Pilar second visit

This Friday, Pilar visited us again to make us practice our voice.
But we didnt use it so much. She focused in making us to connect each part of our body with the way we breath so we wouldnt hurt our vocal cords at the time we were going to use it.

We started showing her our warming up and she recorded us. I didnt felt any secure with it because our teacher was most of the time telling what to do if we were doing it bad and we didnt use music to relax. In this case we had to do it alone. She told us not to use music because we had to create ourself rythm and hear what everyone else was doing. It was more difficult in my opinion, because i didnt knew how to follow my partners when parctically i couldnt hear anything.
I relaxed first and finished first the warming up, which put me very nervous because i didnt knew if i had done it well.

The class continued when Pilar make us change our sitting position so we wouldnt be like the public. She spoke and spoke and eventhough most of my partners tired themselfs and sit like they were at the start i wanted to follow what she told me.
Pilar showed us the movement that we made incounsciously with our body while breathing in a lot of  positions. We worked at this the most of the time so we could controll our body with our respiration.
She made us feel tired with exercises but didnt let us to breath as we were tired. She made us breath controlling our respiration. It was an interesting exercise because i never had though that actors got tired so much.

She also spoke us about or base position and told us we didnt have to stand like that. Pilar made us bend our knees and put our arms in a strange way so it would look relax but for us it wouldnt be like that.

I saw actors do some strange things with their body such as acrobatics and those things... it its necessary to have those abilities to be an actor?
If an actor is about to luck off breath will he or she breath normally to care himself or will he hurt him so he would be able to make a great presentation?  

Pilar Nuñez

This Friday we had an special guest named Pilar Nuñez. Pilar Nuñéz is a teacher of theatre as well as an actress.
She came with the objective to help us at our school play by developing our voice.
She made us make different excercises to not be ashamed of trying new things with our voice. Pilar told us that we always leave our voice as something not special but indeed it is a part of our body.

This first class i found it pretty akward but after i got intrested on what was she doing I find it quite fun and tried the best of me. I´m sure i wasnt able to do it well but at least i tried. We started the class with an breathing excercise which consisted in controlling the air we threw out of our body and to think how much we need to breath to be able to say what we want to do without running out of air. By this exercise which consisted in touching each part of our body while breathing i found that it was really difficult and weird to discover some parts of my body i didnt knew. We had to convine our body with our breathing.

After that we try doing other excercises which made us mork more our body with our facial expression and not to be relaxed in any point because that was the public work.
I discovered that for these exercises she made us try we needed a  lot of imagination to move in a special way with our breathing.

Might doing this exercise would have any difficulties in making difference of gender? Might it be the same  or it would be more difficult?

Kabuki Spider

Kabuki spiders named Tsuchigumo in the plays, actually are really weird characters that need a great amount of energy on them. My character for this play is Tsuchigumo wich first enters the scene as a witch and after that transforms into a spider.

By practising my scene I had to work in a lot of things such as Planning, directing, acting,etc.
Working with kids showed me that sometimes their creativity might be more extensive than an teenager. Thanks to this we had a lot of ideas and finally had to join them up.

For doing this scene i had to practice more actions than voice because it was a fight scene. Actions for my character had to be strong, direct and like cutted in the fight scene. My movements had to be rigid and with a lot of energy on them. This gave the sensation of tension and something weird was happening on me.
I didnt get to find my voice for the character but i did a lot of experiments with my pitches and vocals.
But indeed, what i found was only strange noises that didnt went with my character.
Kabuki style asks for the spider to have a high pitch but for my character i think it would be better a low pitch. But in my all drama practice ive always had a great difficulty in doing low pitches. So, indeed this is a challenge for me.

If i change he voice of the spider would it have an great change in the character? Because, i mean... the goal is to create an evil voice. But an evil voice might be created in a low pitch or a high pitch and in my opinion both might have scary effects. But for a kabuki play, might it have a difference on character?

Pedro Valdivia

Last week, we went to see a play named "Pedro de Valdivia" which had certain amount of comedy, musical and historical context.  The theatre presentation gives information about Valdivia´s life  when he came to America around the time when it was recently discovered and being conquered by Spain.

In this play, there were many characters and only three which were encharged of representing them.
The three main characters were Pedro Valdivia and two other guys. One of them only represented second rank commandants while the thhird guy used to represent natives or Incas. They changed of characters when music started playing and the actors started singing.  But the actors were always doing the same style of characters but different people.  Story happened in a very dynamic way. They not only did spoke dynamic, their actions and changes of scenes were very fast. One thing I really like was the way did never stopped doing actions. They were or doing faces, movements or walking. But they werent stand up only talking.
Actors had to form the play by not only actions, they had also to sing what was happening on and at the same time to concentrate and play different instruments. They had a good knowledge of them.  I think this made the play more entusiasmic.

The props used were instruments, soil, table and a puppet representing Pedro.
They showed good creativity (which is essential for plays) when they transform some soil into a map which contained, mountains, land and sea. It was very funny when they represented Pedro de Valdivia on a puppet because all the characters had to organize themself to provide sounds and movements the same as the pedro de valdivia actor. Most of the play needed a lot of coordination.

In my opinion, the accent wasnt very clear. For me they didnt spoke like chilean people. I´m not sure why. I think that was the only thing wrond i found.  But in conclusion I really enjoyed the play because of coordination and creativity. But, my question is... ¿How came they were able to find so many actions and why did they decided to use a lot of actions and do not concentrate in the context?