Notes on Tunku the Musical
Yes yes shock horror multiple updates so fast wtf is going on. Just dumping thoughts, emptying the warehouse to use a Mastery metaphor or draining the teacup to use a Zen metaphor.
A lot of observations came today, though not too many of them are useful. Anyway we're almost through our 2nd month of rehearsals now, and we're still working on some of the same ol' shit. Still hearing some same ol' shit in terms of feedback for improvement, which I'm sure is a source of frustration of the production team.
Dance
Frankly, I'm quite disappointed with the choreography so far. There hasn't been much and though there's a massive obstacle in the guise of Joe Hasham's preference for stillness and minimal unnecessary movement (not saying that dance is unnecessary movement; fact is, dance as a singular form is a complete communication through movement - in a musical however, movement is just one of the means of communication which can distract from the others if not clearly performed), I would think that there would be more effort and thought put in than what's been so far.
Fine, chances are high that the director will put his foot down and remove non-kickass movement. Fine, quite a number of us are malcoordinated and can't dance to save our own lives and anything else at stake. Keep trying, dammit! After the first couple of weeks where we regularly learned new stuff to try to fit in, there was practically minimal new stuff done. Hell, we just (fucking finally) added new movement to the 3rd song we learned after about a month! This song especially annoys me because we spent that month wondering what the hell to do during the song. I AM thankful that I do have a dancing role during that song, which makes it really cool (yes I am one of the more coordinated ones).
What disappoints the most is that segregation is promoted by the teacher of the ASWARA students. Not explicitly, but 1) he tends to focus all choreography on them only and 2) he tends to talk to them WHILE the Director and Musical Director talk to us. #2 bothers me a LOT because it sends many wrong messages out: a) what they have to say isn't so important, b) it's ok to talk while they're talking, c) what they're saying doesn't affect us dancers, and d) we dancers are different to them singers/actors.
Anyway. End of the day, Joe's sharp eye will ensure only the best shit remains, so it'll be highly entertaining and should look awesome. And end of the day personally, I just wish I could be the one doing all that prancing about and posing.
Acting
Someone said something absolutely horrifying today. Horrifying because it said all the wrong things about this person, or maybe horrifying because they're not untrue. When asked why he acted a particular part in that way, he responded with a "I don't know, Joe didn't say anything." In this context, that translates to "I'm too lazy to think for myself or to observe the scene to make sense of my part in it, I'll just wait for the director to tell me what to do." 1) This is a nightmare scenario for a director as the director doesn't want to do all the thinking himself (leveraging on the many brains of the cast and crew is a real asset that directors count on). 2) These are possibly the only non-sung lines for the ensemble in the whole Act 1, so squander them at thy own peril. 3) This person is a graduate of Joe's Acting for Beginners class, which means that he should know how Joe works and what his expectations are.
Singing
I've come a loooong way from a year ago. I've grown confident and comfortable with my singing voice and my ear, which is truly quite a wonderful feeling. I come from a past where doing things wrong or bad was an embarrassment worse than being taken down by a chihuahua, so coming to a point in my development where I can risk making mistakes and not let that faze me is pretty cool. Pretty damn cool, really - for some reason I had always told myself that I couldn't sing, so that's a great belief to beat the shit out of. I almost cracked up when someone referred to me as "one of the singers from the cast".
I know that my vocal journey is barely beginning - I'm just starting to pick up the nuances that can be affected by all the various little things you can do with your voice. Yes yes I keep telling myself that too - I need to find a vocal coach.
Very interestingly someone recently mentioned that the ASWARA dancers sing well (for the most part) and most importantly, one cannot fault their sense of timing. I experienced this firsthand when I went for a dance rehearsal at ASWARA (Padang Merbok, which is super-old-school-KL and practically next to Bank Negara) when they had no music accompaniment. Flawless timing, nice lesson in humility for me actually as I thought I had near-perfect timing. They do sing reasonably well (with one or two exceptions), the biggest shame is that quite often they don't hear the feedback from the Musical Director (see above).
Production
First, the questions I ask that shall remain unanswered (I don't care for the answers, whatever they may be): why do we have such a large cast? Why are there so few great singers? Why are there so many malcoordinated tone-deaf members? Why have we done so little work on Act 2 so far? Why the obsession with neatly-arranged shoes? Who keeps bloody wearing my sandals?
Now this is the first production that I've been in (or heard of) that has the stage manager 'discipline' the cast. Perhaps it's handy, perhaps it's necessary. It's bloody annoying. It's distracting for the people who do pay attention to have someone constantly going "shut up", "keep quiet" and "sshhh!" Well, live and let live. I'll live with it and I'll let him live.
Opportunities
In the end, what counts as much as giving your all for the production is what you did over the time of the production (including rehearsals) - how you'd grown, what you learned, how you developed, who you met. I'm very glad to work with dancers this time round as they really opened up my mind on dance in Malaysia, our National Arts Academy and the human body. How important habit, practice and discipline are! Stretching, conditioning, moving moving moving.
It's also a pleasure working with this production team, so much to learn and so much experience - Joe, Faridah, Mervyn. Gen, I really think we so take you for granted. You might be the best accompanist in the country and we don't even know it. You kick ass lah! And of course, it's a great pleasure working with the gundus from BB before, with the wide assortment of characters - jokers, dumbasses, pseudo-divas, mean girls, makciks, bitches. Not to say that there aren't characters in the cast who weren't in BB - we're steadily growing the nickname list.
With such a wide pool of talents, I think one would be a fool to waste such a golden opportunity to further develop one's skills over the course of Tunku. Writers, actors, comedians, musicians, dancers, singers, talk show hosts, MCs, playwrights, yoga masters, directors, producers. Okay okay fine drug-pushers, but that's barely a skill. That's only counting those in the arts.
Damned fool of fools
For me, arrogance is the most repulsive trait one could have. Especially snobbish arrogance. Now I don't often judge people too quickly, especially if my first impression is negative. When someone annoys me at first impression, I give them multiple chances at redeeming that bad impression and they usually give me some reason to like them. But when someone proceeds to ignore my greetings twice in a day LIKE A LAN SI FUCKWIT, I bequeath upon thy baleful dickhead (that's penis for a head, not bell-end of the cock) the honorary title of Certified Wanker Unworthy of An Iota of My Time, Attention or Piss. That abbreviates roughly into CWUAINT, which approximates quaint, an ancient way of saying Cunt. An Ancient Cunt in my ancestral tongue is a Lau Chi Bai, which for artistic purposes (the aesthetic beauty of rhyme, obviously) we shall expand into Chow Lau Chi Bai, a Smelly Ancient Cunt. Which converts beautifully into the 3-letter acronym SAC, as in the thing men keep their balls in.
It's not often I dislike someone so much as to spend so much time conferring such a great honour, but the look on his face the two times I greeted him just... grated. Nails on blackboard. Polystyrene on polystyrene, for me. Dentist's drill on tooth. Yappy chihuahua. It evokes nature's basest responses - MurderDeathKillEradicateAnnihilateEliminateDestroy.
Anyway. I shall spend no more energy (or piss, as mentioned in the certification) on him. Remove all negative influences in your life for better living, it is said.
A lot of observations came today, though not too many of them are useful. Anyway we're almost through our 2nd month of rehearsals now, and we're still working on some of the same ol' shit. Still hearing some same ol' shit in terms of feedback for improvement, which I'm sure is a source of frustration of the production team.
Dance
Frankly, I'm quite disappointed with the choreography so far. There hasn't been much and though there's a massive obstacle in the guise of Joe Hasham's preference for stillness and minimal unnecessary movement (not saying that dance is unnecessary movement; fact is, dance as a singular form is a complete communication through movement - in a musical however, movement is just one of the means of communication which can distract from the others if not clearly performed), I would think that there would be more effort and thought put in than what's been so far.
Fine, chances are high that the director will put his foot down and remove non-kickass movement. Fine, quite a number of us are malcoordinated and can't dance to save our own lives and anything else at stake. Keep trying, dammit! After the first couple of weeks where we regularly learned new stuff to try to fit in, there was practically minimal new stuff done. Hell, we just (fucking finally) added new movement to the 3rd song we learned after about a month! This song especially annoys me because we spent that month wondering what the hell to do during the song. I AM thankful that I do have a dancing role during that song, which makes it really cool (yes I am one of the more coordinated ones).
What disappoints the most is that segregation is promoted by the teacher of the ASWARA students. Not explicitly, but 1) he tends to focus all choreography on them only and 2) he tends to talk to them WHILE the Director and Musical Director talk to us. #2 bothers me a LOT because it sends many wrong messages out: a) what they have to say isn't so important, b) it's ok to talk while they're talking, c) what they're saying doesn't affect us dancers, and d) we dancers are different to them singers/actors.
Anyway. End of the day, Joe's sharp eye will ensure only the best shit remains, so it'll be highly entertaining and should look awesome. And end of the day personally, I just wish I could be the one doing all that prancing about and posing.
Acting
Someone said something absolutely horrifying today. Horrifying because it said all the wrong things about this person, or maybe horrifying because they're not untrue. When asked why he acted a particular part in that way, he responded with a "I don't know, Joe didn't say anything." In this context, that translates to "I'm too lazy to think for myself or to observe the scene to make sense of my part in it, I'll just wait for the director to tell me what to do." 1) This is a nightmare scenario for a director as the director doesn't want to do all the thinking himself (leveraging on the many brains of the cast and crew is a real asset that directors count on). 2) These are possibly the only non-sung lines for the ensemble in the whole Act 1, so squander them at thy own peril. 3) This person is a graduate of Joe's Acting for Beginners class, which means that he should know how Joe works and what his expectations are.
Singing
I've come a loooong way from a year ago. I've grown confident and comfortable with my singing voice and my ear, which is truly quite a wonderful feeling. I come from a past where doing things wrong or bad was an embarrassment worse than being taken down by a chihuahua, so coming to a point in my development where I can risk making mistakes and not let that faze me is pretty cool. Pretty damn cool, really - for some reason I had always told myself that I couldn't sing, so that's a great belief to beat the shit out of. I almost cracked up when someone referred to me as "one of the singers from the cast".
I know that my vocal journey is barely beginning - I'm just starting to pick up the nuances that can be affected by all the various little things you can do with your voice. Yes yes I keep telling myself that too - I need to find a vocal coach.
Very interestingly someone recently mentioned that the ASWARA dancers sing well (for the most part) and most importantly, one cannot fault their sense of timing. I experienced this firsthand when I went for a dance rehearsal at ASWARA (Padang Merbok, which is super-old-school-KL and practically next to Bank Negara) when they had no music accompaniment. Flawless timing, nice lesson in humility for me actually as I thought I had near-perfect timing. They do sing reasonably well (with one or two exceptions), the biggest shame is that quite often they don't hear the feedback from the Musical Director (see above).
Production
First, the questions I ask that shall remain unanswered (I don't care for the answers, whatever they may be): why do we have such a large cast? Why are there so few great singers? Why are there so many malcoordinated tone-deaf members? Why have we done so little work on Act 2 so far? Why the obsession with neatly-arranged shoes? Who keeps bloody wearing my sandals?
Now this is the first production that I've been in (or heard of) that has the stage manager 'discipline' the cast. Perhaps it's handy, perhaps it's necessary. It's bloody annoying. It's distracting for the people who do pay attention to have someone constantly going "shut up", "keep quiet" and "sshhh!" Well, live and let live. I'll live with it and I'll let him live.
Opportunities
In the end, what counts as much as giving your all for the production is what you did over the time of the production (including rehearsals) - how you'd grown, what you learned, how you developed, who you met. I'm very glad to work with dancers this time round as they really opened up my mind on dance in Malaysia, our National Arts Academy and the human body. How important habit, practice and discipline are! Stretching, conditioning, moving moving moving.
It's also a pleasure working with this production team, so much to learn and so much experience - Joe, Faridah, Mervyn. Gen, I really think we so take you for granted. You might be the best accompanist in the country and we don't even know it. You kick ass lah! And of course, it's a great pleasure working with the gundus from BB before, with the wide assortment of characters - jokers, dumbasses, pseudo-divas, mean girls, makciks, bitches. Not to say that there aren't characters in the cast who weren't in BB - we're steadily growing the nickname list.
With such a wide pool of talents, I think one would be a fool to waste such a golden opportunity to further develop one's skills over the course of Tunku. Writers, actors, comedians, musicians, dancers, singers, talk show hosts, MCs, playwrights, yoga masters, directors, producers. Okay okay fine drug-pushers, but that's barely a skill. That's only counting those in the arts.
Damned fool of fools
For me, arrogance is the most repulsive trait one could have. Especially snobbish arrogance. Now I don't often judge people too quickly, especially if my first impression is negative. When someone annoys me at first impression, I give them multiple chances at redeeming that bad impression and they usually give me some reason to like them. But when someone proceeds to ignore my greetings twice in a day LIKE A LAN SI FUCKWIT, I bequeath upon thy baleful dickhead (that's penis for a head, not bell-end of the cock) the honorary title of Certified Wanker Unworthy of An Iota of My Time, Attention or Piss. That abbreviates roughly into CWUAINT, which approximates quaint, an ancient way of saying Cunt. An Ancient Cunt in my ancestral tongue is a Lau Chi Bai, which for artistic purposes (the aesthetic beauty of rhyme, obviously) we shall expand into Chow Lau Chi Bai, a Smelly Ancient Cunt. Which converts beautifully into the 3-letter acronym SAC, as in the thing men keep their balls in.
It's not often I dislike someone so much as to spend so much time conferring such a great honour, but the look on his face the two times I greeted him just... grated. Nails on blackboard. Polystyrene on polystyrene, for me. Dentist's drill on tooth. Yappy chihuahua. It evokes nature's basest responses - MurderDeathKillEradicateAnnihilateEliminateDestroy.
Anyway. I shall spend no more energy (or piss, as mentioned in the certification) on him. Remove all negative influences in your life for better living, it is said.
posted by Jo at 2:51 am
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