cdave: (Default)
Augusto Boal, the Brazilian theater director and playwright, died last Saturday.

I'd not heard his name before a month ago, but I feel that I should say a brief word.

I ran across it while doing some reaserch I was doing for an odd idea for a Kids programme item at Eastercon.

The programme item was "Zip, Boing, Bounce!" AKA Not Drinking Games. The idea being that a lot of the drinking games I played at university could be adapted to make them suitable for children. In fact given that I ran the Physics Society drinking circle, I was used to playing these with people who wouldn't drink heavily.

While trying to write down a list of them all, I remembered that I played a few of these before Uni. At drama clubs. From the ages of about 4 to 17 I went to a series drama clubs / youth theatres. Most sessions would run the same way. Initially some physical running around games to get warmed up. Then some sit down games (and in one case Thai Chi) to calm down and focus, and then either some improv work, or rehearsal depending on if a performance was coming up. I owe a fair chunk of my confidence to these classes.

So I went to look up some warm up exercises for actors to see if there were any I could use, and found that almost all my favourite games, from across all the different clubs I'd been in, were listed in Games for Actors and Non-Actors by Augusto Boal. He was a massive influence on Community Theatre.

Looking up a little more about him, I find that he was political activist too. "Seen as a threat to the dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985, he was jailed and tortured before being exiled to Argentina."

I really want to learn more about this man, and wish I'd thought to do so while he was still with us.
cdave: (Default)
Owing to being really busy at work, and (when I get out on time) in the evenings, I've not posted much recently. So here's my current list of things I don't have time to do justice to:

  • Dating
    • Having seen a couple of people point to a flawed article on dating amongst other things has made me want to try and write an Introspection post on the topic, so I can get my own head around my own thoughts on it.
  • RaceFail '09
    • I've spent many hours I don't have to spare reading up on the past three of months this fandom wide argument, and come to the conclusion that I don't have anything useful I could say.
    • I may or may not keep reading, but given that you would find it hard it hard to tell if I had, lets not worry.
  • Avenue Q
    • Went to go see this at the weekend with Dad. Very good.
    • Particularity enjoyed the song "Everyone's a little bit racist".
    • For some reason I got tunes from The Little Mermaid stuck in my head afterwards.
      • What is the correct way to include A Title in a sentence about "a title"?
  • Images

    • New Shelves (from Islington Council's version of freecycle)
      • Photobucket
        How do I get in my room now?

      • Photobucket
        I just put these up, how are they full already?
      • Also: That's a lot of cr*p on my door too. Time to clear that down.
    • "Northern Irish" flag

      • Remember that artsy new flag for Northern Ireland?
        Photobucket
        Well over the weekend it got caught in the string, and today seems to have been torn in half. Nature causing art to imitate life?
  • My Mad war with [livejournal.com profile] chiller
  • A repost from my Facebook wall explaining why I was explaining maths to Jehovah's Witnesses
    • Gödel's incompleteness theorem is a mathematical proof that in any sufficiently complex system of arithmetic, there will statements that you cannot prove as true or false.

      E.g. Tell me if the sentence on the next line is true or false:
      This sentence is false.

      You can assume the statement is true and develop a whole branch of maths off of that. Or you can assume it is false and develop a whole different branch of maths.

      This is what I personally believe about God. The question is undecidable. You can form a coherent set of beliefs starting from the assumption that there is a deity/pantheon of some sort. You can form a coherent set of beliefs starting from the assumption that there is no God. But since it's not provable either way this seems like a waste of time.

      This is why my religion on Facebook is Evangelical (I like telling people this) Strong Agnostic (I believe you cannot disprove a god).

  • Meta post
    • Given how little time I seem to have to blog I wanted to take a look at why I do again. Culminating in a poll asking you to pick one of my tags: Diary, Link, Introspection, Reveiws.

    • Ironically, I don't have time for this.
cdave: (Default)
Last night I saw Pygmalion at the Old Vic, courtesy of [livejournal.com profile] the_magician.

It was a pretty good production. Mr Doolittle (Tony Haygarth), with his rants about middle class morality, was a particular highlight, and got several spontaneous rounds of applause.

It had a lovely old fashioned set, which required the curtains to be drawn so they could do the scene changes. At one point this trapped a sofa cushion on the wrong, so a hand shot out from under the curtain :)

My one complaint would be that Miss Eynsford-Hill (Emma Noakes) was far too quiet. I could hardly hear her at times.

I thought that the ending didn't gell with my memories of the musical. Having looked it up it seems that the ending was changed for the film, but I don't think they quite used the original either. Spoiler )

Profile

cdave: (Default)
cdave

June 2018

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
2425262728 2930

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 8th, 2025 04:25 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios