Collaborative Write Up

  • My Personal Context
I feel like this project that we put up is not really that great, but we made something so I guess we just have to go with it. So we were deciding what plot that we should go with to match the stimuli that has been given to us (the painting), and I thought of this idea of a broken heart. I somehow created the first scene of our play just by do an improvisation with Linda about a couple arguing. I can’t remember exactly what I said or what that plot was, but we figured that the story could be around this couple, so I just basically created baseline of the story.
  • My Approach
As for a story that I’m basically a bully and an abusive husband, I feel like I can fit right into that character. I feel like acting out a drunk, controlling character is not really that hard since this stereotype has been in our society a long time and there are a lot of information of such character because I can find bunch of them in movies or in books. I planned to act the character just simply being an asshole that yells and shouts and throw fists. Somehow that didn’t go as what I planned because in the end I still cannot decide what should I do when I’m facing Natalie. Should act kind? Or should I act like I’m faking the kindness? I cannot decide, so I just let it be.
  • Formation of The Group
Well, there are no former plan for us to form a group, we are a group because all 4 junior decided to do it together so that no individual would look bad if the person messed up. Even if that was the case, this group still works out well since everyone of us contributed something into the project. Whether that being ideas, guidances or suggestions. And most of our scenes are for two people, so when there are people acting on stage, the other two people can sit there and give out their opinions or change whatever they feel like is right for the audience. I feel like this is good teamwork.
  • Where To Start And How Did We Start
As I mentioned we started this whole thing with just a little improv between me and Linda, and then Willjam and Livi just started to adding plots and more logic into the improv scene. First we have to clarify how many characters are there in total. And then we need to figure out the relationship of our characters. Everything kind of made sense in the first place after we act it out and read the lines. Things just started to seem really far off from logic, so there are a lot of times that we have to erase a lot of settings and ideas that we just had just for the sake that it makes more sense to the audience.

  • Practical and physical explorations  
I think I should be talking about acting generally. There are some key elements for my Steve role in the play. First is how I should be talking and moving. We make Steve a character that’s kind of rude and also an alcoholic, as an alcoholic, I think I should be yelling and moving a lot of my body. A real drunk man cannot talk logically and walk normally, but my character should not be that drunk. I was trying to measure and control my “level of being drunk”. In the end, I decided to only be drunk at certain scenes, such as the opening scene and the last scene. I made that decision because I realize whenever my character says something that’s aggressive, I have to act as if I’m drunk on stage. And I feel like that would actually give Steve more liveliness
  • The development of our piece

Well I can talk a lot about this. As I mentioned before, this whole thing came out from an improv that me and Linda did, and Willjam and Livi started to add more scenes and stories in there, so that’s how we get the baseline of the whole work. After we made sure how many characters should there be and who these characters are, we started a long procedure of writing scripts. It really took us a long time to finish, not because of the lines and dialogues are long, but we were all procrastinating which leads to a long delay. The very first draft is really rough, we did not remember the lines and when we watched our performance we can sense the awkwardness that is just piercing out from the stage. We rewrite some parts of the script to make the thing sounds not as awkward. There was a lot of big changes.

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