Too well described...

Last Wednesday our English class had a sweet trip to New York Broad Way. Since, it was the first time that I visited Manhattan after I came to this school, and my girl friend was also accompanying, I was extremely excited. The show that we watched was "Curious incident of the dog in the night time". The play was basically about a boy who has an autism. The boy tries to find the person who killed a dog, which leads him to find his mom who left him when he was young. In the first half, most of the story happens in the boy's home town but the second half was about the boy's journey to find his mom which lives in London.

 The biggest thing that caught my attention was staging. They used a lot of weird sound effects such as siren sounds and electronic sounds. Purpose of the sound effects was to describe the characteristic of autistic individual. People who are affected by autism has great ability of visualization, but also has poor hearing ability. The sound effects that they used perfectly expressed how autistic feel when they hear things. Also, the lightening was very captivative and splendid. It made me to be speechless. The other thing that I was so interested was the cool props. The whole floor was built up by the tiles which could be opened, closed, and go down.

 This show changed my opinions of  autism or those people whose actions are weird. I used to keep away from those people, as if they could hurt me. But the show described the life of autist so well. The sound effect, lightening, blocking, choreography, acting, and the way how author told the story strongly encouraged me to focus on the play and helped me to understand the mystery of the human brain. Although the show had lots of interesting and funny elements, topic was still heavy.

I suppose that the show affected the audiences in all different ways. For me, before I got into the theater, I was just glad about watching a Broad Way play with Charlotte which is huge fan of Theatre. During the show, however, there were a lot of scenes that reminded some of my personal memories which made me extremely nervous and uncomfortable in the theater. Fortunately, she recognized that I was having hard time just sitting there down and watching it. I sincerely appreciated that she hold my cold hands and helped me to release my tension. After the show, I was exhausted and surprised because of the too well described play. I would say this play is a awesome show, but I won't recommend it to people who already know and understand about an autism. You will feel extreme pain in your brain, heart, or both for 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Still have a long way to go

In this comedy scene project, I worked with William. We chose our scene in the TV show "how I met your mother". Since both William and I love the TV show, we could easily decide our scene for the comedy project. So, we chose the dialogue between Ted and Barney which are the two of the main characters. We choose this scene because o two main reasons. The first one is because that these two characters have a similar connection like I have with William. The second one is that we never worked on comedy scene with each other before, and we thought this might be the perfect scene to try.

There were several things that we focused on during the project. The first one is creating the connection based on the characters' relationship. For example, Ted and Barney are great friends and they know everything about each other. In the scene, Ted tells the secret that barney is dating a stripper to other friends even he promised not to tell which makes their relationship and scene so funny. As acting Barney, I had some places where I had to change my voice to convince Ted to put on the brobe and promise to keep my secret. So I worked a lot on those voice change to make the whole scene funnier. I used really strong, serious, and low voice for most of the time when I was doing the ritual . However, I changed it to a high and light voice when I was talking to him about my situations my honest feeling and thoughts. Also, for my individual character development, I wrote the notes on the every single lines to tell myself which part I should use my higher or lower voice, louder or quieter voice like a music sheet. It was the first time that I used this strategy, and I thought this strategy is going to come our better if I also write details about my movement.

I was quite disappointed at myself during working on this project. Firstly, although William and I have decided the scene before the spring break so that we could have a lot of time to practice, I was still struggling with the memorization of the lines until the day we were filming. I am regretting that I haven't practiced more and come up with more ideas, but I am glad that I could have a lot of conversation about acting with William. I have to confess that I didn't work enough on my lines which effected my final video. However, it was also a great experience and practice to improve my acting skills, and I will work harder next time, so I will be 100% ready to take the video with all my lines!

http://youtu.be/JfVNAG0mDx4