My, my, things progress fast.

Swinburne continues to be absolutely fantastic. I came for the education, and to develop industry contacts, but what I’ve found is that the best thing about the course is spending 7 hours a day with some really talented and interesting people. Classmates and teachers alike are friendly and approachable and just really fun to be around and learn from.

The education side of things just doesn’t slow down in this course! I’m just absolutely sucking down information about all sorts of things, and in many cases consolidating knowledge that I already have about theatre and acting and writing and everything. People complain that movement class is repeating the same lessons over and over, but the point is to make everything we learn completely habitual. A drama course would have even more of that stuff. It’s about being aware of your own body and other bodies. It’s not a common thing, but it’s something that actors have to be able to do instinctively. It’s a shame that we get so little time for it in amongst all the other stuff we’re learning.

The good news is everything else we’re learning is interesting and useful. The sound and lighting components are coming pretty easily to me since I have some prior experience. Scriptwriting is absolutely fascinating and really helps me see the merits and flaws in my own writing. The improv and acting classes are lots of fun and also illuminate for me what I’m doing right and wrong. Marketing and publicity is incredibly useful and I’m already considering how it has worked in the context of other shows I’ve been involved with. I honestly feel like the course would be incomplete without any of these elements.

And perhaps because we’re rushing through the education at near-light speed, our personal relationships are developing at least as fast. But that’s a story for another time.

And what a week!

We’ve confirmed that one of our classmates has officially dropped out. Technically that makes two because there was one person of the roll that never made it to any classes ever, including orientation. Anyway the girl who dropped out has at several clones at Swinnie so she’s not really forgotten. One of them is her best friend. So that makes a kinda sense. It’s still creepy how similar they look.

They’re saying at least ten of us will drop out before next year. I can’t think of ten people who wouldn’t commit to the year. It’s tough because when I think of it I can only really imagine the people who I haven’t made good friends with, which is a bit rude because there’s no reason the people I like are more likely to stay. It’s hard to predict. Like I think there are a couple of people who aren’t 100% sure that this course will take them where they want to go but they might just stick around because they may as well. And people might drop out for completely unlikely reasons like breaking both their arms. True story.

Best thing of the week was building a box. I was in a group with one of the more timid girly girls in the class and at the start she was a bit afraid of the power drill but by the end she was more aggressive with the thing than I was. It was funny and cute to see her get empowered by the thing once she was comfortable with it.

We’re pretty much sure we’re killing our publicity teacher. She’s not a real teacher so she can’t handle us really and she bitches about us constantly. Completely the wrong way to handle a class full of wannabe actors.

Anyway on the whole week two went pretty quick. We start building our masks on Monday and I can’t wait!

I always just assume that this blog has absolutely no visitors, ever, which makes me really pathetic at maintaining it because what’s the point of writing to an audience of nobody? I guess I realise that I have a few friends who check back on occasion, but I always forget that this thing gets catalogued by most of the major search engines and people may just find it searching for random info on something I’ve mentioned in passing.

Anyway a couple weeks ago I installed the new version of reinvigorate, which was already a fantastic bit of web traffic analysis software and has gotten even slicker now. Anyway because I don’t expect there to be any useful data I only just checked it for the first time today and one of the searches that brought someone here was “how to direct the importance of being earnest”, a subject I suddenly realise I haven’t commented on at all.

So yeah, I directed a production of Earnest for La Trobe Student Theatre last year, and maybe I might have a few insights that someone looking for info about it would find useful. This is also a chance for me to evaluate my own performance in my role. Bear in mind I was a volunteer director of a volunteer student production with all the idiosyncrasies that implies. Things like low budget, keen but sometimes inexperienced cast, really really crappy performance space and etc. all informed many of the decisions that I made as a director. I won’t get into the hiccups and hurdles I experienced or else I’d go on all day.

Firstly, the script. I pulled a free transcript off Project Gutenberg, because having it in digital format allowed me to edit it to my heart’s content. Editing was strictly necessary. The original script has numerous dated references. It’s important to remember much of the humour of this play comes from the hypocrisy of the upper classes represented within it and part of that is how fashion rather than practicality is highly esteemed. The upshot being there are a couple of references to things that were fashionable at the time it was written that won’t make any kind of sense nowadays, depending on where in the world you’re performing. So make changes. Make cuts. I’d advise against additions. Anachronisms can be cute but don’t overdo it - you’ll piss people off.

There’s plenty of analysis and such about how many gay references there are in this play. They can be interesting but ultimately only people who know about that background will care if you play up that aspect. So if you’re not targeting a queer audience then don’t concern yourself with those details. Having said that, it is a quite viciously cynical play when it comes to the subject of romance, and you should definitely highlight those aspects. It’s basically unavoidable if you want to derive any humour out of it at all. There are other themes and things but this isn’t a study guide. Look it up elsewhere.

Our set was minimal, as were our costumes. Cluttered set and costume design is distracting, in my opinion. If you can’t stage your play in a genuine late Victorian era room and thus transport the audience completely in time and space, then you’re better off implying the period with tasteful accessories. Theatre is different to film in that theatre audiences are asked to engage their imagination. That’s what makes theatre worth seeing. It’s what makes more abstract forms of theatre like puppetry and mime compelling. If you do all the work for them, they may as well watch the movie.

On the subject of accents, in Australia our upper class accent sounds about British enough to satisfy myself as a director, and for an amateur production that’s about all anyone will expect. I have a personal grudge against accents that aren’t natural to actors, as I find it can cause their performance in general to suffer. A fair case can be made for this play requiring genuine British accents, but in our case we had little time as it was and no time whatsoever to devote to accent training of any depth. If you want British accents, get British actors.

A word about staging. Our production used a kind of ringside staging, with audience seated on four sides of a square. For various reasons this turned out to be a difficult decision to live with. Nobody including myself had any experience with theatre in the round. Also the theatre space we used was small and had a low ceiling, which made lighting complicated, especially given that we didn’t have nearly enough lights anyway. Despite those problems there were few complaints from audience members, and the overall (and intended) effect was to give the audience a feeling that they were in a room with the characters rather than outside the room watching through a fourth wall, thus heightening the sense of intimacy. It’s a good play to do that with, but in execution in our case it wasn’t ideal.

Overall it was very much an actor-focussed rendition, highlighting the interplay and relationship between Algernon and Jack and their respective lovers. That was my vision from the beginning of the process, and one that hopefully carried through into the performance.

The catalyst for this particular post is a rather lengthy discussion about a comic book. The book in question is a recent relaunch of an old title featuring a new title character - a not unusual set of circumstances in a world of transient super powers - written by a female writer whose work I know in passing (She writes for DC, I’m a Marvel Zombie, Avril couldn’t make it any more obvious). Having not hated the previous work of hers that I’m acquainted with, it interested me to find out that Gail Simone’s New Atom is being painted as an Asian American.

It’s unfortunate in many ways that my first exposure to this character is this review. It’s biased quite heavily against the character apparently for no other reason than the writer isn’t Asian and doesn’t understand us, man. Anyway Gail leaps into the fray and is misunderstood herself, and the debate quickly goes a little bit nuts.

The most offensive this to me, as an Australian Born Filipino, is the comment that reads “Just treat the character as you would a average white heterosexual american male and get rid of the unneccessary racial overtunes in the writing.”

That’s someone suggesting the best way to portray a character of Asian descent is to… pretend he’s not Asian? From what I know about the character, he was born and raised in Hong Kong, his father and himself are scientists therefore he regularly corresponds with Americans and speaks fluent American English. Again: Pretend he’s not Asian! Draw him Asian but write him American! Then he’ll truly be Asian-American!

Um. What the fuck?

This is a problem for me because it’s such a simplistic way of describing a very, very complex way of life. This is something that has plagued me as I’ve tried to build an identity for myself. I have to start from scratch in many ways because I don’t fit in a box that exists on any shelf at the Ethnicity Store. I’m Australian. I’m Filipino. My mind’s Australian. My body’s Filipino. I don’t belong in Australia! I don’t belong in the Philippines! My skin’s black, my eyes are slanted, my brain’s white trash! Draw me Asian and write me Australian. Who the fuck am I, really? Where am I from? I’m from Melbourne! No where am I from. Oh, my parents are from the Philippines. Oh I thought so but I thought I’d better ask. Yeah, right, no wuckers.

I’ll never be you. You fair haired, white skinned Austeraaaaayans whose parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ parents were fresh off the boat once too. I’ll never be them who speak gobbledigook and sing and dance and exploit the underclass for labour and entertainment. I don’t even bridge the gap effectively because I’m not quite enough of either. I speak English with a Flip accent in the Philippines. How mental is that? Can’t even be a fake Aussie when I’m “home”! Can’t be a fake local cos I don’t know the language. In Australia can’t be a fake Aussie cos my skin’s not right. Can’t be a fake FOB cos my voice ain’t right. In all that mess somewhere there’s a real me but damned if I know what race he is.

Draw him Asian and write him American. You could do that but people would still complain. Because in their heads his R’s and L’s aren’t quite right. It’s the writer’s fault he’s got an accent! Shut the fuck up. The writer isn’t reading the words off the page. Who is? That’s right, you, you racist son of a bitch. Get off your high horse.

I probably wouldn’t agree with Gail’s characterisation of this Hong Kong born immigrant - sounds too comfortably American to me - but I just as strongly disagree with anyone who thinks the solution is to de-ethnicise him completely. Even to a 2nd or 3rd generation immigrant, our heritage is something that we can’t escape… from or to.

In an effort to motivate myself into making this blogspace at least somewhat entertaining and useful, if only for my own self, I’m going to try something new.

I’m making a commitment to learning new things.

Here’s the gameplan: I’ve got the Wikipedia random link bookmarked in FireFox. When I’m bored (as I often am) I’ll hit that link as many times as it takes to get to an article that qualifies for participation in my own personal Wikiducation. What qualifies is a nebulous matter, which I’ll define more clearly at a later date. Then after reading up on whatever subject (and possibly sinking into the bottomless well of related topics), I’ll write up a summary and some other commentary about it and whatever else the article inspires.

Let’s see how long I can keep this up. First one is Ceres (mythology). We’re talking the goddess of Roman mythology, whose purpose in the pantheon is easy to recall since we get the word “cereal” from her name. She is, of course, a Roman bastardisation of a Greek goddess, in this case Demeter.

What I found interesting about the article was the revelation that the Greek pantheon was not all immediately co-opted by the Romans. For instance, it says that “The Romans adopted Ceres in 496 BC during a devastating famine”, implying that Romans picked and chose what gods they required from the Greeks as and when it became necessary. I find this fascinating, given the current popularity amongst certain Westerners to adopt Eastern philosophy and religion in bits and pieces and incorporating such into their current world view. Apparently such a practice has historical precedent.

The relationship between Rome and Greece of antiquity is, of course, fascinating in and of itself. Rome nominally conquered Greece, Greek land was occupied by Roman colonists and so on, possibly dominating by virtue of their well organised governing body. Culturally, on the other hand, Greece was far superior, the upshot being that the politically dominant country ended up emulating it’s subordinates lifestyle to the extent that the original Roman religious system (one based not on mythology but on complex interrelations between gods and men) was superseded and largely forgotten. Not to mention the adoption of arts, architecture, philosophy, literature and ultimately (amongst ruling classes at least) language. Greece was arguably the backbone of the Roman Empire.

This sort of thing isn’t even all that uncommon, it’s just harder to identify in the modern era. Take cinema, for example. Like it or not, watching film is a learned ability, there are many conventions that classic cinema follows from shot structure to plotting to framing the mise-en-scene. They were all established by early Hollywood obviously, based on theatrical conventions. There are examples of early Japanese cinema that didn’t follow the same conventions. The first time you see it, it’s a little bit jarring and off-putting. Amateur cinema can also exhibit the same “mistakes”. But it’s just because we’re so used to the classic form. If the first American screen directors had chosen to do things a little bit differently, we might be reading a whole different screen language. Current Japanese cinema no longer has those quirks.

The persistence of Bollywood cinema is a tribute to the strength of that culture, and there are even Western directors that exploit Bollywood conventions. Moulin Rouge is a film directed by an Australian set in France starring American, British and Australian actors, but there are sequences that are undeniably Bollywood influenced.

Now that I’ve deviated about as far as possible away from the original subject, I’m going to stop. I really hope not all of these posts turn out like this.

So I’m in Manila for the last day before heading off to Boracay - an unbelievably beautiful beach resort place - so I thought I’d check in here before (probably) losing contact with the rest of the world for a week.

The weather here is nice and mild. I expected it to be stinking hot because that’s what I remember from the last times I was here. But it’s actually pretty pleasant. The smog isn’t as thick as I remember either, but that’ll change after the New Years fireworks tonight.

We’ve spent maybe a quarter of our waking hours here driving around places. Traffic in Manila is… an experience. Average speed on a cheap tollway is like 60 km/h in good traffic. People don’t seem to pay attention to cars around them but they notice you if you honk so there’s pretty much constant honking everywhere you go. You get used to it.

The markets are worse. They’re packed and smelly and full of fake shit. Not fake poos, fake goods for sale. Although you’d probably find fake poos if you looked. We’ve spent some time there but honestly there isn’t a lot worth buying. Even at outrageous discounts. But a lot of the genuine stuff that you see in proper stores have an alright discount from western prices so shopping here is still good.

I’ve been hanging with my cousin Kosho. He’s a funny guy and laughs as much and as hard at the same things I laugh at so it’s a lot of fun. Also his dad played Jesus in what I found out last night was the world premiere of Jesus Christ Superstar back in ‘71. Filippino bootleggers got a copy of the score and someone decided to put on the show. Beat Broadway by a month. He’s still got an amazing voice.

Anyway I’m off. Everyone have an awesome and safe New Years celebration!

I think I’ve maintained radio silence on this blog long enough that nobody expects that I’ll update it, which makes it safe(r) to bitch about shit. The MySpace smokescreen I’ve got totally helps too. Nothing easier than being a coward on the internet.

Just to get a little meta before getting to the actual point, I guess it’s kinda weird that I feel the need to post this online at all, when I’m effectively hoping nobody will see it anyway. But a strange part of me thinks that putting it online makes it more real in some way. Like it passes some validation process just by existing in a shared space. That’s an interesting topic that I’ll forget about exploring later.

Anyway the meat of this post concerns theatre. I just got back from an (at best) ordinary production of Cosi, a famous Aussie comedy. It was an amateur youth theatre company, and the last production of theirs that I saw didn’t dazzle me, so to be honest I wasn’t expecting much.

Now they say in a creative field there can be no wrongdoing. It’s not true in theatre. Direction without vision is wrong. Lack of direction is wrong. Overdirection is wrong. I’ve personally been guilty of at least two out of three of those. The main problem with this particular production was an obvious and profound lack of coherency in the performances. It was like watching a group of individual actors who had rehearsed the same play with different companies and tried to throw it all together. It was surreal.

I don’t believe there was any serious gap between each actor in terms of talent, there was just an overbearing sense that none of them had really been told to do anything and each of them had dealt with that in their own way. Some actors flourish when given freedom. Others fall back on routine gestures. Some simply flounder. I saw the whole range tonight. But the bigger sin was the sense that each actor was performing alone despite the ensemble cast around them. If a play is going to tank I prefer to see everyone go down together in a blaze of glory. And I find that a team of actors working together on stage put together a more interesting performance at any rate even if they don’t individually have incredible talent or skill.

One last thing I want to note here, and this is probably more a matter of preference than anything else. It is regrettably necessary on occasion for sets to change during any given production. There are plenty of ways to go about this chore, and probably the least interesting is the current amateur standard of dimming the lights to black or near-black and changing the set while music plays. I think many young directors (and again, myself included) don’t realise there are better ways to do this ranging from a very Brechtian method of allowing the actors to do the duty with lights up, to more creative illusionist inspired methods of distracting the audience while the set changes. The best set changes I’ve ever seen were in Bell Shakespeare Company’s A Comedy of Errors, which featured an illusionist doing cheap and easy magic tricks while the set changed behind him. It was a remarkable example of two misdirections in one - first your eyes are on the trick instead of the set change, and then within the trick you’re distracted from the true nature of its magic

In Cosi almost every set change was used as an opportunity for a costume change as well. I’m not strictly opposed to costume changes, but each one added seconds of black empty space without really having a noticeable impact on the production. If there was momentum to be lost in the pace of the dialogue (which there wasn’t), that much darkness may well have killed it. The costumes in this case were simply so mundane and so frequently changed that by the end it was difficult to care about what anyone was wearing, even when they came out wearing period dresses.

All told, Cosi can be thanked for showing me the most extreme consequences of mistakes I’ve made in the past. It’s sometimes important to see the worst of things to gain insight into what makes them so bad. I’m glad I was exposed to it, but I hope I don’t have to suffer through anything like it again.

I’m between theatre projects so I can update my blog again. Ha!

Actually that’s a lie. I’m meant to be writing a play so I’m updating my blog again. HA HA! That’s even worse!

There’s are arseloads of happenings that I could report, but I haven’t the time nor inclination to do so. Earnest went alright, all told. I’m fairly certain The ST made a profit off it in the end. That’s the bottom line really. The production itself, some things worked, others didn’t. That’s what student theatre’s all about really. Learning process. I definitely learned.

Sucks that I’m leaving it next year. I’m gonna miss people. Not that I can’t keep in contact with them, but experience tells me that I won’t because I’m a jerk like that. Seriously of all my MHS friends I’m still in regular contact with three of them, and they weren’t all what I would’ve called my best friends in school.

I caught myself getting indignant at a magazine editor who suggested that comic books aren’t deserving of the same prizes that novels are entitled to. It just annoyed me because it was clear that the dude not only hadn’t read the book in question, but also hadn’t read a single literary comic book in his life. Comics are split into genre’s same as any other medium. When you talk about comic books it’s easy to call to mind the X-Men. Harder to think of From Hell or Pride of Baghdad.

A few weeks ago I argued that comics don’t belong to the category of Pop Culture, because so few people actually read them. It’s fair to say that comic book characters belong to pop culture, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing. There’s a difference between knowing who Batman is and reading an issue of Detective Comics. I consider it UnPop Culture. Not quite anti-establishment enough to be fringe culture but not prolific enough to be popular culture. I’d actually consider most fictional novels to belong to the same category. Funny that.

Wow, I do still know my password! Fancy that.

So I got here to uni like two hours early hoping to speak to someone about something. Turns out people expect to be told when I’m going to do that. Bored at uni almost beats bored at home at any rate.

I saw Clerks II last night.

Oh look there’s Tim. Turns out I can just turn up and expect to meet someone.

Anyway Clerks II. Well you know it’s pretty unsurprisingly like the original. Although the pop culture references didn’t quite pop as much and I’m familiar enough with Kevin Smith’s writing that his setups led to predictable punchlines. Although the story itself resolved pleasingly unpredictably, I just wish it didn’t trudge through so much inconsequential dialogue to get through it.

Although Dante is far too much a whiny bitch.

On the home front, females. Argh. ‘Nuff said.

I’m directing The Importance of Being Earnest and having a ball, my cast is freakin awesome so far but it’s only a week till we’ve only got a month left till we open and I’m starting to feel the pressure. I’m confident it’ll be a fun play to watch anyway. Such a strong, strong script.

Not much else to report really. If I think of anything I’ll let you know. In like a month.

So it turned out to actually be a month between installments. Oops. I didn’t actually intend that.

So superhero comics started growing up when death became permanent, arbitrary and shocking. And people realised that comics can be like real life in other ways, too.

It got a little bit out of control, though. Stories about people flying around in tights and having highly improbable powers got realistic. Something there doesn’t sit right. I’m personally a firm believer that art of any type suffers from being too tightly bound to reality.

Anyway that’s beside the point really. The real important change was that longer storylines became more and more accepted. The problem is that it’s still monthly, 20-odd pages of story at a time. Only now that story doesn’t even tell a complete story. It only tells a chapter of a story that could be up to 12 issues long, and that years worth of comics only amounts to one episode in an indefinitely long saga.

Imagine watching Lost, but you only get three scenes at a time, once a month each. I mean even with TV shows I prefer to watch them on DVD at my own pace. The comic book equivalent is the trade paperback, a collection of a storyline. A great format, but since it’s popularity is increasing a number of writers are writing specifically so that the pacing would be effective in the TP format. I don’t mind, but it’s still a monthly comic at the same time. Mainly for no good reason other than because it always has been. Because the label would prefer to gauge a title’s popularity monthly than take a punt on an expensive and time-consuming graphic novel format that might not reap benefits. It’s quite insane.

Also the fact that classic characters are still far too popular to retire means that most of them have decades of history behind them. Which isn’t so bad, except that recently some of the changes that have occurred are really quite important. Spidey’s public unveiling was the bombshell that made news headlines a month back, but that’s just one of dozens of things that have happened over the years, all of which come into play all the time.

It’s all rather tiring. I need sleep.