Thank you Five!

4^th September, 2015.

This proved to be not only beneficial but, a truly fun experience. Despite my fear of performing in front of an audience (aka my teachers and unknown colleagues), I was able to pull my socks up and do exactly that. Like always we gathered together with our instructors in an informal environment to learn. Yet again they did so without any straight forward manner of following the rule book, for instance, "You do this and so and so happens" instead, they started off by asking us what we had understood so far from our previous sessions together and what we hoped to learn in the future sessions to come. This started a round of debate on whether or not theater has any significance in our daily lives with references to Plato’s The Republic. The students engaged in the discussion came to a mutual consensus that nothing can be purely black/white. There are gray areas in everything.

 

This is precisely what theater does; it makes you aware of the presence of those gray areas so often pushed into the background. It highlights them by satirizing them, making them humorous, or just simply out rightly mocking the audience for their flaws, and this is exactly why theater is in fact important for our daily lives.

Having concluded the above mentioned, a list of who to perform theater for, and who not to perform theater for, was jotted down, along with a list of techniques that could be used to enhance a certain theatrical production classified as experimental theater. The examples shared were awe inspiring and generally speaking greatly experimental, however, they were also an eye opener to the many ways that theater could in fact be fun (because before this session I was strictly against theater, taking it to be in layman terms, boring).

Since we were eager to learn how ethnotheater and experimental theater are linked together in real life (without knowing it – in some cases – at the time), and the instructors were similarly hungry to teach through practical experience, the students were set the task of performing approximately thirty second performances having chosen any of the “who to perform for” or “who not to perform for” along with a technique or more to enhance our stories. Every group (since Prof. Boyd had divided us into the groups through the ‘huggie bear’ exercise) performed to the best of their abilities since we were given approximately twenty minutes to come up with an amazing skit.

At the end of this experience what I realized was, was that the simple fact of choosing a story close to your heart or your personal experience (as was the case with my group), can make a great difference in one’s understanding, not just of theater and its space but, also of how theater is important for a person in their daily struggle to survive the everyday obstacles thrown their way. It also reminded of what Shakespeare in his play As You Like It said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages” (Shakespeare n.pag.). What stood out to me about the experience of performing a thirty second skit though was that I learned to use a term commonly employed by theater artists and that was to say thank you before the number of minutes left before the show, for example, “thank you five”.