Tuesday, October 7

When we arrived at school, we were met with sad news. The head of my program, who is also our Textual Analysis professor, had been hit by a car while walking his dog. He was sent to the hospital, and was said to be making a full recovery. Tragically, his dog passed away. I think we were all pretty shaken up by it. I cried at three separate times during the school day, and some others in my class did as well.

Our Voice Professor went to help, so we led our Voice class ourselves, with the help of a recording of her voice leading us through our warm-ups.

MOVEMENT
It was the first day that we discussed all the readings we've been doing. These included excerpts from:

- How to Use Body Language by Drs. Sharon and Glenn Livingston
- The Body Speaks by Lorna Marshall
- Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn
- The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnellan
- Gymnastik for Busy People by Elsa Gindler
- Waking Up: The Work of Charlotte Selver collected and edited by William C. Littlewood with Mary Alice Roche
- blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell


ACTING
We started off with a discussion about how the logic that the actor uses is a product of the time that they're performing (and what is happening in the world at that time), the author (and the material) that they are performing, and the creative collective (be it an ensemble or an individual) who is creating it. We also discussed "collective will", or the common impulse of the ensemble.

We moved on to the topic of flawed actors. Iceman suggested that he thinks actors get away with mediocrity far more than artists in other genres. In order for a painting to move you, no part of it can be mediocre. If a musician is mediocre, you jump on their mistakes. But if you're watching a play and an actor is mediocre, you often will try to enjoy the play as a whole. And, as my professor said, in order to enjoy the play, the audience will sometimes forgive an actor's mistakes. But that does not make them a good actor.

We discussed the importance of always having an audience, even if the audience is the wall in your living room. Being watched is a sensation that we have to rehearse with in order to make the rehearsal as close to the performance as possible.

We also began discussing the difference between theatre and sports. Thrill, who is an athlete, says that he's good at tuning out audiences because of his sports background. O.D., who was a swimmer, said that for him, the difference between sports and theatre is the sense of competition vs. collaboration.

We spent the rest of the class working on our "homework" exercises. These are not homework in the typical sense. These are the exercises that our professor thinks that we should continue to do for the rest of our lives in order to keep up our skills. Just as musicians play scales and arpeggios, we must do the basics on a daily basis so that we can do complex work afterward.

These exercises include:
- memory of physical action work (which we're all very familiar with now)
- allowing objects to affect us deeply
- yielding to small, automatic movements
- making lists of physical sensations and places, and then pointing to something on the list and letting it take over (I was thinking about making a deck of cards with these things on them, and then just pulling out cards from it)
- allowing movement, or emotion, or thought (or perhaps all three) to develop and evolve while maintaining a sense of public solitude