I love frogs 🐸

My play for my director’s notebook is Caucasian Chalk Circle. It is a Brecht play and I love Brecht style. CA has finished this production last fall, but I am not satisfied with that production after I learned more about Brecht and his style. In this project, I don’t have the limitation that a high school theatre has so I can achieve my “epic theatre”. I will mostly follow Brecht style when doing this project.  Before I start to working on everything, I will read my Caucasian Chalk Circle again and read another biography of Brecht during the summer, so I will know more about Brecht and his idea of “epic” theatre and more about his techniques. After that, I plan to watch 2 or 3 production of Caucasian Chalk Circle and one of them will be Brecht’s production. I believe during the summer and next semester I will have new chances to know more about theatre techniques, and I will mostly use technologies to show how is an “epic’ theatre looks like.  From technical aspects, ...

Spring improv was super fun!!! I went to the spring improv on Friday night, and that was the most fun theatre project I’ve ever seen in Cheshire Academy.  This time was improv so that was so different than every production in the past: everything was improvised!!! I prefer this production to be a show rather than a theatre production. During that one and half hour period of time, the production was cut into a lots of small programs.  One program that left me with a deep impression was the “mimic” show, especially Julia Raff’s turn: she played as Mr.Cirmo while Mr.Cirmo himself sitting in the audience. Though she wasn’t acting exactly the way Mr.Cirmo behaves, but the comedy effect I believe was the one of the most fun one in the night, because the improv meant to be fun and every people saw that scene—an actress tries to be an audience.  Another fun program to me was the last one: people try to get to sit on the bench. To sit on the bench, you must persuade o...

Hamlet in caveman ages. There are several reasons make me want to do a Hamlet in caveman ages. The first one is the animation movie, Lion King. What both Hamlet and Simba share is their fathers are both killed by their uncle; they also have a similar way to go through the conflicts to try to get back their position. In the animation movie, the “palace” is a cave in a high mountain. At first I wanted to combine the two production and I found it hard: you cannot simply convert Hamlet to lion and add other animal characters. So I decided to create a caveman Hamlet. Next, the movie Hamlet 2000 also gives me a lot of inspiration. This production is an adaptation for Hamlet in modern world. It uses a lot of modern technologies to replace the original properties. Even “Denmark” becomes a film company in NYC and Hamlet is the son of the former CEO. No more king, queen, princess, prince, the story still makes sense. Except the lines in the movie are still very “literature”, everything else...

In the following paragraphs I will focus on my interpretation of how each director might think when he or she was directing the movies of hamlet. The Hamlet in 2000, by Micheal Almereyda, is an adaptation of Hamlet in modern world. In this movie, not only the setting is modern but the movie itself. Hamlet, a 4 hours play, has been cut into a 110 minutes movie. “Denmark”, which is supposed to be a country, becomes a film corporation in New York City. And Hamlet is a movie student who is supposed to take the CEO position of the corporation. Though everything happens in almost the same in the original plot( Hamlet gets mad and avenges his uncle), there are nuances of technical designs that create new concepts in the movie. In the scene that Polonius reveals to Claudius the letter that Hamlet gives Ophelia, the director used technology to achieve a image of Ophelia falls in water which foreshadows the later plot. And in the “to be or not to be” scene, Hamlet is in a video store, walki...

Despite of the multiple aspects of the theater tech, I have realized several “core” of a good technical theatre. After watching the Hamlets and other productions, I found that you can have different vision so different designs will work for different productions. However, there is something does not change, which I see as a key point to make designs work—contrast. Light and dark, cool and warm, black and white, wealth and poverty. The contrast between elements always help the designer to establish settings effectively. If you have ordinary people on the stage dress in one color, you will have the protagonist dresses another color; if you have the surrounding dark, you will light up the character’s face; if you have a slow music at a lovely scene, you will have strong music on a ghost scene later.  Another thing I consider as another key point do set up good theatre techs is the symbolism. Theatre tech enhance the scene while symbolism works the same way. Putting some desig...