Now we can call it a semester!

Semester 1 over! From a simple boy who thought theater was only the set of acting and staging skills to a curious theater student who finds out theater can be present in various perspectives. 

Before I dived into the world of theater, theater was only a stage with performers. I had no knowledge about theater at all that time. Though was my shallow made me pick this class. By now, I know that theater is a complex subject just like physics—with different styles, artists and its own history. Learning this subject means more than act stories out and staging. Learning the theater is about learning a history of stage performance and a history of the culture of a typical time. When we was studying Stanislavski, I thought he was all of the theater of the time. Nevertheless, he was only one theater theorist of the time, he was not the standard of every theater thing. As a result, there is not a right way to act out a story but there could be many ways to act it out. Sometimes, even though I have been assigned a director whose style I don’t really like, I should still study he or she with respect and curious. Just like learning more things doesn’t harm you, studying more directors not matter I like he or she or not, if I keep doing this for a long time, the accumulation of knowledge would be huge enough to build up a good background of theater study for me.

Another thing I had deep feeling with was working with my classmates. A small class with 3 students makes the percentage of personal opinions occupied a large amount of class discussion time. What this caused was that classmates became another resource which sometimes had same importance as the teacher. I always asked others when I stuck somewhere in the project. For example, I was not good on computer so I always asked them how to do plug in things in my PowerPoint when I was doing my director’s notebook. 

Many other things I had already covered in my last reflection. Here I have more space to do a reflection on my last project—a shortened version of the director’s notebook. That project had a weird difficulty: it was hard to think what to write and where to analyze but when I found somewhere valuable to discuss then I would have too much to write. The reasons why my PowerPoint I made was full of words at the several top pages was kind of awkward. First, after I confirmed my topics, I wrote a lot of words for my first topic because there was that many words I wanted to say. However, I found out I could not do every topic like this and I would run out of time when I did the presentation(though I finally ran out of time). So I cut many contents and details compared to my first draft. Additionally, another thing I learnt was the length of your ppt does not present the length of your presentation. Though I cut many words in my PowerPoint, I still insisted to talk about them in my presentation which made me ran out of time. I was not a experienced presenter but I learnt a lot from this project. Here are several things I have learnt from my PowerPoint making process: too many words make your PowerPoint looks boring; read through your PowerPoint with every you want to talk about and record how long it take before go to present; delete uncritical words to describe when you can show them through pictures or videos; pictures sometimes are easier to understand than words.

Overall, I appreciate all the effort we have made in this semester. I take the class without any regret. I can feel myself approaching a higher level of knowledge when I do works in the class. Thank to everyone and see you next year!