.   Something viewed as or providing material for a literary or journalistic treatment: "He was colorful, he was charismatic, he was controversial, he was a good story" (Terry Ann Knopf).

6.   The background information regarding something: What's the story on these unpaid bills?

7.   Romantic legend or tradition: a hero known to us in story.

tr.v., -ried, -ry·ing, -ries.

1.   To decorate with scenes representing historical or legendary events.

2.   Archaic. To tell as a story.

The above definition was what I found from Answer.com, and the word, was what we will be working around. *Do note the bold parts of the definition.

Stories. Stories from people of different walks of life, and stories about various kinds of emotions, and stories from a vast variety of experiences.

We explored the who, what, when, where, how and why of stories. 

Who do we tell it to? What are stories? When and where do we tell them? How do we tell them? Why are they told? 

These questions made me realize, I’ve never wondered so intimately about why stories exist. I’ve always been a talkative person and if I met up with someone I could talk to, we could go on for hours sharing stories of our lives! I’ve never had restriction regarding telling others stories of my life, but what about those who are unable to share their stories as I did? That led to the next issue we discussed about; who are unable to tell their stories.

There was a significantly long list of people we created under ‘people unable to tell their stories publicly’ which included victims of tragic events, the disabled, the poor, the politically oppressed, and they were unable to broadcast their stories because of the risk they are taking by revealing the events of their life to a larger audience. A risk so great, that sometimes, their lives will be in danger if they voice out their experiences.

It’s breathtaking to know what we can do with the stories they give us, to turn it into something more than just words, using it in theatre to help create change and hope (in the aspect of forum theatre which I will explain in later posts) and to help recreate the stories, memories, of people so that their stories could be heard (in the viewpoint of playback theatre). There are so many wonderful ways to tell stories, and I believe that theatre is one of the more powerful ones that are able to tell the story as well as assist the community on so many different stages.