This is one of the biggest parts of our assessment criteria as theatre students because here we depend on our entire ensemble. It is a long drawn out process which we go through together. As an ensemble, we had decided on our platform that we would present it on. The yearly UN Day celebration that the school held. Traditionally, the UN Day Presentation is organized and conceptualized by students. It is a student run production that is a defining time every year for the ABA Community. We hope to maintain that tradition successfully. As students doing the IB Diploma, we also had to be practical. Putting on a show is difficult and time-consuming work. So is there any way we can make it beneficial for us. That is when we realised it is the perfect time to present our collaborative piece to a target audience.
Our Inspiration for the year is 'Light'. It is the UN year of Digital Light. So we needed to form a story inspired from that, which would set up the rest of the presentation. Our first task was to think up some ideas.
I will come up with and explore more as time progresses, but my initial instinct was to use shadows.
As an ensemble we had come to the decision that we wanted the story to be the history of light. The form to present it was what we had to discover.
I got interested in the idea of shadows through 3 widely different facets.
The first was watching the 9th grade theatre class perform their devised pieces using phone lights and a white curtain on our stage. They performed short stories for a kindergarten class. While it might not have been 'professional', it was effective. It was an interesting mode of storytelling and I found myself engaged even though I wasn't the target audience member.
The second was during my research of different practitioners, I remember looking into the works of Jean Rosenthall. She was the revolutionary light engineer for the original West Side Story Broadway production. In collaboration with Lael Wertenbaker, she produced a photo essay on light forms called the 'The magic of light'.
It was shot on a miniature stage (scale: two inches to one foot) using small versions of the fresnel and ellipsoidal spotlights. The figures are sculptor's scale-model manikins. The essay is preceded by a mini light plot.
The essay was designed to show in simple terms how light coming from the standard theatre lighting positions will look when focused to light an actor in a given area on the stage. The mini light plot is a ground plan showing where the light pipes and instruments are hanging in relation to the stage. The plot also has on it an elevation of one of the tormentor pipes (or "booms," as they are sometimes called) for side lighting, and the ground plan of the tormentor positions used in the photo essay.
I found this so interesting and it got me thinking more about the intricacies of shadows.
My final push was seeing shadow work in action. The following presentation by 'Attraction', a shadow theatre group, for their first audition for Britain's Got Talent hit an emotional chord with me. If we can be inspired from work like this, it can only be beneficial to our performance.
Our Inspiration for the year is 'Light'. It is the UN year of Digital Light. So we needed to form a story inspired from that, which would set up the rest of the presentation. Our first task was to think up some ideas.
I will come up with and explore more as time progresses, but my initial instinct was to use shadows.
As an ensemble we had come to the decision that we wanted the story to be the history of light. The form to present it was what we had to discover.
I got interested in the idea of shadows through 3 widely different facets.
The first was watching the 9th grade theatre class perform their devised pieces using phone lights and a white curtain on our stage. They performed short stories for a kindergarten class. While it might not have been 'professional', it was effective. It was an interesting mode of storytelling and I found myself engaged even though I wasn't the target audience member.
The second was during my research of different practitioners, I remember looking into the works of Jean Rosenthall. She was the revolutionary light engineer for the original West Side Story Broadway production. In collaboration with Lael Wertenbaker, she produced a photo essay on light forms called the 'The magic of light'.
It was shot on a miniature stage (scale: two inches to one foot) using small versions of the fresnel and ellipsoidal spotlights. The figures are sculptor's scale-model manikins. The essay is preceded by a mini light plot.
The essay was designed to show in simple terms how light coming from the standard theatre lighting positions will look when focused to light an actor in a given area on the stage. The mini light plot is a ground plan showing where the light pipes and instruments are hanging in relation to the stage. The plot also has on it an elevation of one of the tormentor pipes (or "booms," as they are sometimes called) for side lighting, and the ground plan of the tormentor positions used in the photo essay.
I found this so interesting and it got me thinking more about the intricacies of shadows.
My final push was seeing shadow work in action. The following presentation by 'Attraction', a shadow theatre group, for their first audition for Britain's Got Talent hit an emotional chord with me. If we can be inspired from work like this, it can only be beneficial to our performance.
Of course, these are my personal thoughts and nothing is definite until the ensemble is consulted. Hopefully during our next lesson, we will have a forum discussion where I will be able to bring up my ideas and hear others as well. Even if we don't perform as shadows, at least I will know we considered it.