Trillogy of 3 Medieval Women
It was last Friday night and as usual I was running a few minutes late for the assigned play. This particular play was a performance of The Trilogy of Medieval Women. It was this time, however, that my tardiness actually played a role in my viewing of the show. As it turns out, this particular play was being performed in Spanish. The production did offer a special section of seats that had translating devices, but since I arrived late, it was already full. When the lights dimmed, the opening monologue began. It surprised me how many words I could understand, but as a whole how little sense I could make out of the play. When the opening monologue was over, it shocked me to hear the first sounds coming from behind me, especially since we were in Ida Green Theatre (with very steep seating). The actress slowly made her way down to the front of the theatre, singing and conversing with the actress on stage the entire way. I was also very interested with the fact that, even though I couldn’t understand the words, I could still hear when the actor broke her character. This has an amazing reliance on/in tone and the sound of her voice and even though I couldn’t recognize what she was saying, it was obvious when she made a mistake. It was for this reason that I was glad that I missed out on the English translation, because I was able to discover how important tone is in an actor’s voice.
posted by jon weems @ 1:57 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I sat in the english translation section, thus missing out on the oppurtunity to hear the entire play in Spanish. It's interesting that the thing you noticed the most was the tone of the actors. I wish I could have listened to the play in Spanish so that I could understand what you mean when you say that by their tone you could tell when they were making mistakes. That's something I don't even consciously notice while watching plays in English. Maybe I do and just don't fully undertand what you mean since I listened to the play differently than you did.
I think it is amazing that you could tell just by the tone the actresses' voice that she was getting out of character. I have a question though, which actress was it that you could tell when she was breaking character? I ask this because I really did not think that Mrs. Bueno really broke character but I do agree that Clelia did because not only could you tell from the tone of her voice but you could also tell from facial expressions.
I think your comments about reading an actors tone are very interesting because I constantly found myself relying on semiotic indicators to read the characters as a result of the vast majority of the dialogue which was lost in translation. Aside from observing the actresses gestures and body movements I also began relying on the specific tone of the actors voice in order to gauge their emotional and situational state of being. unfortunately, I found it extremely difficult to reach many worthwile conclusions pretending to the intentions of the character.
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