Lucas Biespiel's IB Theater Journal

Recap

lbiespiel — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:47:07 +0000

Today we made Dijori Doo’s. A fun experience to me, yet I have in fact done it before, and most of the background knowledge about Dijori Doo’s that was presented to us was stuff that I already knew. This wasn’t a huge surprise to me, seeing as music is what I do and so I’ve done some research on Dijeri Doo’s. This isn’t the point of this post though.

Yesterday, Jane got in an argument with the entire class, and I’m still not really sure what she was arguing for. The things that annoyed me were:

1. Jane kept arguing the with people when they were just sharing the opinion, something she had just scolded Alex for doing 2 minutes prior.

2. Jane interrupted Shannon while she was saying how her views on it related to the play, to say that everyone was getting off topic and that we need to start thinking about the play…

3. Jane said she wasn’t liking the vibe from one corner of the room. That corner only had males in it, and the only person talking was Russel… or rather he was trying to talk, but Jane kept interrupting him before he could make his point.

The third thing was the one that really got to me. I don’t appreciate being called sexist, and I feel like that’s what was happening. It turned into a feminism conversation, with statements like “controlling, dominant, white males” being thrown out. That is a very uncomfortable conversation for a white male to be in, especially when 3/4 of the class is female. The problem is that I have trouble voicing these concerns without being called sexist. One of my biggest problems is the idea that people who have been discriminated against therefor have the right to discriminate. I myself have heard some individual feminists say that they don’t like how “white males always put people of other ethnicities and women into categories and then make generalizations about them.” That kind of talk makes me furious, because it’s so hypocritical, all they’re doing is making generalizations about people of another ethnic group and/or sex. This really hits hard with me, but it’s an argument I can never win, because I’ve been painted into the same corner that is host to some specific white males that did terrible things long before I was even born. It’s ridiculous, and this conversation went way too far. I was about 15 seconds away from getting up and leaving the classroom because of some of the things my classmates and even Jane herself said. Discrimination isn’t a one way street.

Reading

lbiespiel — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:18:55 +0000

All we did last week was read the play. Fun. I decided to say I wanted to be Harry, and though based on past things Jane has done with casting I have no idea if I’ll end up being cast as him, I think he’s funny (though to be honest I hadn’t read the script at all when I said I’d be him). This week was not super interesting to me, because if we hadn’t started having long conversations on things that had nothing to do with the play, we could have finished it in two days. Instead, we read it all week, and we’re still not very close to being done. I wonder what we’re doing on Monday…

Research Project

lbiespiel — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:09:02 +0000

Though I haven’t completely decided, I plan on doing asian folk opera as my theater practice. This combines my passion for music and this theater class.

Unfortunately, it is very hard to find specific plays on this topic, because a) they’re all in a different language and b) it’s a pretty new practice and there probably aren’t any plays in the public domain.

That’s about all I can fuigure out… hopefully Jane can find a play for me…

Origins of Theater

lbiespiel — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:00:32 +0000

Theory 1 (Egypt)

Acording to this theory the people of Egypt came up with theater in the hopes of depicting the immortality of the pharoas. I can see this as a cool idea, but frankly I don’t agree that this is where theater started.

Theory 2 (Greek):

Acording to this theory, there was a huge celebration in Greece, and since poetry had already been “created” lines of poetry were said by the “actors” and acted out. It was a way of entertaining thoses of a higher class.

I personally disagree with all of this. I think that theater was created spontaniously and not by a certain civilization. It could have happened through a person who decided that he/she would have fun pretending to be someone else, and people enjoying to watch them. Mocking is in human nature, and I will say it can be fun to watch someone do it. There are WAY TOO MANY ways this could have happened to pick one, two, or even three and say that they are true, because it is ignorant to suggest that Theater was created by one group of people and somehow spread from civilization to civilization, and somehow ended up crossing the ocean before any people did. Theater is origin-less, it was not created, it just happened. When money came around people got greedy and decided to do whatever sort of theater they’d created for a profit. Even before money, material goods must have been given for entertainment, that’s just common curtsy. It’s like when someone says something funny and therefore you give them a high five. That’s how theater became what it was today, people realized how much other people enjoyed being entertained. Now I’m rambling… In short, theater just happened, it wasn’t created, and because of that there’s no way to explain how it was created.

Australia Movie

lbiespiel — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:39:13 +0000

Today we watched a movie about Australian Theater… or rather just Australia. It was stressed upon us to notice things like costume, props, etc., but deep down this was a documentary about Australia. I can see the purpose of the film in our class: to give a general look at the only country that’s also a continent to further our knowledge of their theater practice once we get to it (Jane said that was not the point of it, but she never said what was which leaves me to assume that it was the point). Basically the movie covered this: the government and the people of Australia don’t get along, some people want it to be the way it used to be, and the pornography industry is a new one there. I’m glad I have that information I suppose, though I would have preferred to watch some Australian theater to introduce me to Australian theater, rather than trying to explain what it was without any sort of actual theater material to go by. Still, the day was fun, and I got to know the Australians a bit better.

Talking About Cultures

lbiespiel — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:52:48 +0000

So on Friday there was some tech thing going on with about half the class, so we had a “normal” sized IB class. Hooray. We sat in a circle and discussed this new project thing we’re doing. Basically we’re going to pick a culture, study that culture, study that cultures theater practice, and then study a specific play in that theater practice. I would be lying if I said it all made sense to me, I’m still having that feeling that I missed something that was said on the first day of school and everyone knows what’s going on except me… what I do know how to do is fake knowing what’s going on and then ask in private later. Unfortunately, we started talking about people who orient colors with numbers, musical notes, words etc., and never actually got to my turn to share… actually we only got to four people, but I’m used to that by now. Essentially, it was a pretty chill class period, and good for me because I missed school from Monday to Thursday because of the flu. Now I have tons of makeup work to do, YEAH!!!

Hunter Gatherer II

lbiespiel — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:47:05 +0000

On Friday we wrapped up our Hunter Gatherer experience by creating a ritual for each of our respective stories. This, I must say was much better than the fish ritual, which I found to be a little dull. Perhaps that’s just because I wasn’t having a great dat during the fish ritual, but I really though that this activity panned out well in the end, and I learned something from the experience. We found it a bit odd to add words to something that had no words originally, so we basically kept it to the sounds we had in the first place. I think that the one problem here was that it had only been two days since we had done the original pieces, and we ourselves had done the original pieces. I think it could have worked out better if maybe another class had acted out skits and then left us written documentation of the occurrences and then we had done rituals from that. This would have removed the though of “well that’s not actually what happened” from our minds, because we wouldn’t have been the ones coming up with the story. Despite this I think this was a very good way to end the week, and though I was sort of turned off to the whole activity, I think I found a way to take something away from it in the end, which is all that really matters to me.

Hunter Gatherer

lbiespiel — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:44:38 +0000

Part 1,

We did the hunter gatherer thing today, where we went off and had an experience as one of the two, and quite frankly I’m not sure how much I got out of it. To me it wasn’t much of a story telling device because there was no language. I understand the idea of not speaking, but it seemed like we could have achieved the exact same effect there playing a game of telephone, or that game we occasionally play in class that’s similar. The story continued to change as more time went on but really the only difference I saw from the game I listed was that it took up more time, and was slightly more planed out. The point did get across however: when a story is told repeatedly over time it gets jumbled. Plain and simple.