Poems

1. The grandma in the traditional Arab village, is gathering grapes. It was represented by the scene of grandma working and granddaughter imaging aside, with the faithful connection of prayers. "I woke from the long fever to find them.   "faith and life "

covering my head like cool prayers."

2. The grandma is talking about the things that are important in her life are gone that she's not surprised by anything now. Her passed away husband, and the coming death. "who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.     "

They will plant themselves. We will all die."    "face to death"

3. In the family dad talked about the traditions of their nation Arab, about the religious connection of death and afterlife. "Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”   

He said that’s what a true Arab would say." "religious traditions" 

2 Diorama

Since I have not chose any thing specific ideas for my scene, I will do the final scene of the adaptation just right now. Because the ending part is way more significant. The scene is about the part that Kahu finally became the whale rider with the whale, and leaving her tribe, and her family. Her grandfather, Koro the leader of the tribe with his wife say farewell to Kahu. The style of the staging is mostly sad, which shows how the old traditional grandpa feels sad and regrets for his thoughts of his awesome grand daughter. As in the pic, I will use digital projection with sea and beach as the background, and with grandparents on stage right, and Kahu with the whale (maybe she hangs a model of whale) on the stage right.

Whale rider live

As we had a long time period of our class over the whole year of working on "the second part of the class", performance, I guess I am more familiar with the word and everything behind that. We used basically one and half quarter of the year term to work on staging and adaptation from some novels. It is just like a progress of a production, and I am getting to it right now. Those IB course exams helped me a lot, although I am not a full IB student so that the grade of the exam is not that obviously important. Especially when my teacher commented after I finally finished my oral presentation with only 9 bullet points, that I have learned a lot. I agree with that totally with fully appreciation. So now I am here to talk about the possible / pretending that we may do an adaption of the novel The Whale Rider. 

This is the novel which kind of truly represented the nowadays situation of Maori people, the natives around New Zealand. There is a word that was so obvious, and seem like a key word that we even have seen it in the test we had: Magical realism (Maybe those two words I am not 100 percent positively sure about it). The story that it tells is real and realistic in the same time, but with a kind of "magical production" within. For example, the conversation and the tale of whale and whale rider. In those stories that participates with gods and super nature, I call it "magical production". But the meaning and idea that the story teller wants to express is very realistic and clarified. This is the key work that we may work on. So I agree that the adaption can have a lot of wide ideas, and we do not have to settle them into an original staging. We can set the whole story into any time periods, with different groups / races of people, as long as we are connected with the connection between nature and humans, and tradition with humans are fine with it. I am sorry that I could not have a clear idea about the staging and story line for details, due to my poor imagination. But I have the outline about how the story would be like. 

I think this topic of story is really brand with deep meaning, but also a common topic. We can separate the idea into two different ways, due to everyone's perceptive about what the most important information that the novel is trying to tell us. I will put the connection between human beings and nature, then the another one is the conflict between tradition and modern. (Obviously, this novel supports the part of protecting tradition the most.) But it also shows the "invasion" of modern life, for example when the Maori tribe leader "picked up the smart phone and call his son from South Island". This is what is interesting and comedic from the topic, but sad in the same time. This is the factor that we can comedic the staging and the adaption.  

Once, on this Island

Last Sunday, I went to the black box to watch our last winter musical - once on this island. It is already the third and the last day, but it is still that popular and busy around. All the seats are full to sit down. This is the first play that I can finally understand well and track on what is going on like most of the scenes. I am not that surprised about that because I actually have just read the original book and also actually did direct with one partner to make one performance based on the story as an adaptation. So I felt really confident to watch and glad about my first time full journey to the play. 

Although I do not quiet know about the performance area, but I guess I will make some comments based on my guess. This is a kind of musical, which is just like a well staged opera. So full and all through the play, those actors are singing all the time. Their singing skills are so good - I was amazed that so many people can sing that well in this world around me. With in the time, the back ground music was participating so professionally. As the first time I heard it, I thought someone in the back stage were playing the downloaded music from internet or somewhere. But after a little bit I found out that some unique instrument that has a longer tone than it should be, then I finally realized that people are playing it! I was so surprised. This is also a challenge for me to go and choose drama as my spring sport I guess. Because both of the cru members and the actors are so professional. A person without any, any of the acting skills like me, I do not know if that is a good choice for me to go right now.

The story was beautiful, and the staging and set ups were funny too. The scene with Webkha (I do not know if I did spell it right) standing up stairs on stage as dressed as a professor, with other actors hang their hand drew pics to describe the history of beauhommes family was really fresh. The four gods, Erzulie, Agwe, Papage and Asaka on the four corners of the stage were perfectly fit in the performance. I do not know why, but when I did actually try to find out if the actors did not fit in their characters, I felt I can find nothing about it. The customs and pops are just perfectly fit too. (Sorry but I do not have any more ways to describe, that was just an amazing and perfect creature!) The play also reminded me a lot and gave me ideas to rethink about the structure of my own performance for the IB exam. I wish I could be like them and have the creative thoughts come out. And last of all, their performance skills are the best present if I can actually learn it.  

New draft of performance

http://youtu.be/JLyJW-ZIVKk

Oral presentation text (partial)

Hello everyone I want to talk about our IB course work, the adaptation of my love my love. We choose our play from a non popular part from the book, which not every one can guess what our characters are. We are the butterflies, who watch for Desiree's life, from the beginning to the end when she died, and brought all of her desire. Our lines are all around desiree's stories. So we decided to separate the play into two different staging. We originally planned that we design the plot as butterflies, talking about the story of Ti Moune through the whole play. We have the  first one is about staging about narration. Then when we have to exactly show the story, we act it out, and try to show them with you. 

From the play as you can see, the style of the play is mostly funny , from the beginning part to the middle part, but the funny atmosphere ended in the middle of the play. We separate the whole performance basically into three scenes. First one is when Desiree was still a pure girl from the small village on the island, her smooth life has been changed until one day, she eventually met Daniel. The second scene is  when Desiree met Daniel again, she fell in love with him deeply, so we had a dancing scene which show how romantic it is. Then the last scene about how and why Desiree got threw out of Daniel's house. This is the sad part, which is the also the end of the story. The audiences, and especially I hope you can feel, and take their steps on Desiree's journey, and understand her life. Different people have different perspectives, so they may have different ways to understand Desiree. Some of them think Desiree is the representative for desire brings people down into darkness, and her name is just a sign. Some people think she is just a pure girl, went a road that does not belong to herself. Just like in the book, "The fish trying to swim on the land". This is kind of the way that we want to show our audiences. Desiree is just a pure girl, but with a strong heart to chase her dreams, and a tragic life for her. 

In the performance, I guess the most outstanding detail was both of us, the actors wore a pair of butterfly wings. This is the way how we show the separation of the different part of our scenes, the "butterflies' talkshow" and the reality. As you can see, there are uncountable times of black out and the scenes changing happened. So this is the way to tell the audiences when and who we were, in different scenes. Some times I was still the butterfly who witness besides, but the girl was in the reality acting Desiree. There are differences between the color of the wings and our customs between each other. I am in all black, from customs to the wings. This represents that I am always the same - never changed , represents the insistence of Desiree's characteristics.  this was also mentioned in the scripts too.But my partner is different. She has a pair of white butterfly wings, and several different customs - kind of hard for her to change them through all the time. She has so many different kinds of styles, not only because the requirement of the play, but she represents the changing part of Desiree's characteristics. 

Our staging video

http://youtu.be/GctucEvwtnE