Julie Taymor Director’s Notebook Reflection

My Project

For my Director’s Notebook on Julie Taymor, I chose to watch and analyze her production of Igor Stravinsky’s version of “Oedipus Rex”. I really enjoyed doing this project. As a naturally analytical person, I found it fun to look out for small details in the production that could potentially tie into larger themes or symbolism. My first time watching through the production, I jotted down any thoughts relating to the project that came to mind as it played, resulting in a lengthy list of observations at the end. I then looked over my list of notes and tried to organize them into the topics that we had to cover for the project. This allowed me to see which areas I had to pay more attention to on subsequent viewings of the video. 

Before I started work on the presentation itself, I read what Julie Taymor had to say about her production of “Oedipus Rex” in her book “Playing With Fire” as a guide for what things I should focus on the most. The book also helped illuminate certain things about her production for me, such as the inspiration behind the specific style of masks she used and the significance of the recurring red thread. 

When I began putting the presentation together in Google Slides, I started by making slides for the stuff I had the most information about, and continued from there. It was only when the presentation was almost done that I did most of the reorganizing of slides to have a natural flow between topics. I did not end up using as many images as I would have liked to (for example, I probably could have added a picture of the Sphinx Puppet), but I think that the ones I did include got across my points well enough on their own. The plot summary slide was actually the last one I added, and it was mainly there so that if either of my classmates had not read the original play, they would not be too confused during my presentation.

I did not really get the chance to properly present my project, but even when I was doing it for just Mrs. Guarino, I did notice near the end that I had picked up my habit of talking slightly too fast, making it more difficult for people to keep up with me. That is something I still have to work on in general when it comes to presenting things. 

Looking at my presentation in comparison to my classmates’, I figure that mine probably could have gone into more detail at points, but I am also glad that I didn’t make mine as long as theirs. I did not even think of pulling up the video during my presentation for extra proof of my points, and I think it could have helped if I had had the time. However, in general, I am satisfied with how this project turned out.

Oedipus Rex Director’s Notebook Rough Draft

These are the rough notes I took while watching through the movie for the first time. I didn’t have enough time to really organize or refine them any further unfortunately.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cam9GjGs_aBrthBOmc7MBv_rETKeIiEof0-HxkngH6s

Bread and Puppet Theater

Bread and Puppet Theater was founded by Peter Schumann in 1963 on New York City’s Lower East Side. In 1974 the theater relocated to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with an old barn on the property being renovated into a museum for retired puppets. They do two kinds of shows - smaller inside shows and larger outside shows - but both kinds are used to discuss social issues of the day and meant to promote good.
A quote from Peter Schumann: “Bread and Puppet is based on bread baking and the not-for-sale distribution of bread at moments created by art, and these moments are created in opposition to capitalist culture and habit. Therefore the puppet show is not only a puppet show, but an eating-bread-together event.” (July 10, 2012, Grover, VT)
In another quote from Schumann, he explains that the aims of the theater should be to be seen as something necessary and nourishing like bread, rather than a commodity.
Source: http://breadandpuppet.org/about-bread-and-puppet
Photos: http://breadandpuppet.org/about-bread-and-puppet/photo-gallery/museum-images

Research on Julie Taymor (Homework)

    It was very interesting learning about Julie Taymor and her work in the performing arts. Despite having never heard her name before starting this class, I have heard of some of her projects. The main one is of course the Broadway adaptation of “The Lion King”, but I also remember learning about her film adaption of “Tempest” near the end of our reading of “Othello” for World Literature class last year, and I’ve actually heard of the Spider-Man musical through the Internet as well. It almost makes me feel bad that I have never heard of Taymor before... though in researching her I also found out that she was apparently fired from the Spider-Man musical for making too many last minute changes, then sued the show’s producers only to eventually settle out of court.
    When watching Taymor’s Ted Talk, there were two parts that caught my attention. The first was around the seven minute mark when she said, “I love the apparent truth of theater.” In context, she’s talking about how theater audiences are willing to extend their suspension of disbelief and imagine something grander and more real out of what is presented to them. This idea definitely seems to fit with more of the Stanislavskian approach to theater, which aims to immerse the audience and get them to relate to the characters, rather than the Brechtian approach, which aims to make people focus more on the social message of the play than the actual story and the world it’s set in. Since Stanislavski’s ideology is far more commonly popular in contemporary theater, this is not that surprising.
    The other part that peaked my interest was the anecdote Taymor told around the fifteen minute mark about when she climbed up an active volcano and then had to find her own way down. Aside from being an unusual story in itself, the reason it caught my attention was because I had read the New York Times article from 1992 about Taymor just Becker watching the video, and in it, I had made note of the following passage:
    “Each of her last three works has, in fact, ended in scenes of immolation: a funeral pyre in "The Transposed Heads," a burning that turns the title character in "Juan Darien" back into a jaguar (his original semblance) and a conflagration that destroys the king and court in "Fool's Fire." "Grendel," the forthcoming opera by Goldenthal and Taymor, will begin with a cremation. In each of these instances, fire leads to transformation.”
    With this in mind, I cannot help but wonder if that experience at the volcano had something to do with what seems to be this trademark of Taymor’s work, and whether it is a conscious or subconscious influence.
    There was another small thing that stood out to me in the article: it mentioned that, as a child, Taymor had seen and been heavily inspired by the work of Peter Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater, a group that I discovered when doing in-class research on the use of masks in modern-day theater.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/22/magazine/the-looking-glass-world-of-julie-taylor.html?pagewanted=all
https://www.biography.com/people/julie-taymor-320722

Semester 1 Reflection (August - Thanksgiving)

I am very glad to have chosen Theater as my IB Group 6 class. I can already notice looking back on our filmed performances from the last three months that I have become more willing to put myself out there on stage without feeling awkward, though I can continue to work on that going forward. Learning all of the different methods to put yourself into the character from our Stanislavski unit has definitely helped me with that, as it allows me to ignore my own hangups and simply act as the character would.

The Brecht unit, though it went in a very different direction from the Stanislavski one, taught me a lesson that is equally as important: the ability of theater to change the world. Realizing that the art you are performing could seriously impact people who could then go out and affect the world certainly puts more pressure on the performers, but it also gives theater an air of distinguished importance, and has motivated me to push myself and take my acting more seriously. While Brecht stressed making characters unsympathetic and keeping the audience from becoming fully immesered in the world of the play so that they would be more likely to pay attention to and later act on the social messages being taught, I feel that having sympathetic characters can help with sending the message in another way; when bad things happen to characters you like because of the unjust system, it makes the viewer emotionally invested in fighting against that system for the sake of the characters. Humans are generally more likely to respond to a crisis if they are shown its direct impact on a human life, after all.

Outside of specific units, having to plan out scenes, adapted or original, with my classmates has increased my appreciation for both directing and cooperation. When you are in charge of setting up the scene, you have to have very significant detail planned out for the actors to make the most out of. You are the one with the most direct control over what message the performance is trying to send, and how the audience should feel. In particular, the scene we adapted from The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Brecht showed both the advantages and disadvantages of props. Having props can not only make a scene more realistic, but also, as they did in our performance, add extra subtle layers to the scene with how the actors interact with them. The downside of props is that you have to keep track of them, making sure that people bring them out when they’re supposed to and that they use the rights ones and, perhaps most importantly, that the props never get in the way of the acting. I will be considering all of these points going into future scenes we do for this class with props.

Lastly, as the main video editor for our class, I’ve been slowly learning about both how to best balance audio so that both the actors and any background music can be heard at the apportioned volumes (plus what kind of music is most fitting for the scene), as well as how important camera positioning is. I hope to continue improving on these skills and the others mentioned above going into the rest of this year and beyond.

How to Do a Brecht Play Right: Review of Cheshire Academy’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”

    I was cautiously optimistic going into Cheshire Academy’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” directed by Marc Aronson. On one hand, I am well acquainted with many of the people who were involved in the production and already knew of their talents. On the other hand, Brecht’s style of play doesn’t lend itself well to a high school performance; wordy with an emphasis on social themes. While I was unable to attend Mr. Aronson’s last Brecht production, “Life of Galileo”, the snippets I heard about it afterwards were not positive, with the major complaint being that it was boring.
    Fortunately, of the many words I could use to describe this performance of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”, ‘boring’ is not one of them. This is mainly due to the actors, all of whom seemed perfectly cast. This play has only a few developed characters but a revolving door of ensemble members, yet the actors were able to make each role stand on its own. David Mathison in particular succeeded in this with his wide range of voices and mannerisms, going from a paranoid cloaked figure speaking in fragmented sentences to a squeaky voiced nobleman to a regal lawyer back to back. Peter Deng was the most emotive member of the cast, especially evident in the first scene where he was always reacting to the others’ actions rather than just sitting there.
    In terms of single roles, Sam Weed was the natural choice to play the motherly Grusha, and I feel that she managed to play up Grusha’s practical nature in the earlier scenes rather than simply portraying her as a naïve, good-hearted girl; she even got a lovely little singing moment when crossing the bridge. However, the performance that surprised me the most was Amalia Gutierrez as the non-singing Singer. Not only did she have moments of sass, like at the very end of the opening scene, and genuine emotion when reciting the inner thoughts of the characters, but she felt much more present in the scenes than you would expect from a Narrator. She would sometimes stand right up next to the actors, occasionally directly interacting with them as with the Governor when he was being led off to his execution, and other times she would be hanging back on the edges of the stage watching the action unfold before her.
    The constant presence of the Singer reminds the audience that, in both the full context of the play itself and our reality, the story being told is just that - a story. This is one of many ways in which the show followed Brechtian principles. The sets were no more complicated than they need to be, and there were practically no attempts to hide the stage crew when they came to move things around. For moments where there were supposed to be a large number of characters on stage, they simply played recordings of teachers reading the lines. Having these disembodied voices of people whom the audience are likely to recognize ends up subtracting from the illusion rather than adding to it, which seems to have been intentional. The opening of the play set this precedent by having a folksy song play while the actors come in stage, and then forcing both them and the audience to wait, silently and patiently, until the song ended.
    Having read the entire play in advance for class, I took note of what changes were made. Due to the size of the cast, some scenes which used to feature four or five random characters were slightly reworked to have the number of characters reduced to two or three, such as when Grusha is initially watching baby Michael at the palace while the others convince her to leave, and the scene with the merchants at the bridge where three characters were condensed to two. Other bits were cut entirely, such as when Grusha tries to stay at the inn, when young Michael is allying with the older children, and the selection of Azdack’s past cases as judge. These cuts were understandable due to the limited cast size, and seeing as the play in this form ended up being two hours long anyway, I can only imagine how long it would have been if they had done everything. Even with these cuts, the story’s major themes, such as justice (Azdack’s corrupt sense of justice, the idea that items go to those who can make the most good out of it).
    The last thing I’d like to note is the placement of the intermission. Rather than being halfway through the play, it occurs later on, right before Azdack’s backstory. By doing this, the play becomes re-framed as two different stories: first, the story of the maid Grusha becoming the mother of the noble child; and second, the story of the illegitimate judge who, through granting Grusha custody over Michael, delivers the moral of the play, that goods should go to those who can make the most out of them. Not only are both these stories made compelling by the excellent performances, but making Azdack essentially a secondary protagonist places an even greater emphasis on the social message, making this performance of “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” a perfect blend of the Brecht and more contemptorary styles of acting. I would drop everything to see this show again if I had the chance.

Scene with Signs Reflection (Excerpt from Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”

    Overall, our excerpt of a scene from “The Caucasian Chalk Circle” worked out even better than I had initially hoped. First of all, though it took us extra time to learn our lines and become comfortable performing the scene, the performances ended up being spot-on. Unfortunately there are moments in the video where, even after drastically raising the volume of the raw video footage and lowering the volume of the background music, it could be difficult to tell what we were saying. In the future, I think that we can all work on speaking louder and more clearly. However, speaking of the music, I personally feel that it added to the atmosphere and tension of the scene, especially the short song used at the end, without making its presence too obvious. Then again, it would likely have felt more Brechtian without the music, even if it ended up feeling slightly more awkward as a consequence.
    The minimalistic set also worked in our favor, as it forces the audience to focus on the content of the scene rather than becoming fully immersed, the mind of effect that Brecht was going for in his plays. In retrospect, the idea of using a bottle for the baby did not work out as well as we had originally envisioned it. While it succeeded in being less sympathetic than an actual baby doll would have been, I can see how any random person watching the scene could take a while to realize what the bottle is meant to represent. If we had planned ahead more, we could have made its purpose more clear. Even the mini label added to the bottle clarifying its role is impossible to read in the video.
    When we started work on this scene, the aspect we put the most thought into was the use of signs. We made most of them double sided both to save posterboard and to add an extra layer of meaning to each one. Watching the video, I see that I personally could have paid more attention to making my sign visible to the audience while performing, but Helen and Youngchen did well in this regard. Helen also pausing the scene to show off the last two signs as she picked them up was a good call in that it both gave the audience time to read them and further contributed to the staged feeling this play is meant to give off.
    The signs all served different purposes: the opening sign sets the tone for the scene and the “Cottage” sign sets the location; the “Losing the Baby” sign states the threat the Corporal presents and what Grusha is primarily concerned about; the sign reading “What is the woman afraid of?” provides the audience with a question to think about, forcing them to lay attention as Brecht would want, and the “Truth or Lie?” sign does the same while also giving the audience a glimpse into Grusha’s thoughts; the sign Grusha hits the Corporal with is covered in phrases that serve as her motivation for her saving the baby; and the “Mother” sign represents Grusha’s accepting of Michael as her own while also answering a question presented by the first sign. Who are the good people? Mothers, for one.