PPP costumes / Voice

If there is any one there that thinks that doing their PPP is easy they are dead. This is a job that requires a lot of concentration and more if you are working with other people that can decide as well as you what to do because then the coordination needed for the final product is essential. For the past 3 classes i have been trying, really trying my best to present a good PPP for the costumes of our one act play performance and i am no where there.
Its incredible how can a simple PPT presentation be so difficult, first if you have no drawing skills like me and if there is more than one idea to do the basic designs. How can you think on what someone else wants to wear? its very difficult and complex preparation because you need to take into account that you have to talk to you partners on the design then follow the color scheme and finally let Roberto to decide.
The thing with costumes is that you have not just to imagine them but to feel them, you have to try and visualize the character and the respective actor wearing that costume and then focus on the actions these characters have to do and how the costume affects the entrances of these actors because if the character leaves the stage and come back as another character like in our play, it has to be using a easy costume to put on, maybe a simple jumper or some kind of cloth so that the entrance can be done fast enough and very clear without having awkward silence moment or having to force some extra lines to give the actor more time.
Finally the other aspect of my post today is the voice which as all actors would agree on, one of the most important factors affecting a play and the final product. The voice is for the actor what the feet is for the dancers, or at least when it is a spoken play because it is not only changing the voice to suit a different character but also projecting the voice to make the whole audience clearly listen and understand what you say but mostly to help you develop you character to its maximum extent because a character that uses your own voice is never as good and as real as a character with a new voice, something different and something that helps you connect with him or her better
I could saee how different people can work with ranges of voices that come from very high pitch and low pitch, we can see this even in my theater group were we all have different ranges and some can represent a women while to others its very much more difficult, luckily for me i have a very big range which allows me to play with different types of voices and sometimes using some added effects that give the final touches to the voice.
The question i would like to leave for today is: Is it true that anyone can reach all basic ranges of voice with training?
I can tell you that is would be true if you see it by the idea that singers train their voices to reach clearly certain ranges but this does not mean that they can break their range and reach other ranges that they weren't born with. I dont really think that i could break my range because i dont practise enough but i think that i can play enough with that range so that i can play different type of characters easily.


“Try and fail, but don't fail to try.”
Stephen Kaggwa

Spoiled kids

I would like to start this post with some advance in the progress of our One act play which for the moment is what i would call a work in progress. It has developed in terms of plot and characterization but is still not what we need to satisfy our expectations. This week we started with 2 different paths, first the presentations of our PPP's and then the rehearsals of the One act Play which were very good looking until Saturday's which was more of a relaxing one. In terms of the PPP we had a bit of a problem to understand the what was really needed.
It was a bit of a mess to understand because at first i thought it was something for us to understand and for us to see but then It seemed it was really like the real PPP and we actually had to do it in a formal way but due to the fact i cant draw at all i had the idea to do my part (costumes) from internet images but they were still wrong because we were also supposed to make slides with action images in scenes to see how it looked like.
Even though i felt a bit disappointed with my work, I felt it was well done and really felt like we shouldn't had been yelled at because it was a hard try and a part from us no one had already showed theirs. I think thats the problem when you want to be the first, all the pressure comes to you and the class focuses on your work but still it is better for us so that we can understand better and work towards a better mark.

In this weekends rehearsal the tag that was mostly used was very spoiled kids because we werent doing as Roberto wanted but still i think that we did a great job. I was clear that we could have worked harder in the preparation before bu the progress done was great and im looking forward to continue with that kind of job. It was impressive to see how the work is actually improving every day and the energy is getting higher each time and im sure that we will get a better position while we are on the go and not only when we think how to do it.

2 face and 1AP

It is impressive to see how things that on paper work well sometimes flunk in the practice. To compare with, some plays in the basketball tactical book are written to be shown only as theoretical because once they are tried, you see they really dont work as well as you thought they did.
This week we had our first real rehearsal for this years one act play and we had a bit of a discussion in the way we were going to focus the play. It was a moment of concern when we saw that the whole work we had done was for nothing because it was not working in the performance. We had to re do and recycle some of the work to catch up with the lost time and finally have a new idea for the presentation.
To be totally honest i still dont have a clue on how it is going to develop because for the moment it is very dull at least for me. I just feel as if the flow and the swag is not really happening. it is like a very cut and paste like play.

I feel like we have to work a whole lot more to actually understand what robersto whats for us, it is just a matter of dissecting the information and work really hard towards the creation of the play because for now its not the acting skills but the creativity that is lacking. the problem with the actual performance was not the game itself but the texts were too dense and the play didnt develop as we needed for the use of that game. the game that we presented was a mixture between gender bender and 2 face from batman, the idea was to portray 2 characters deviding the body in half and showing by this a counter point between these characters not only in the way of being but i the selection of sides as part of their limitations they cannot turn so they can only appear and disappear from certain places. Because the action were very slow the actual game seemed compromised and we thought of instead of the 2 character we could just do 2 but with a magic door in the back for them to change accordingly and finally we could develop this with more facility because now the entrances were mor fluent and with more energy due to the less focus we needed in mantaining one of the sides and not the other.