DAI Week Four Part One

Day Sixteen started with Daily Practice with Joe. We got our assignment for the final project, a devised piece, from Ronlin along with some explanation using poems, philosophy, and stories. We worked on painting the masks for the rest of the morning. Nicholette gave a presentation on her class's thesis project from 2010 on how a piece of theater lives (basically how they went about devising). They met for 9 hours a day for 8 weeks in 3 hour blocks. We don't have that kind of time, but she did have some really great advice on how to work, manage time, and meet goals. She emphasized the importance of the working atmosphere, safety, acceptance, and no self-censorship. She talked about personal daemons that are our genius. These daemons follow us around the room and give us our best ideas. They are intuition, the inner child, and the divine. Hers takes the form of Dobby the House Elf. That night, our group (the four cardboard mask people) met to play in the masks and come up with improv scenarios we could play with the next day.

Day Seventeen started with Daily Practice, but this time Joe just told us when to switch activities rather than leading us in every movement. This is so we can devote the sequence to memory and continue Daily Practice on our own back home. Our group did some character work just playing together in the masks. We came up with a short skit involving a villain that took a girl's lollipop then was chased by her father. Since this is what we had, we shared it during the afternoon staff showings. The comments the entire class received included find a way to be inspired by the dynamic mask, inhabit the mask with the whole body, respond and play to the reality of the situation, find clearly articulated actions that drive the piece forward, report to the audience, interruption is important, be clear about the situation, and find the identities of the masks. The film colloquium that night was a showing of MirrorMask. Ronlin emphasized the importance of contextualization not convention in our devised pieces.

Day Eighteen started with Daily Practice and tumbling. Our group played some scenarios under Nicholette's supervision. We worked on anti-mask where the character suddenly becomes something very different from what it was. We nailed down a narrative structure in our afternoon session. We settled on a hunting show as the proposal for our piece. We met again in the evening to play through the structure a few times.

Enjoy the Day,
Brandon Brockshus