Tuesday, October 28

I've met with my Viewpoints group (Thrill, Iceman, Wifey, and Director A) a few times now to prepare our performance for Movement class tomorrow, and I'm pretty excited to share it. I think we found something neat.

MOVEMENT
We spent class learning new partner stretches. We were assigned to find a one-minute monologue and learn it neutrally before next Tuesday. We're going to use them as "movement monologues", although I'm not really sure what that means yet.

VOICE
I can't tell you how great it was to have Voice class again after a week without it.

I got advice from one of the 3rd-Years about how to calm down my tremors, and it's helped a lot. I'm going to avoid the Dying Cockroach for awhile, as that's a tricky one for me to do. And I'm actually going to send LESS energy outward when I start the tremors, and not flex my feet as much in things like 1st position.

Today in class, I only did two tremors; 1st Position and Half-Plow. I was in Half-Plow for several minutes in a light tremor, and it was really cool. In some ways it feels like I'm taking a step back, but I have to let my body record the tremors this way so that I can eventually find a happy medium.

We worked a bit on our "STS" combinations, and my Professor said that my "s" sounds have improved greatly. I'm so proud! I've been working really hard on them. I still have to be thinking about them in order to make the correction, but it's nice to know that I'm on the right track.


ACTING
I loved Acting class today. We started off by doing Michael Chekov exercises with "expansion" and "contraction". In my "daily center", I'm comfortable with both actions. But my artistic center is definitely more comfortable with "expansion", which is exactly what actors are supposed to feel.

My Professor says that psychological muscles are just like physical ones and need to be exercised regularly.

At one point, our professor told a story about Marlene Dietrich. Apparently, she once said that several actors in her generation (such as Jimmy Stewart) always acted "while looking for their left shoe". No matter what they were saying (I interpret this as meaning that they had a distracted quality to them, and said all their lines with the same weight).

We went back to the text etudes that we did several weeks ago while sitting in chairs, and I got some really great notes from our professor. In the first one, things went astray as the result of my making a choice instead of acting on an impulse (a choice that I didn't know I was making at the time). In the second one, things were weak because I wasn't giving myself full freedom to explore my impulses (and, as my professor often says, "there's no such thing as 99% freedom").

I'm always glad to get really direct criticism from my professors. It's nice to know exactly what I need to work on. And I feel like I understood all the feedback I got today. Now it's just a matter of putting it into practice. Wish me luck!


ANALYSIS
I turned in my paper on The Wild Duck today. I honestly started that paper 5 different times before settling on an action for the play (rejected actions included "to sacrifice" and "to benefit others"). I ended up with a very muddy paper using a combination of "to meddle" and "to manipulate". It's horrible, but at least it's done.

The very first thing that our Professor said in class today was that, from now on, we all need to read the Arts portion (specifically the Theater section) of the New York Times on a daily basis (you can read it online for free). He says that as actors, we have to embrace the entire profession. We have to be aware of what's going on in the field. So I subscribed to it on my GoogleReader (which is a lovely device, if you don't already have it... I highly recommend). I also already follow a couple of Broadway World feeds, as well as some smaller, more personal accounts of Broadway happenings.

We discussed Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov today, and spent a fair amount of time attempting to discern whether it's a comedy or a drama. I'm still a little foggy on it, actually. I guess it's a "neither"?

We were split into two groups for research before Thursday. My group (Director A, Director C, Director J, Thrill, Two-Shots-Up, and me) has to investigate the characters of Ástrov, Yélena, and Sónya. We're charting how their pasts are revealed and commented on through the course of the play.