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Reflection of this week’s presentations

Despite of my own presentation, others’ presentations helped a lot in my understanding on tech theatre. These presentations helped me establishing a new perspective on theatre career. 

In Helen’s presentation, she briefly introduced the history of the makeup. In Ancient Greece, they started to use masks to decorate their faces and Rome continued this tradition. But it was not until the 1800s, people started to realize the role of cosmetic in theatre. Makeup enhances the characters while sometimes helps the performers to create a different person from the performer. For example, when females try to act male characters they need to do some makeup anyway, like Lexi in Les Miserables. Makeups reflect the mental conditions or the mood of the characters, and certain kinds of makeups only appear in certain time period. Costumes, however, had played  an important role since the origin of theatre. Then they became more important in the Renaissance. The usage of costumes are to depict gods, animals, mythological creatures. Fashionable dresses appeared in 1800s as well as the theater cosmetic.Costumes usually tell the audience about the character’s personality, social position, and other traits. For example, poor characters wear grey or dark costumes while the rich wear golden, bright and fancy costumes. Costumes also help to set up the background of the play by using the colors, shapes, and textures to inform certain time periods or locations.

In Jenna’s presentation, which took a similar structure to Helen’s, introduced the history first. The Greeks, used simulation sounds in plays, and Roman Theatre used choir to enhance the scenes. Then she showed several old sound makers. For example, Foleys, which were named after the creator of such a way to incorporate sound into movie. It means a range of sound effects recordings originally developed for radio drama. Music theatre often has band or orchestra and chorus. The difference between musical theater and theater with music are that musical theater uses music throughout the whole story while songs are not actually performed within the story in theater with music.

In scenic design part, Ms.Guarino did not do a lot of introductions but she played several useful videos for us. Many people in scene design did not major it in their college. Many of them started from painting or other art-related majors and learn scene design in their work experience in theater. Scene design has many aspects: it is a complex of architecture on stage, visual art, directing, playwriting. Jobs of scene design need to be specific in specific plays. Same as other kind of designing jobs, scene designers need to make or draw drafts before they put them into reality, and they need to make change to improve if something is wrong in scenes. I think I want to know more about the scenic design in theory and practice.


After learning all these knowledge about technical theater, I have more confidence to talk about theater both in theories and practices. I can tell these knowledge will play a big part in my directors’ notebook project. 

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sources

http://www.tim-shane.com/Commedia-Dottore.htm https://prezi.com/m/z1b1p24wy6j9/the-stock-characters-of-commedia-dellarte-in-modern-enterta/ https://theatreiblog.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/il-dottore/
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