IB exam

For the IB exam, I didn't prepare enough to take an exam. First, shamefully I didn't complete the book "Whale rider". I only watched a movie and read some parts of the book that we talked about in the class. So, when I was taking the exam, I actually had no idea what I was writing. I spent 30 minutes to read a book during the test. It was very embarrassing experience to just sit there down and stare at the questions without coming up with any ideas. Eventually, I chose one question and tried to answer it, but my point was totally off from the question. I described the scene when Kahu goes into the ocean to reach to whales and finally she rides those whales and grand father realizes that Kahu is the true leader of the tribe. I didn't even complete it. I only wrote one and half pages about when Kahu was trying to approach to the whales and ended up with couple of lines that describes when Kahu actually rides the whale because I was out of time. 

The second day's exam was even worse. My teacher recommended us to memorize two poems from each of two poets, so that we could bring them up during the test and answer the questions. However, I.. . didn't memorize any of them. I honestly don't know why I didn't or couldn't do the works that my English teacher told me to do. Even when I had extra review session with her, I was just starring at the poems and not thinking anything. Thus, when I was taking the exam, I couldn't write a single word until most of the time passed. I literally wrote three sentences about "Because I could not stop for Death" and handed it. 

I really don't understand my behavior in past few weeks. I was totally out of my mind and  the book and the poems were not coming into my brain. I handed several quizzes without writing any single word. I felt so sorry and shamed to my teacher, but my mind was not on working.

Notes

Emily Dickinson
Death

Immortality, civility, eternity
Slant rhyme

First stanza
Death-, ourselves-

Second stanza
He knew no haste
My labor and my leisure too
Away, civility

Third stanza
We passed the ×3
School, children
Recess, Ring
Gazing grain, setting sun

Fourth stanza
Gossamer, Gown
Tippet, Tulle
Chill, Tulle

Fifth stanza
Ground, ground

Sixth stanza
Horse's Heads
Day, Eternity

Key words
Death, immortality, eternity, civility, we

Are black and white opposite?

Emily Dickinson – Death

“Poets often withhold certitude, which can at the same time empower readers to think creatively.”

My favorite part of literature is poetry. It is because I hate reading and it takes extremely long time for me to read novel. However, since I am a musician, I love to read lyrics of songs. As a singer, I think delivery of the lyrics is one of the most important part of performing. To deliver it properly, singers need to put a lot of time and effort to understand the lyrics. It might be impossible to fully understand the message of author. But, readers can receive the literature and understand it in their own way.

Firstly, death is the biggest theme of this poem. Emily Dickinson mentioned a lot about characteristic of death. Personification of death encourages readers to think about characteristic of death which most of people usually don't think about too much. Ironically, the other biggest theme in the poem is life which is usually considered as an opposite idea of death. By combining the characteristics of those two opposite ideas, it encourages readers to think about the idea which is important but is avoided by people to be thought about.

There are a lot of poems and lyrics that often withhold certitude. It is because human can never understand others' thought perfectly. So, the smart poets know the fact and try to write their ideas that they want to speak out to the world in the most effective way. In my opinion, that is why readers feel like poets often withhold certitude. Also, themes of poems always exist in somewhere in every individual's life. People just forget about things that are not related to them at the moment or are not considered as important part. And those small ideas that authors mention stick into readers brain and makes it to work in different way, which causes the thing called creativity.

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 either your brain or heart for 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Time to go back to a student from an actor

We played "Once On This Island" for the winter musical in Cheshire Academy. This musical is an adaption of a novel called My Love My Love by Rosa Guy. I was one of the member in the casts and I played Daniel. Daniel is one of the main characters in the musical. For me, it was really hard to play Daniel because I have never done romantic actings before and it was my first time acting on the stage. So I had been getting too much stress and pressure before the show. However, fortunately the show went pretty well. Among the entire music in the musical, my favorite song was "Pray". Even though I lay down on the floor for the entire song and pretend to sleep, I could feel every actor's energy from the song and a lot of audiences told me they got goose bumps by that song. 

When I first got a script of the musical and watched the entire performance on the youtube, I was actually so confused. Before I read the script and watched it, I was just excited about the fact that I got the male leading role. However, after I realized that I need to be a jerk and the time of my singing part is less then the time of laying down on the ground and driving, I was disconcerted and disappointed. It took quite a lot of time and effort to get rid of those emotions and focus on my role. I think this show was generally very interesting and well fitted in our black box theater. First of all, I think the four gods were very well described and each characters were very well cast. Maggie's voice expressed the Agwe's dignity, Abigail's vibrant performance expressed characteristic of Asaka, Charlotte's intensity and moderation expressed the Erzulie's beauty, and Gianna's acting and make up perfectly expressed the Papa ge's creepiness. Also, I think the actors who had peasant and rich roles did a great job to express their character. Even though I had little bit of dissatisfaction of my role and the ending, I would say the play was very interesting and beautiful.

Two months of preparing for this musical "Once on this island" was very meaningful time for me because a lot of things were new experience to me and I felt those time healed my scars from my past. Firstly, this was my first performance that I acted on the stage. When I was in Korea, I once dreamed to be an actor and learned acting but things didn't go well because of my back problem. Eventually, I needed to give up everything that I sincerely desired and had a hard time forgetting everything. So, I truly appreciate this chance that I could be on the stage and work with everyone for the performance. I needed to answer the question "what was your favorite memory during the rehearsal?" for information about me that was gonna be hanging on the wall with my photo. I answered "when I wear the microphone" because wearing microphone was totally new thing and somehow I felt wearing microphone was kind of funny. However, my real answer that I hid in my heart was "every time when I open the black box door". It's really hard to explain that feeling but I always got emotional and excited when I opened the black box door and stepped into the black box. However, that doesn't mean I only had easy and joyful time in the black box. Honestly, there were several times that I wanted to storm out of the black box during the rehearsal or just skip the rehearsal and not show up. When Ms.Digiacomo yelled at me although when I was trying really hard, when I could imagine my history grade was falling down because of 4 hours rehearsals, when my partners attitude, words, and actions annoyed me and drove me crazy, when I needed to lay down on the cold, hard black box floor for more than 30 minutes, and when I could never get the one single note for my duet song and practiced it like for a hundred of times, I really wanted to kick the door and run away from the black box. I actually don't know how I handled those hard time and have good feelings and memories about everything that happened in the past two months. The truth is I learned a lot of new things that I haven't learned in my life before and became a little bit bigger person than couple months ago. One thing that I really felt bad for everyone was even though I was the oldest kid among the students, I couldn't fulfill the role of it because of bunch of my excuses. For the next year's musical, I hope I can be a person who can embrace the group and contribute to make a better team.

 

The story of two different wolrds

The novel that our group adapted to a new version is "my love, my love" by Rosa Guy. The novel is basically about a tragic destiny of peasant girl "Ti moune" and her star crossed love story. Ti moune's tragedy begins when she finds out Daniel crushed in his car in the forest. She falls in love with the rich boy Daniel at first sight which she is not supposed to desire. At the beginning, she only cares about the boy's well being. However at the last part, her desire toward Daniel becomes too huge so that she couldn't handle. Although she has been grown up in the peasant village, since she was adopted by her parents, there are a lot of part that shows Ti moune's difference from other peasants. She always had the desire and curiosity about outside world of the peasant village and the book emphasized that desire and curiosity as the cause of her death. But also, her death can be interpreted as a true freedom because of the butterflies that come out from her body after she dies.

In the scene that our group reinterpreted, we emphasized the contrast between rich and poor. Our group didn't agree with how the book described that her death was her fault. So, we decided to make the rich as villain. In the book, Daniel actually loves Ti moune but he had no choice but to chooses his fiance "Andrea" because he is in the situation that he can't change or do anything with. That characteristic reduces Daniel's fault for Ti moune's death in the book, so we gave a slight change to Daniel's characteristic. We changed his character from indecisive young man to womanizer playboy so that we can show how the rich ruins the peasants which also represents the strong and the weak. To show the extreme contrast we used music as the biggest source. Fortunately, since our group had amazing musicians, we used ukulele for the peasant's side and piano for the rich side.

To act a Daniel, my key point was showing the different attitude between in front of Ti moune and his father Gabriel. I acted very gentle and sweet to Ti moune but I showed Daniel's real personality which is a playboy who never thinks about girls seriously in the conversation with father.

 

For the staging, we put couch and piano on the left side of the stage which represents rich side and we put ukulele and some cushion on the right side of the stage. Our scene starts from the narrator standing middle of the stage introducing the play. Then we perform peasant side and rich side in an order.

 

 

Being an actor

Our group's interpretation is mostly based on the original text. Instead of creating whole new settings, we inserted few things to emphasize the contrast between rich and poor. First thing that we used to describe the contrast was music. Since our group has wonderful musicians, music was the first source that we came up with. James who plays Tonton plays ukulele which represents poor side and Ben who plays Gabriel plays piano which represents rich side. More than only playing those instruments, we also used music in our lines. While peasants concern about their daily survival, riches have conversation about old classical music which also show extreme contrast. Also, we focused on creating the characteristic of riches. Since the original text really didn't describe the riches, we needed to imagine what riches talk about and make the personalities up. And that is where we came up with Daniel's character which is really different from original Daniel's character.
 We tried to make Daniel as mean character as we could so audience can feel that rich actually destroyed poor. Original text is more focused on Desiree's desire. Story begins with her own desire and ends up to the tragedy which is result of her desire. However, we didn't really agree with the ending and wanted more realistic and critical ending. So, we started our scene with showing the contrast and led to the tragedy which is all caused by riches. Our goal is to make audience feel this story is about how cruel the rich are, not a naive peasant girl's sad love story.

 There are a lot of personal challenges for me to do this project. The biggest issue is acting out our performance for 20 minutes and keeping our energy which also requires the perfect memorization of lines. Since all of our group members never had an experience of performing on the stage for 20 minutes and are not professional actors, it is really challenging to be an actor who can deliver what author meant to show. To do so, first, we all need to memorize the lines perfectly which is really challenging work for me. Secondly, we need to create and put emotions in the lines and control them. Even if I got that second step, it is extremely difficult to recall and expose those same level of emotions every time when we perform. I think it is because my personal level of energy changes by what happened to me on that day in real life, but I still need to express appointed amount of energy when I perform. And I think that is one of the most important skill that is required to actors. Also, to make our scene better, actors need to create more chemistry with each other and better teamwork which we are not really good at yet. Ben and I are still focusing on remembering our lines when we practice on the stage. As soon as we are completely done with lines, we are going to work on our emotions and character.