Tuesday, December 1, 2009

trixie and monkey's visit

At the Trixie & Monkey talk, a couple things really stood out to me and I think would be useful for us as performers:

1. a "change" or arc in an act: Trixie was describing how in a lot of their acts they try to include a change from the beginning to the end. Example is her mermaid strip, where she starts out with a mermaid tail and ends up stripping off the tail and becoming a woman that can walk, or like her flea circus act where she is running a flea circus but in the process of losing her fleas, she has to remove all her clothes to find them. I think she made a good point with this since having an arc or a change or a story to the act makes it more dynamic and more interesting to watch.

2. thinking about AUDIENCE: Trixie & Monkey also talked about how they constantly think about the audience and how valuable performing in front of an audience of peers is. The way an audience reacts to different parts of the act can be extremely helpful in deciding what parts to play up, what parts to play down. We should probably schedule sometime in January when we're all back to have some of our own friends or some kind of small audience to a "preview" of sorts, which would basically be a dress rehearsal, just so we can get that kind of honest feedback Trixie and Monkey were talking about.

I had to leave the talk early though...any one else that was there, do you have anything else to add?

1 comment:

  1. i liked what she said about remembering that every item of clothing you take off becomes a prop, so don't just toss it on the floor. i hadn't really thought of my act as having any props, but when you put it that way i have a few, and i have to figure out how to use them.

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