Final Exam TPPP

This week we presented our TPPP’s (mock) that acted as both practice for IB assessment next year and as an internal final exam. Although we all focused on the same experience (our commedia-inspired production of “Love Wins All”) we could relate the rest of our year back to that focus. I’m never nervous for a presentation and even enjoy presenting. For me, when I’ve prepared something, have the opportunity to clearly explain my ideas, and get to be myself (no acting involved) there is no reason to be nervous. Additionally I’d figured out the timings in my head, so I knew I had roughly three minutes to spend on each image in my presentation.

            I had to make sure that each of the aspects of the course I mentioned could be related back to “Love Wins All”, so I started my presentation discussing my technical role as the acrobatic instructor. I made sure to emphasize the importance of movement and physicality in commedia, a concept that I then related to my second focus of body positioning. Because each commedia stock character’s mask has a specific movement I discussed how they way they moved helped the audience recognize their role in society. This allowed me to mention good old Etienne Decroux and his three principles of movement (of which I’m very familiar with, after learning about him at TAPs and then presenting a masterclass about it at IST) Additionally Brecht recognized the importance of body position and movement in what he called “gest/gestus”. I then moved on to discuss how the symbolism in Brecht’s Epic Theatre mirrored the symbolism used by Edward Gordon Craig in his set designs, BOTH ideas relate to the fact that commedia characters are symbols themselves.

            For my next focus I took a figurative approach to explain how commedia mask work can really be considered similar to puppets. At this point I was at liberty to discuss the master class on puppetry I’d taken in London, and how the principles of puppetry can be applied to mask work. My last two images went into more depth on the other roles I took on for “Love Wins All” such as the role of actor (Il Capitano) and the role of choreographer. My discussing the influence and inspiration of clowning, stand-up comedy, and “One Man Two Guvnors” hopefully I got across just how much theatre in the world I knew and understood.

            Overall I feel pretty confident with my performance, now I suppose we must all wait to know results…