Pluridisciplinar project

Hi, artists!

In this entry I want to reflect on a very interesting project we did in which we had to unite music and visual arts. In our seminar, we decided not to do something as a big group but as small groups. Our theme was the different styles of films there are (comedies, thrillers...). Our group had to perform a thriller. We decided to tell a story like in a theatre. There was a party, then a murder, then an investigation and finally...

SPOILER

The murderer was caught.

Our idea was, I think, very ambitious for the little resources we had. The first idea was to do a dance but at the time of the truth, nobody of our group wanted to dance so we had to reduce our visual art in the performance, the creation of a "wall" and the "detective's hat" and the use of lights (moving them faster when the music was faster...).

It seems like a good idea, doesn't it? Well, it did not go as expected. I think that we all, as a group, were not that happy about the result.

What happened?

1. The room was not dark enough for our lights at that hour (we were the first group to perform). We did not have this into account.

2. The first sound the computer had to reproduce stopped and in the next ones something had happened to the volume. Maybe we turned it down without realising it. This made that in one moment, one of the actors did not know that it was already time for her to do her act.

3. There were not walls like in the theatre, so in the end when we wanted to project something, everybody saw a person going there.

4. We tried to make sense to the fact of turning off and on the lights but there was a moment in which the public got confused.

5. Problems in the group. There was a member that did not come to any of the rehearsals. She was one of the main characters. We thought that she would come at least at the last rehearsal, but she did not and we used the last day in order to change the performance. Somebody else had to play that part and we did not have anybody that could do specifically the checking of the light and/or the sound as we planned during all the sessions. She did not participate the day we had to put this into practice because we told her that she could not do it without having done any rehearsal. She was going through a bad time, but all we asked her was to come at least at the last rehearsal, because this is not a project you can do without the others. It was very sad because at the beginning we were all really excited about this project, but it did not end well.

What can we learn from this?

EVERYTHING!!!!

If something does not go well, we can reflect on what happened like we have done and avoid this in the future. Also, watching the other groups was very useful for us to get ideas for a future performance. Maybe with a more simple idea this could work better in the future. We have to have into account that while performing we had to play instruments in direct! This makes it harder and I would have liked for us as a seminar to work together, but the other groups did not want this, so a simple idea would have been definitely better. But you only learn by making mistakes.

We finally did a cover in which we wanted to express the story we had performed: Detective Scarlet solving out a murder! And we added the curtains in order to reflect this "performance" we did, as this was the cover for a film you would see in the cinema or in the theatre.

This is the final video with the cover and our act that day:

And this is the cover we created:

And these are the hat and the wall created for the performance: