Friday, September 19

VOICE
I took my IPA consonant test, and I think I rocked it.

But then, my professor did something that has totally rocked my world in a crazy way: she informed Killer and I that we have the two worst "sibilant s" sounds in the class. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS. I think it means that our "s" sounds sort of hiss? All I know is that I've been hyper conscious of my "s" sounds all day. I think maybe I AM hissy, but I cannot for the life of me come up with a way to produce an "s" sound any other way.

I talked to my roommate about it, and I decided that I should ask the professor for a meeting to discuss it, as apparently we're not going to get to the "s" training for awhile, and I'd like to start correcting the problem as soon as possible. Killer wrote me that he has the same intention. I'm glad I'm not the only one.

I think I AM the only one with an "l" problem (I say words that start with "l" so that my tongue is touching the bottoms of my top front teeth). And I don't distinguish between my "wh" and "w" sounds yet (apparently, the "w" in "whistle" should sound different from the one in "want" in Standard American Dialect). And whenever the letter "s" is at the end of the word, I almost always pronounce it as an "s" instead of a "z", even when that is incorrect (like "daughters").

Honestly, though, I'm excited to have things to work on. I feel like this is the reason I'm here. I've spent my entire life pronouncing words in a non-neutral, unclear fashion, and I had no idea (unconscious incompetence). Now I know that there's a problem (conscious incompetence). Hopefully, I'll learn how to do it right (conscious competence) and do it that way for so long that it'll become normal (unconscious competence). Awesome.


ACTING
We continued doing point-of-view exercises with the space. When I went, the "stage" area just had some tables, chairs, and stools on it. My professor whispered to me that it was "a garden in autumn", and then I had to treat the space in that way. As a result from watching the exercises yesterday, I no longer felt the need to perform. I didn't feel the need to illustrate to my classmates what my space was. I didn't try to make it real for them. Instead, I concentrated on making it real for me.

I looked at a stool and imagined that it was a wilting plant. I felt the chill in the air, and saw the bleak autumn sun, and the trees in the distance with their leaves changing to yellow. Another stool was a flowering bush, and I could tell that it was dying, so I used my hand to pat the soil and try to ascertain whether the ground was moist enough for it, and then dusted the dirt off onto my skirt. I thought about replacing some of the plants in the garden, and wondering why the former owner had planted them in the first place. A chair in the room became an iron bench that I sat on, thinking about how lovely my garden would be in the spring.

When I completed the exercise, my professor asked my classmates where they thought I had been. To my surprise, All-The-Way immediately asked, "Were you in a garden?" I guess that by making it real for myself, I made it real for her as well. It was such a neat feeling. She also asked if I had inherited the garden from someone. I told her that I knew that it was mine now, and that it hadn't always been mine, but that I hadn't gotten further than that. Most of my classmates guessed that it was autumn, which I was stoked about. Of course, not everyone got the garden... Several thought that it was a graveyard, and one even thought that I might've been indoors... But even just having one classmate identify it made me feel like I was on the right track. It felt great. :)