Knowing and Practice

Performance and staging are always part of the class, and we are gradually learning them from the beginning when we acted as animals or pretended to be in certain emotions and ran to other classmates’ position. Undoubtedly, as a novice, there are quite a lot flaws in the first scene that I perform, but fortunately, by watching others’ performance and introspecting, I thought it is relatively easy to improve.

When I  am adapting the play to performance, it is quite easy to decide what emotions we should express, what actions we should show and how to condense or expand the original lines in the play. After all, we all have seen so many performance whether through media or theaters. We can judge what makes a good performance and which ones are better. We can realize the emotions from the text through the instinct and we know which lines, if they are performed on stage, will be viewed as verbose by the audience. What is challenging for me though is how to apply these theories into practice, because now it is the time for me to change my position from viewer to actor and director.

I am always struggling with how to really show emotions on the stage. Knowing the emotion does not ensure that I can reveal the emotion through acting and some degree of nervousness always accompany with me when I act on the stage. The way to address this problem for me is maybe to put my focus on where it belongs, not on what “should” the character feel or on the audience, but on my partners. I know to overcome that is never easy, but by practicing more and working more on moment to moment, it won’t be that hard. Time is needed for achieving that.

One of the another main difficulties that I am facing is how to use limited items in the black box theater to revision the scene.It seemed to me that the only tools that I could really use are those boxes. However, after watching others’ performance and staging, I realize firstly I don’t need to find tools to adapt the scene but I can let the scene adapt to the tools I have. For instance, although the characters are talking to each other while standing, I can make them sit on chairs having coffees and seem like chatting intimately. Besides, it is still possible to use these tools to convey the ideas in the original play. Adler’s group inspired me when I was watching their balcony scene. The way Romeo secretly listen to Juliet’s speech through showing only head from the curtain perfectly display the idea that the original play wants to show.