More Theater Fun
A friend of mine here is taking a theater class, and he invited me to join in one night. (You'd think after my first experience, I would have learned my lesson.) I met with my friend that night and headed to the "classroom", which was just a big empty room with some pillows and a cd player. About 20 people showed up, and we started the class.
For the first activity, the teacher guy turned the lights out and told us to walk around in circles. Whatever, I gave it a shot. We walked around in circles for a few minutes as the teacher played different songs and messed with the lights.
Then he told us to act like we had some sort of physical handicap as we walked around in circles.
I didn't move my left arm much as I walked around, I figured that was pretty good. Other people were crawling on the floor and shaking and all kinds of crazy stuff. Then the teacher told us to act like we had down syndrome as we walked around. I continued walking around with my left arm problem, while others went all out. It was weird. Real weird.
After a few minutes of that craziness, we all sat down and the teacher handed us photocopies of a newspaper article he had found. The article was about a family with a down syndrome son who couldn't speak or hear. One day he wandered away and became lost. The family searched for years and never found him, and the father died from his sadness. It turns out the military found the son, and since he couldn't talk or hear, they gave him to the state who gave him a new identity and put him up at a boarding house. After a few years someone from the media recognized the kid and got him returned to his family.
For the next 2 hours or so, we acted this story out. It's a really sad story, and acting it out wasn't all that much fun. We split up into groups and acted different scenes out, we made human still-frame "photographs", then we went back to walking around in circles. Only this time we had to pretend we were the son, wandering around lonely and sad and hungry and hopeless.
Then the class ended, we said good night, and headed to our homes.
So my 2 experiences of theater over here have been pretty weird. Is this true of theater everywhere, or just here?
