Shy, Alison and I are deep in Super Ruwaxi land, and we are in the middle of trying to figure out the different visual looks for the different worlds in the work. These worlds include Ruwaxi's home, her school, the club, the world of her arch nemesis (Fedora Boy/Lexie Luthora), and Urvashi's mythological world. In addition to the live feed projection and audience interaction that we already set up in the initial version of the work, we are also planning to collaborate with Adnan as an animator. In addition to identifying different looks for the different worlds, one of our biggest challenges is that certain scenes have many more characters than we have performers for. This is one such scene.
The following scene is set at Ruwaxi's school. It takes place after an initial exposition on the Middle Kingdom (Ruwaxi's home), where we find out about her close friend, Nana. It also takes place after Ruwaxi has accidentally transformed the sleazy Fedora Boy into a female-bodied person at the club. Fedora Boy has transformed himself into Lexie Luthora and now works at the Gender Police. Lexie has been assigned to go undercover at Ruwaxi's school to start a female-only program of internalized self-hatred, but she does not know that Ruwaxi is the person who transformed her into a woman. This video uses mudras as hand puppets to embody multiple characters, which I (as Ruwaxi) would respond to as a live body. For the moment, you hear Ruwaxi's lines included in the voice-over, but not my body responding to the hand puppets. The narrator is also not embodied in this video.
password "pepper"
Feedback Questions:
(1) Do you find that the hand puppets offer enough scope for a rich acting performance, particularly for the character Nana -- or does their mediatized and pre-recorded nature take away from the liveness of the acting and complexity of the relationships?
(2) Can you follow the scene, or do you get confused about who the characters are? Do you need different voices and different people's hands to play the different characters? Shall I give the different hands different outfits (nail polish, rings, etc.) or faces? Initially I was going to concentrate more on the different characters' aharya abhinaya; I was also considering having individual fingers or pairs of fingers play a single character -- but these foci seemed to limit movement possibilities, so I focused on expression through movement for this study.
(3) Would you prefer that Shyamala play Lexie (as she will in other parts of the play), or do you prefer Lexie as a hand puppet?
(4) Do you like the visuals as they are (knowing that I would have to fix the second half so the hands do not overlap with each other), or would you prefer them to be mixed with animation?
(5) Other thoughts?
The following scene is set at Ruwaxi's school. It takes place after an initial exposition on the Middle Kingdom (Ruwaxi's home), where we find out about her close friend, Nana. It also takes place after Ruwaxi has accidentally transformed the sleazy Fedora Boy into a female-bodied person at the club. Fedora Boy has transformed himself into Lexie Luthora and now works at the Gender Police. Lexie has been assigned to go undercover at Ruwaxi's school to start a female-only program of internalized self-hatred, but she does not know that Ruwaxi is the person who transformed her into a woman. This video uses mudras as hand puppets to embody multiple characters, which I (as Ruwaxi) would respond to as a live body. For the moment, you hear Ruwaxi's lines included in the voice-over, but not my body responding to the hand puppets. The narrator is also not embodied in this video.
password "pepper"
Feedback Questions:
(1) Do you find that the hand puppets offer enough scope for a rich acting performance, particularly for the character Nana -- or does their mediatized and pre-recorded nature take away from the liveness of the acting and complexity of the relationships?
(2) Can you follow the scene, or do you get confused about who the characters are? Do you need different voices and different people's hands to play the different characters? Shall I give the different hands different outfits (nail polish, rings, etc.) or faces? Initially I was going to concentrate more on the different characters' aharya abhinaya; I was also considering having individual fingers or pairs of fingers play a single character -- but these foci seemed to limit movement possibilities, so I focused on expression through movement for this study.
(3) Would you prefer that Shyamala play Lexie (as she will in other parts of the play), or do you prefer Lexie as a hand puppet?
(4) Do you like the visuals as they are (knowing that I would have to fix the second half so the hands do not overlap with each other), or would you prefer them to be mixed with animation?
(5) Other thoughts?
