What did you learn today- Gillian

What did you learn today?

               I felt that the play had a variation of scenes that at first seem to have no link to the scene before or after it. However, after i thought about it, i discovered that they were actually inter-linked. I felt that the whole play was about Swee Lin and Kay Siu’s characters. I felt that the freeze frames were about the story the characters were about to tell.  These characters are somewhat based on their dating experience. It progressed to show them getting ready to be husband and wife, later them growing old together and eventually one of them dying. It seemed like a fairytale. Until, they start bringing us into their past and showing us their early part of their experiences – where the struggle to achieve the fairytale began.

              The play was not the typical play in which i would have expected. A typical play for me would be a play in which the audience would not participate actively but would only watch as a third party. The play was part of a typical play and part of an untypical play which is the engaging the audience type. This i feel got me to understand the play better as it made me reflect and ask myself what the play was about and what it had to do with me.

            The play is potrays a variety of perspectives of learning. Learning from our past mistakes is an example. I realised when we were meditating and the questions asked about our past experiences made us reflect on our mistakes and faults. The meditation process was one that of a audience participation. After reflecting on my mistakes and learning from them, i decided to participate actively in the meditation questions that were up for grabs. This made me bolder and ask questions because in life, we need to ask questions as well. The meditating process made us reflect our mistakes because if we are in denial, we will never learn what was wrong with us in the first place.

             I learnt that we do not always need a lot of props or costume changes to portray the scene or character. It is the acting substance that counts instead. If you have a variety of props but standard of acting is not good, the props and costumes will not do any good. You can have the least amount of props but still pull off the performance because of the acting. In the play’s context, watching the scene where Swee Lin was a student and Kay Siu the teacher, all they needed was a pointer, a pair of glasses and a stool. The rest was up to the actors to paint the picture for us through their acting.