Journal Friday September 16

Today we only had 45 minutes of class but the teacher made time to show us a video about a Chinese oprah tradition where the women talking was saying that she didn't want to expose these to the Western world because she was afraid that they would westernize it and modernize it and that tradition should be preserved. This lead to an argument about wether or not we should modernize or change our traditions or leave them as they were hundreds of years from now. Many people had different opinions. I believe that tradition are part of our culture and they are what make our culture and we should preserve it and best as we can without making any modifications so that is relates more and goes better to the western world. I think that if we change our traditions, for example "Marinera" or "El Baile de las Tijeras", we are deteriorating our culture and could eventually vanish it which will affect us as persons because our culture makes who we are, it affects us in a direct way and if we modify this, we would be completely lost as persons and when it comes to our personalities and who we are. 

This argument had to do with the Lysistrata project; wether we should change it or keep it how Aristophanes wrote it. I think there are two completely different things. Theatre class if all about experiencing and trying new things, being risk takers and showing our vision in our own weird way and I think we have the right to try and modify anything we want in this room because it will help us analyze the text more and understand and evoke our vision to the public. 

Finally, we had time at the end of class to talk to our groups. So we decided that our theme would be witches for two reasons that has to do with our vision. First, witches have always been portrayed as powerful creatures. So what we wanted to show was a comparison between witches and women and connect them by a same attribute: power. We want to portray how women have a lot of power over men and intelligence and how in Lysistrata they used this power to make the men listen to them and stop the war. Also, we also decided doing witches because Antonio had this idea where we did it in the perspective of men, portraying women as the dark side, the bad side, as if they are the bad ones, which would be ironic and the idea of witches would help us because over centuries witches have been stereotypically portrayed as bad, evil creatures, so that will help us depict our vision.  

Finally, we decided we wanted to film it because we thought it was much more creative and because our themes is withes, by filming it, it would help us add effects to the camera and to the characters that would represent our main theme and help us create that dark environment.