For this assignment I chose to work on a character in "Super Ruwaxi: Origins" a piece that Cynthia and I are expanding into a full show. Here is a little about the piece:
Super Ruwaxi: Origins tells the origin story of how Wu Ruwaxi, a nerdy Chinese-American teenager, becomes Super Ruwaxi, a feminist super-heroine with magical gender-bending body odor. Ruwaxi also discovers that she has her power because she is future incarnation of the Hindu apsara, Urvashi.
Up until now I have been playing the character of Urvashi. However this assignment allowed me to explore the physicality and expression of the Super Villain: Razor Girl.
What you need to know before watching this... Super Ruwaxi is approached by a slimy guy in a dance club named Fedora Boy/aka The Fed. He makes inappropriate advances on her. She gets mad and discovers her magical gender-bending body odor, changing him into Fedora Girl. Fedora Girl is shocked and runs away. What follows is Fedora Girl's transformation into Razor Girl, aka Lexi Luthora.
Fedora girl to razor girl from
Shyamala Moorty on
Vimeo.
Password: Ruwaxi
Questions:
1. What interests you emotionally and/or physically? How would you as an audience member feel about this character (like, dislike, empathize with, scared of, be amused by etc...)? How else might I push this rendition of Razor Girl into a convincing and complex Super Villain who was accidentally created by Super Ruwaxi?
2. How does the song and spoken words inform you about what is going on for the character? (I got the idea from something Cynthia wrote that happens in the gender police headquarters where men are teaching their sons that "boys don't cry.") Could you imagine other words, or no words support this transition? If so, what could you imagine?
3. Costuming: is it clear that the two costumes are the same person? Right now I interpreted Cynthia's description of Razor Girl as having the razor in a french twist as best as I could with short hair. However I realized, after I made the study, that keeping the hat might help us know that this is the same person as the audience members who were wearing it as Fedora Boy and Girl.
Here is a pic of a hat I have that actually has a little slot that a normal sized razor fits into perfectly (do we need to exaggerate the size of the razor?)
And here are two full body pics of Razor Girl, one with the razor in hair and one with the razor in hat. With the hat, I look more like a jazz/cabaret dancer to me. This could be interesting...if we went in the hat direction I wonder how that might inform the way Razor Girl moves (do I need to go take some jazz
classes?)
What are your thoughts about razor placement?Anything else about her costume that interests you, that you're not sure about, or that you have ideas about?
4. Costume transition: As the music ends in the video, I tried to recreate a sequence similar to Ruwaxi's transition into her club self...walking into the closet and being afraid of being caught. Is this confusing without hands and narrative? Could you imagine hands and narrative coming in here? On a stage, I could do it in a different space than where Fedora girl just came from, but with a still camera it was easier to do it in place. Right now I relied on a video transition to create the clothing transition, but Razor Girl could, like Super Ruwaxi did earlier, change cloths live on stage if it is a simple enough transition (or in a video sequence). Any thoughts about this transition?
5. Anything else?
