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| DRAMA JOURNAL -TERM 1 RECAP Click here to go home FOR VARIOUS REASONS, INCLUDIND SCHOOLWORK AND TIME CONSTRAINTS, I WILL RECAP ALL OF FIRST TERM IN A SINGLE JOURNAL ENTRY... SOAK IT UP, BOYS AND GIRLS... Welcome to the first Drama Journal of the year. Yes, I've been a slack bitch. Bite me. Quite frankly there hasn't been all that much happening in Drama to write about, really, so I am going to feel free to rant about all sorts of shit that crosses my lunatic scope of imagination, like how I feel about the way Barnum is coming along, and other stuff of similar and opposite nature. Smooth contradiction, that. Where should I begin.... Well a fitting start, one would assume is the first Drama lesson of Term One, so, I will start there. I can vaguely remember the first lesson. I'm pretty sure we played that funny little 'Ha' game, with the intention of delivering us an inisght of how we feel being in a class with new people for the first time. Suffice to say, it didn't exactly work. No dramas (pardon the pun) and as far as I can remember the second time we tried it, it didn't work either. Screw that though, lets get onto what matters: my opinion on the "new people"! Well, it must be said that speaking as of this moment (April 19 2004) that our group has meshed quite well. Sure, there were a few conflicts, but thats normal in the type of environment we're subjecting ourselves to. Of the newcommers, I've known Victor Fali the longest, stemming back to Grade 6 at Kalinda Primary School. I'm probably better friends with him now than I've ever been, which is good. The thing with Victor is that he's really good with impro. He's gone off on an improvisational tangent a handful of times in class, which leaves me wondering "how the fuck did he think of that ?". I'm not sure if I'm the only one thats noticed that. Other than Victor, I've known Blake since Year 10, I think, so there wasn't much tension, if any, between him and I. Now, that leaves Jade, Anny, David, Tyler, Victor Ubila and Alex. I can't say anything about Jade as I never really got the chance of even talking to her, so I'll move along swiftly. Tyler. Need I say more? I guess most of you guys already have made up your minds about him, but I feel that putting the tag 'misunderstood' on him is rather appropriate. I have no problems with Tyler, and we're about the only two people in the class, lo, all of VCE that could be considered pro wrestling addicts. Good for us, I say. Victor Ubila, or 'taco' as he is affectionately known by his peers is someone I've met for the first time this year, and after working with him a few times, I've only begun to scratch the surface of this guy's personality. David is also a rather interesting chap who I don't know that well, and that seems to have the same sort of mindset as Alex when it comes to telling...uh.... lets call it 'low brow' jokes. Anny, is another person I've worked with and met for the first time this year and she is really nice. She can focus on the work or chill out and thats really cool. Finally, my fellow PSAS member (more on that later) Alex.....well, let me put it this way: he's an interesting, he's funny, he's witty and he's smart. Actually, here's a killer analogy that just popped into my head - he's like a younger, more energetic version of God's *other* son, Bert Newton! Yeah that was sacrilegious. Sue me. He actually kinda resembles him... SEE WHAT I MEAN? It's been fun so far, getting to know these people, but as it stands now, I'm under the impression thatthe Year 12's and Year 11's have different work requirements, and as such will go in different directions, meaning that we won't spen much time together as a complete group, which - in my opinion - is a shame. Anyway, after wasting a good four paragraphs, it's best to get onto Term One's dramatic work, starting off with a simple game - in pairs, we had an 'A' person and a 'B' person. I was paired off with Blake. The aim of this silent game was for Person 'A' to pass an object (different objects in each pair) to Person 'B' - who wasn't allowed to touch it. I happened to be Person 'B', and our object was a bin. It took like five seconds for Blake to think "he's an idiot, and he'll catch the bin if I throw it at him, because he doesn't want it to make a noise". Funnily enough, yours truly, being the dipshit moron that he is, caught the God damn bin. Then I had to try and get Blake to touch it for the remaining period of time. Did it work? Nope. Moving onto the next lesson where our 'environmental confidence' was tested. I'm referring to the 'Ha!' game where we stand in a circle and step and say 'ha' when we feel comfortable. Didn't work this time, but who could blame us - it was only the second lesson. That was followed by something I'm rather comfortable doing, melodramas, which turned out okay. The next lessons were relatively unimportant until we were handed our first big thing of 2004 - the piece on 'falling over'. For those who don't remember, or who weren't there, we had to devise a piece that symbolises falling over, relating to dreams, desires, fears and memory. My group for the falling over piece, had Victor U, David and myself. Actually, if I recall correctly, our group was the only one who stayed back on Moday's lesson when Judes was on camp, which showed that we were more committed than the other groups at that point. Hooray for us. Anyway, we rehearsed and planned for a few lessons, and we put on a performance that I felt wasn't recieved in the way I'd like them to be. Infact, I think that I get that a lot. Usually my group has a really good idea and I envision the whole play, thinking "yeah we really have a deep and meaningful piece fo theatre here" and I end up thinking that we didn't quite nail it after it's all said and done. I guess I have high standards when it comes to drama, and I don't like being just 'adequate' or 'good', I (as we obviously all do) like doing well. Meh. The following lesson we did something I quite frankly can't stand - something which Judes has an infatuation with - any game where we run around like insects. I hate them. I'll go on the record as saying that I hate them. I don't like those games where we run around up the stairs or across the stage like animals or insects or the Incredible Hulk. OK, I've had my bitch and I've got more bitching to do, but that, like the PSAS explination from earlier on, will come later. Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, after that crap we were read a nice little story about Arachne and Minerva. Using themes from that, we had to create a performance. I had Nick, Alex and David in my group and I vaguely remember the plot (something about a girl [David] two-timing her boyfriends [Alex and I] in a restaurant where Nick was the waiter). Okay, maybe thats slightly more that 'vague'. Our performance was memorable for two quotes - the -"Darling?" - "Darling!" exclamations between Alex and myself when we find out that our girlfriend (David) has been dining with each of us - at opposite tables. The other quote was when Alex and I got into a brawl, nay, a heated argument and I said "Fie fie, you puppet, you!". Hmmmm where have I heard that? Now, unlike the falling over piece, I felt this came across generally well, but thats probably because this was humour-based which is probably my strength when it comes to Drama. The next few lessons didn't really have much I could write about - we pretty much did one breathing exercise and started the Ross/Simmonds piece which was never actually performed. After those shenanigans, and another unsuccessfull attempt at the "Ha!" game. One thing that I can actually remember that we did after all of that was an exercise where Victor U, Tyler and I (I think) did a funeral scene, with a superobjective. For the life of me I can't remember what the superobjective was, although I can recall the corpse coming to life and the "what the hell have you been drinking/smoking/inhaling or possibly all three" look from Judes. Hmmmm. Now....the following day heralded an interesting exercise. It was another superobjective-motivated task, but it was fun and it was different. What I'm referring to is the school council board meeting roleplay that we did, where we had to be in character (given to us on a slip of paper) to argue for or against the proposed $10,000 grant from the government to the school. I remember I was a politician and Rachel and myself had a bit of an (in-character) altercation. That was fun. Oh and I got to be a pompous prick - for a reason this time, haha. Moving steadily along, past the lesson where James brought in home-made (?) cupcakes for everyone, to the next semi-big thing: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. I can't rememer who I paired up with (the fact that I left doing this journal so late probably contributes to that) - I think it was Gemma. Anyway we put on a pretty good performance, I felt, except my minor screw-up, referring to Gemma as Roo which was actually who I was playing. All-in-all it wasn't tood bad. The other pairs, especially James/Ellyce and Alex/Kylie did really well too. Well done to them. The next thing thats interesting enough to note was the excercise where we stare into our partner's eyes and move closer/further back depending on how comfortable you felt. The last time we did that (and the only other time I believe) was the lesson last year that ended with James and I doing the activity infront of the whole class. This time around, Alex and I were paired up. The funny thing about that was that we are both short-sighted. That meant that we were both squinting to see each other's expressions. Funny stuff. At one point I remember telling myself "screw this - I'm not moving any more forward until he does". And he did...after five or six minutes... A lesson or two after that, every Year 12 student in our class went to see Stolen for English. Every Year 12 student...except Mel and myself. We ended up pairing up to do an exerpt from Morris Gelitzman's Two Weeks With The Queen. I thought that we both did a great job, especially Mel. the others (the rest of the Year 11's) also did a good job. Later that (Wednes)day, Mel had VCAL so I was the only person left (after all, Period 5 is a Year 12 only class as opposed to the joint 11-12 class I just described). Obviously I scored a free period. Nice. After being relatively happy with Drama thus far, I, like the rest of the class was presented with a task that might just challenge that feeling: the Australian Psyche. Basically we had to represent the Australian psyche however we liked, so long as it wasn't crap. Yeah, I don't remember exactly what the instructions were, if that isn't obvious yet. My group consisted of Victor U, Anny and Ellyce. Our performance was based on the way we, as Australians have treated Aboriginals in the past, and how the times have changed, allowing our views on Aborigines to change so immensly. Overall, I felt our performance was pretty good. Not great, but not piss-poor either. The message we conveyed probably wasn't as understood as I would have liked, but what we, or at least I learned from this was worth the not-so-bad performance. When it's all said and done, I'll take a shithouse performance and some valuable lessons learned over a great performance where I didn't learn squat anyday. Go me! As mentioned earlie, Alex and I have formed PSAS: The Papa Snap Appreciation Society. What is PSAS? Well, I can tell you that it is based on Papa Snap, a fictional character from Tommy Ungerer's I Am Papa Snap And These Are My Favourite No Such Stories - first borrowed from our College library 29 years ago. So we thought, "hey - this book (which contains many one-to-two page short stories that make no sense) is rather cool. Lets form a cult". Ang thats what is going to happen! Look out for a Papa Snap page, coming soon to CKTC Online, baby! Enough hoo-ha, lets get back to the journal, shall we? Well there actually isn't that much to get back to - appart from finding out our Ensemble groups for next term, nothing much really happened in the dying days of Term One, with the possible exception being the Mother Courage extract I did with Victor Fali. We did it as a set of conjoined-monarch-twins addressing the nation. Siamese queens? Who'd of thunk it? Anyway, for what it was, it turned out okay. So, that really left us at the end of Term One, with impending Ensembles (for us Year 12') and solos (for them Year 11's - and I am aware that I just defied the laws of English grammar twice) looming over our heads as we head into the holidays. That brings us to the end of this journal, sadly. Yeah it was a big one, about 2,344 words to be exact. I'll do one for next term as well, which will discuss how we went with our Ensembles, how those nutty little Year 11 children handled their solos, stuff on what we did in class, and of course, a bit on The Collapsible Man as well. So until then, beam me up, Scotty! -Bob [END OF PAGE] All material on this website is (c) 2004 Bob Productions Inc., on behalf of the Curiosity Killed The Cat Team and Maroondah Secondary College. Don't copy anything without permission or a lawsuit will be coming your way. |
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