assessment 3

Assessment 3

1. According to Ruth Zaporah, on her book Action Theater, “Practice makes perfect. When we say this, we mean that when we practice a skill, piano playing, for instance, we become more skilled. We get better and better as we aim for perfection.”
I strongly agree and disagree with such comment. It is clear that physically speaking the more practice you have, the better and smoother the movement becomes, also practice helps to open your horizont of skills, giving you a bigger range of moves.
But when it comes to emotion, I disagree with this quote.
During the final stages of the process, in which our company has gone through was clear the loss of emotional attachment to the piece. The more the company practiced the physicallity the more mechanical it got and the more emotions were lost.
Practicing the skills and making the movements perfect worked very well, but as a performer was hard to not become mechanical when it came to the emotional part.
I was moving without a purpose, I couldn´t feel the conection between movement and feelings anymore. It was then, when I realised that just developing physical skills was not enough, I needed to dive into the most complex and darkest feelings of my character and find again the purpose of moving.
I needed to make my character mature, not just physically speaking, but emotionaly as well; and not just me, but most of the company members had to go through the same journey to find purpose again.


2. The first performance clearly showed that the company was physically prepared, no big mistakes, all movements very controlled, a very consistent performance although a few changes needed to be made, but still, the performers worked well around the small mistakes and barriers.
Is consistence another word for good performance? The answer is no.
The performance was well structured, and that is what consistent means. The first performance was far from good, physically a few mistakes were done and a few wrong choices on stage were made.
The audience couldn´t notice any physical mistakes, but did they notice how mechanical it was? Did the audience noticed the lack of emotional attachement to the piece? Emotions, where were the emotions?
This all could be related to the lack of concentration, too much talking, too many jokes backstage and loss of focus. Performers were simply not taking their own piece seriously.
Clearly this afects all the performers in a sense, if the performer gives a impulse and don´t get the same level of reaction back it looses its concentration and focus easely.
As a performer, the first performance was the most mechanical performance I had done in Fractal, I felt nothing, I was moving because I needed to, I was more frustrated than ever.
For the second performance the performers were more focused and willing to go deep into the world of fractal and give to the audience a real emotional impression.
Defenetely the second performance was more commited than the first one, the level of focus and concetration was absolutely fantastic. On the backstage the noise was almost zero, performers were ready to go on stage at any minute, it was possible to feel to mood building up as all the performers were getting ready to go on stage.
As one of the performers I could say that the level of focus of the company on the second performance helped me completely to finaly find the right emotional balance on my piece with Andrew and Silvia. It was a long search, i was always feeling like i was being untrue to my charaters feelings, reacting in a completely wrong way, and i was right, my reactions were wrong and on the second performance i could finaly have enough support from my colleges to find the last piece of my puzzle.
Then the third and last performance. The best peformance of the three, and also the most mature one.
The second show gave bases to make the third one what it was.
Of course that would be wrong to say that the performance was perfect, because obviasly it was not, but we can say that the audience experienced all the performance as it should, visually and emotionaly.

3. The blog is defenentely a great idea. Sharing ideas and thoughts is the best way for self improvement, also the blog was very usefull in moments of great stress within the company members and the only way in which they could express themselves.