Hilary's Drama Adventures

MORE CLOWNING!

Today we went outside, what a wonderful adventure. Today my clown mostly stayed with the group, still trying to be friends with Jane. She stole a balloon and traded it for something from Keethan’s clown. Then she ran around and climbed things and pretended to be invisible. On the way back to class she found a bunch of papers and hid them in her shirt as her version of cleaning up.

The next day she went out into the world with James. They went on adventures and snuck around and then acted like adults. My clown instead of talking makes farting noises which I feel is the equivalent to all of the shit that comes out of people’s mouths. She’s subverting the hierarchical structure and infiltrating the commodes of the man. Also she lost her whistle and that made her sad but James did a funeral for it and she loud cried without tears, and then we through a mitt in the river the next time and gave it a funeral as well and it was sad but funny. I think this is the most emotion I’ve felt at a funeral. Most just make me feel slightly disgusted. And then James and her returned to the class and I found a new whistle and I just sat down on a spinny chair and spun for a while because she felt sad and was adjusting to a new thing I guess. But then James came back and we went on another adventure and scared the geese and rolled down the hill in front of Hagey Hall and then ran up SCH and she tried to be invisible but someone knew me and said my name and it was someone I hadn’t seen since highschool and she just looked a me weird and kept going and I went back to being invisible and then James and my clown ate some sticks and then we wandered our way back to class.

CLOWNING!

When my clown was first born she wasn’t quite sure what to do, she crawled around on the floor and met people, she liked Jane. When she discovered someone’s chair fort she hid inside of it and eventually found a watch, that made her laugh, and she really likes to laugh. As she continued moving around the space there was a kerfuffle and a bunch of stuff was suddenly there. Despite the mass of people she braved it and found a noisemaker. This was her best friend. It helped her communicate and united her with Jane because Jane had a noisemaker too. She went and hung out with Jane and Megan’s clowns and learned to draw kind of but mostly just liked making sounds with the whistle.

The Last Day of Mask

The final day we did mask we really enjoyable because we got to explore outside of the classroom. First outside into the hall, checking out where light came from, trying to grab it, experiencing the sound of the vending machine and then continuing on. We made new sounds and learned about echoes and things we could do to make things happen. Now I walk through the tunnels and think of how interesting they are because of the million things you can try down there but no one else ever seems to notice. On our way back to the class I had the mask on and I tried the door that leads to AL7 and it was open. My neutral really wanted to explore, it was somewhere neither of us had ever been and I was mad at Will when he came and told us we had to go another way. When we got back to the class Kim and I discussed how she had wanted to pull the fire alarm because it was an interesting object but that the sense of responsibility is present so we didn’t go through with it.

In looking at the photo below you see that all of the neutral faces are different. This is interesting because our neutral faces looked different depending on who looked at them. The fact that they were still asymmetrical added depth to them and “gives them life”. The first exercise we did was trying to calm an angry mob of people. It was really interesting watching other people calm others. Some seemed really calm and gave out that energy as well. But some looked almost afraid or nervous and you could tell that they weren’t quite calming the mob. Some people did different actions to try and calm the mob but some of the different styles didn’t work because it changed what the look was trying to portray.

The second time we did this exercise we were supposed to look at an unruly sea and try and respond to it. For me it was kind of this idea of awe that I felt when I looked at it and thus responded to it by submitting to it. This one was different for everyone and there were a lot of different emotions at play but it was interesting to watch the different emotions everyone projected.

Today was the first day we worked on neutral masking. It was interesting because it was supposed to be a kind of prep for clown. After we went into neutral mask it was easy to ignore whatever other people around you were doing and focus on something if that was what most interested you. For me it was a water bottle. I liked the way it rolled. and the sounds it made. It offered a lot of choices and I liked learning what it was outside of what society deems things to be. Eventually someone took the cap off and we spilt water on the floor. To my neutral masks complete surprise it took paint off the floor and all of a sudden I wanted to share it with everyone. It was magical in that respect, a new way of doing something, a discovery of the things we were able to create. 

Hallman Institute 

Doing this in V1 was really interesting. The space is really acoustically great for creating different sounds with all of the hallways and tunnels and different types of material constructions, it would have been cool to also have our sticks and try making noises with those. It was neat to recreate the sound of the space within the room, there were so many different sounds, options and choices to make each one of them affecting the whole of the atmosphere.