Beginnings of One Act Play

Description: this week we've been reading a lot about Paucartambo, and talking about Paucartambo and basically everything was about Paucartambo, and of course our one act play. And for the weekend we went to see "Yerma".

Analysis,connections and reflection: First of all, we had our tests for this week, so we had to read a lot, the first writings that I read were about how they talk and how do they communicated in rural areas such as Paucartambo, it also taught us of the oral literature, but then came the actual festival, in which they wrote about how the festival is, the different myths and mysterious and very catchy things. Also this was very easy to read, as it was very well explained and so I enjoyed this ones the most, even though i read it too late for the test...

For the one act play, I was very confused of what was best to do, what could work, but just in the first day we argue about this, we came out with our plot, I know that for creating a story we need a lot of imagination, creativity and been dynamic, and hopefully, we did this in the time we had to plan the one act play, even though we just have the main idea and we still need to write the scenes and the scrip and those things. We were not sure of our game until the second day we stayed in school to decide this, but we came out with: each character will have two characters, and  2 will have just one, we will be able to change characters, but we will only be able to move in one direction, we will be split into two, half of our body will be of one character and the other one of the other character, so this will not allow us to look at the audience directly, we will always face to the other person we are talking to. Also we are coming already with our characters, which Roberto want us to develop a lot in this one act play, as we did not developed much in the school play, even though I think this is a very great challenge, I am not sure how to play two characters almost at the same time and how to change so quickly.
 This makes me think about "Yerma", as Maria Laura, played various characters, but still, it is not the same as we will be half a character and half another, she changed her clothes to change characters, but on one side we will still be the other character, so what can we do, to not get confused, is it just practice?, how can I develop the two character the same way? with body characterization? physical work? what can I do in order to transmit, what I want to transmit with my characters? how would I focus that much in order  not to loose one character, and not to get confused? 

Paucartambo, critique of sources and feedback

Description: This week we've been working in our critique of sources and how we should actually write it, also the feedback from the school play, and of course searching more about Paucartambo.

Analysis: First of all we’ve been talking about the school play and it seems it was very pleasant to the headmasters and to everyone, we did put a lot of effort and it was difficult to work with the puppets, so it was a great challenge and we actually did it. Regarding the critique of sources we learned some steps to do this:

1.       Identify the source

2.       Summarise the content briefly

3.       Describe how it was use

4.       Why it was useful

Also we have to have a valid argument and we have to say how reliable was the source for the investigation. We all did very good in this, some little mistakes but it was good and easy to do (now that we actually know how to do it).

Regarding Paucartambo we looked about the conditions of theatre, there are 4:

1.       Involvement of the body to represent another person in certain time and place through a performance.

2.       Order, composition and game

3.       A content, something to say

4.       A social and ritual function.

This 4 has to be included in order to be theatre, so looking about Paucartambo in the involvement of the body we have the time, space, mask and actions. In this case, everything happens in Paucartambo, which is a small town, which is 109 kms north east Cuzco city.  There are more things ahead to learn about Paucartambo, including the texts we have to read now, I bet these texts will help a lot to our understanding. Also this tradition uses masks, which makes it even more interesting.

Connections: As in Paucartambo they use masks, which is very interesting as we used masks for the school play, we are going to be able to actually learn about these, as we didn’t actually learnt in the school play. The only things we learnt were that there are kind of masks, and that we should always look to the front when wearing a mask.

Reflection: Even though we used masks for our school play we never actually get into deep and we never learnt the conventions of wearing a mask, so I was wondering which were the conventions when wearing a mask?, especially in this tradition?, why do they actually wear it?, just to represent other characters or because of something deeper?