MY FIRST LOOK AT IB THEATRE ARTS (past entry)

(Wednesday, 4 March 2009)

We had our first class of IB Theatre Arts on Monday 2nd March. It was our first sneak peak at the infite, painful, hard work that's ahead of us. I was very excited. I was pretty sure I made the right chose when I choose to continue with drama for IB last year. I knew it required a lot of responsibility and commitment: you are not only working in class (7 periods of 40 minutes a week), you also have to do reaserches in your own time and stay 2 hours after school to rehearse for the school play. But, responsibility and commitment are challenges... and I love challenges.

Roberto explained to us what the areas of study, the assessment and the theatre practices that we were going to study were for this course. I am really looking forward to the theatre practices. I find the Spanish Golde Age Theatre quite interesting, and this year's school play is 'La vida es sueño' by Pedro Calderon de la Barca. One of my fears in this course is the fact that we hace to do a lot of writing. I enjoy doing research (reading books, watching plays, searching in the internet), but when it comes to writing it all up, I don't. For IB Drama, we have to write one report of 1000-1250 words, and one reasearch investigation of 2000-2500 words. I hope I do well on these assignments. What I'm most excited about in this course is the are of 'Theatre in the Making', because I really like the role of producing plays.

On our second class, March 3rd, Roberto gave us some sheets ro tead for homework withe the title 'The Holy Theatre'. I tried to read it yesterday, but after the second paragraph I was faliing asleep. I supposed it was a boring reading but today I gave it another try and I found that it was not boring at all, it was very interesting. MY favorite part was the beginning. Peter Brook, the author, says: 'the notion that the stage is the place where the invisible can appear has a deep hols in our thoughts'... but, what is the invisible? I am looking forward to discuss this in class, or do some investigations on my own because I want an answer.

That same day Robert told us our first two assignments. The first one was to get a partner and tell him/her 3 facts of your life that nobody knew. The your partener had to invent a false fact and then present you and your 4 facts to the rest of the class. My partner was Diego. I think I didn't do very well in this assignment bacause I made mistakes while speaking and instead of just continuing with the presentation, I paused and laughed... I wasn't concentrated. I also think I had problems with my pronunciaton, maybe I spoke too fast. I believe it is good that I notice these mistakes now in the beginning, so by the end of the course I would have worked on them and won't have these problems anymore.

Our second assignment was to answer, in partenrs again, some questions about theatre. My favorite question was 'What does theatre mean to you?'. My answer was that theatre is my way of expression: it's an opportunity to be someone else while you portray a character, something our of the ordinary. I really liked one of Valentina's answers. She said that theatre let her learn more about herself every time she had to stop being herself to play another character. This got me thinking, and then I realised that she was totally right. You have to really know yourself: your mannerisms, your tone of voice, the way you walk, etc, to leave all those things behing and build another character in your body.

Finally, Roberto left us some homework for Friday. We have to bring 5 things we like very much: a picture, a smell, a song, an item of clothe and another object. He told us that we were going to create a little scene or presentation using those 5 things. The song and the object that I am going to take came to my mind as soon as Roberto mentioned them. Tomorrow I will look for the picture, the smell and the item of clothe. It worries me that I won't find a way to relate those 5 objects and my scene or presentation wil be a failure. Also, I think I will find it difficult to find a smell because...

Why is a smell useful in the process of building a character or scene?