Thursday, October 30

I can't believe we're already at the end of October. Where has the time gone?

Barack Obama came and spoke in my town today. Several of my classmates wanted to ditch class to go see him, but no one actually did (too dedicated of students for that, I suppose). I'm going to do early voting tomorrow over my lunch break. Which means I have to finish my research on candidates tonight. I feel the need to make informed decisions.


MOVEMENT
There's now another muscle that I can't feel but have to use. Apparently, there's also some minor version of the psoas that's more central in the body, and my Movement Professor says that I have to "zip it up" when I'm using my good muscles of support (I think that note was specifically for me).

We did some partner stretches on our legs today, and it turns out that I'm more flexible than I thought I was (and so is Wifey, for the record).


VOICE
More of the same. I think I've nailed the "Amidst the mists..." thing, which I thought would be the hardest for me. But it turns out that words like "dreamers" and "trees" are my weak spots at the moments ("dr" and "tr" combinations are harder to make clear than you might think). And of course, there's the word "distinctly"...


ACTING
The artistic director for the repertory theatre (which is an Equity theatre that is in a tight partnership with my program) came to speak with our class today. He said that the theatre has already begun acquiring grant money for our season next year, and even has ideas about the shows that we'll be doing in our third year. (Seriously, my third year? 2010? You're KIDDING! They don't even know what we can DO yet!)

The conversation then switched to a lesson about basic human needs, and applying them to characters. The root of drama is when needs are in conflict. All needs are of equal value when we're analyzing a script, and we can't judge characters by them, but we have to know what they're foregrounding in order to play them properly. There were several needs, and each of them had subsets. Here's the list we had:

- Security (shelter, food, safety, etc.)
- Love (carnal, familial, friendship, divine, contact, connection, romantic, etc.)
- Self-Worth (purpose, power, meaning, soul, etc.)
- Self-Respect (affirmation, respect, validation, power, etc.)
- Freedom
- Manhood/Womanhood
- Absolution (purging guilt)
- Self-Preservation (saving yourself)

He said that with all of us being in this program, we're allowing Self-Worth to be above everything else. Clearly if we're planning to be actors, we're not making Security our priority. And we've all risked a lot to be here, including what people think of us (respect) and the status of our relationships (love). I feel pretty good about that.

After the artistic director left, we did a group exercise that involved Wifey saying a line that we were all supposed to understand as the last line of a speech, and we were to receive our cue based on that. It yielded some neat things. Particularly a golden comment from our professor regarding taking what is inside of you, having it interact with what is coming from someone else, and letting the two interact and perhaps explode. I wish I'd written the whole thing down. *sigh*


ANALYSIS
In Uncle Vanya, the characters all begin by waiting around for order to be restored. Order is only restored when, at the end of the play, they leave. They all complain about being bored. They're trapped in a place where they can't proceed with what they want to do. And the things that they do during the course of the play are only being done because they have NOTHING LEFT TO DO.

That's pretty much what I got out of today's class.


TECH
Tonight was the first day of tech for Wilder, Wilder, Wilder, which is a series of five one-act plays by Thornton Wilder. It's being performed by the entire 2nd-Year class, and I've been assigned to be on stage crew (also called "deck crew"). So far, I've had to do very, very little. I helped sweep and mop the stage, I set up some food props, which I'll have to do every night (fun fact: props that are used up every show and need to be replaced are called "consumables"). I also was assigned to sit at various locations in the audience and help the director with things related to sightlines (which means telling him how much can be seen from different vantage points, both onstage and backstage).

So tech went from 6:30-11:00 tonight. We have it again for the same length tomorrow, and then we have two 10-for-12s this weekend (which means you have a 12-hour work span -- in our case noon to midnight -- with a two-hour lunch break).