Semester Reflect

Time passes so fast, its November now, which means I have been study theater for almost 3 months. As I know more about theatre, I recognized that theatre is not only practice acting skill, but also a growth of reading and analyzing.

I can remember our first project was 2 monologue--one written by ourselves and the other we acted out. That was my first time to understand how nature of the character is important to some actors. Also I learned a important way to improve myself--film ourselves and play the video over to see where can improve. Meanwhile, we went to the Romeo and Juliet Edgerton Park in New Haven. That was the first play I watched with study purpose. However, back to that time, I know little about theater so I did not do a good review on that play.

We started Stanilavski chapter after the monologue project. In that chapter, we did a lot of Stanilavski exercises to experience our character as someone like us. We were asked to read and understand the characters. We used our characters in the monologue project to make up a group scene. This time, as our knowledge of our own characters accumulated, our performance turned out to be much better than our first project. When I watched our group scene video, I must say each character expressed him or herself in a larger degree compared to the monologue project which should be a pure production of one single character. A week after that just before we finished the Stanislavski chapter we went to the Les Miserables in the Bushnell Performing Arts Center, Hartford. Its was the first professional theater production I have ever seen. I was shocked by how impressing that one was. It gave me a rough concept on how a good theater production should be--move the audiences and put them in motion.The Stanilavski chapter helped me to establish my knowledge about one style of theater and many method to achieve a natural play, then we entered the Brecht chapter which stresses over-exaggerate on specific part of play to notify the audience some conflicts and problems.

In this chapter what we did different from Stanislavski chapter was we read a lot of materials and watched a lot of videos and we had a lot of discussions but we had less exercises than the Stanislavski chapter. We spent most of our time in the chapter to finish the reading of Brecht play the Caucasian Chalk Circle which is the most unlike Brecht style production he had ever made. We read through the chapters and we made analysis of the characters an the conflicts he wanted us to notice in the book. In the end, we did a sign scene--using sign to help audience aware something our selves. After we did the sign scene, we went to the Caucasian Chalk Circle by CA Varsity players.When I was watching their performance, I exclaimed that there is a long way to go in my theater study--I can see the great gap between our scene and the varsity scene.

I enjoyed the time I spent with Ms.Guarino and Helen and Jenna this semester. Though we are a relatively small class, the fullness I felt was not less than any big class. As I experienced theater with happiness and diligence, I may consider myself now as a player. A lot of thanks to everyone in our class!