Captured Thought: Group Interpretation

Well GI has sorta been ruling my life these past couple of weeks, so what else would I have thoughts about? Yesterday was the sectional competition. What I knew going into it: My lines, my staging, that we weren't perfect, that there were ten other schools in the sectional, that this was the hardest sectional to compete in because only three schools. Prior to Saturday morning, I had only ever seen one GI performance, and it was on film. No idea what was coming. The group saw "Spanking Shakespeare" once we arrived at Huntley and put away our set and costumes. I enjoyed it only because it was the first time I had ever seen a Group Interp LIVE, so I did not know how to judge. Later in the day, a few GI's later, we saw Fremd high school perform "Faustus," which completely blew me away. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I can't explain with words how amazing they worked as a group. Every motion, line, look, freeze was together.

At the awards ceremony they were announced as the third place winners and I immediately thought, "Which two groups that I DIDN't see were better than FREMD?" Then they announced Lake Park as the 2nd place winners, which made sense to me because I had heard they were good AND I didn't see them. One school left, who's gonna win the plaque?
"And the sectionals Champion is. Glenbrook... North!" I was in complete shock. Our whole group was. we ran to the stage cheering and hugging and shouting "NO way!" or "Oh my God!" together to claim our plaque.

I will never know for sure how we ranked higher than Fremd. But I can sure speculate a whole lot. I believe that our story was easier to follow than Fremd's. WE did 3 short stories from "Tales of Beedle the Bard" while they performed a 30-minute version of "Faustus" that, while beautiful to watch, was hard to follow, and really only featured three people of the twelve. We had an 11-person cast, and everyone had at least one featured role. Even though our show was not as clean, it was pretty physically taxing, maybe just as much as Fremd'sm and our's was shorter, easier to watch, more comical, and essentially, more entertaining.

NOw all we have to do is keep improving. State competition is next weekend!

Dialectics: Short Stories and... you'll have to read it to find out the other thing

As you know, I'm writing a short story in English... So far, I've set up my characters and a plot and I'm getting to hammering through draft on of the whole story. Soon i'm gonna have to comb through the entire story to fix the problems, the things that are going wrong (and not the bad things happening to the characters, the things that don't make the situation absolutely perfectly tense or miserable or scary. Or whatever it's supposed to be.) I also have to make sure the characters are perfect... and I mean perfect the same way i meant it before. And I'll have to do this more than once. I really don't know how I'm supposed to dive into short story writing... and I found a parallel in my own life when I went to rehearsal today. The director and I were talking about the process of putting together a show. Picking a cast is like picking the characters, and the first full draft of a short story is like finishing the blocking of a show: You know what's supposed to happen but everything isn't just right yet. Then the further drafts are the combing and cleaning of a show. And finally, the most rewarding (or sometimes, sadly, disappointing) is the presentation: publishing, opening night, whatever you wanna call it. In a way, I'm staging a show on paper instead of onstage.

Blogging around and around and around

Theme of the week: Find a direction for my short story...

-----

Here's Tess's blog post about the importance of objects in a short story because everything has a different meaning to different people, and we can show significance in the story by using specific objects and how the characters react to or think of the objects as ways to solidify the characters...

This is great, Tess! We talked about how it's important to make sure we use specific objects in our stories to give them realism and definition ("the creaky rocking chair" instead of "a chair") as if to prove that he narrator really was there and really does know exactly what was where. But to really "invade their privacy," as Mr. Allen would say, we can use specific objects to explore what meaning they have to a character. I'm so glad I found this... It should definitely help inspire a few words of the thousand I need.

-----

Leanne also pointed out something that affects short story characters: sight. She used Santa Claus as the example of people not believing something until they see it, also pointing out how young children who have not yet seen a reason to believe there is no Santa believe, even though they ALSO haven't seen Santa himself to prove his existence...

Leanne, I'm looking at a lot of posts as a way to try to gather things to keep in mind for my short story... And I really like what you've pointed out here... Often we can actually be blinded from the truth because of what we see with our eyes, and it often happens more as we get older. The perfect example of this is in "Cathedrals" but it can still apply to other situations. My short story character isn't blind, but maybe something could happen that would bring in this theme, because I really like it.