Wednesday, October 8

MOVEMENT
We continued our discussions on the readings briefly. Over the last couple of days, our conversations have been all over the place due to the sheer quantity and variety of our recent readings. We've discussed mirroring body language as a tactic. Also how preening behavior is instinctual when trying to attract people.

Today's discussion focused mostly on the senses. My professor says that on top of the 5 senses we're taught in elementary school (scent, sight, touch, taste, and sound), we also have two additional senses. One is "kinesthetic sense" (knowing where your body is in space), and the other she calls the "KGB sense" (knowing when you're in danger). Throughout our lives, actors need to continue to develop our senses so that they're sharp when we're on stage.

Our professor told us that she conducts her class as a series of workshops as opposed to being under a rubric so that she can better adapt the class to fit our needs. She says that the goal of the 1st-year here, movement-wise, is to have sensory awareness in all parts of the body, and control over a lot of it.

The second part of the class was spent doing things in order to try to isolate our psoas muscles. It's still incredibly frustrating for me (and for most of my class), as I cannot feel those muscles at all (they're deep in the body). But my professor said today that if you can visualize the psoas while you're doing these exercises, eventually your body will take over and start doing things using the muscles that we're trying to isolate.

As homework for tomorrow, we have to identify 14-16 "states of being". This will include naming them, saying what we were doing, and discussing our breathing, heart rate, and every other way that our bodies, minds, and emotions were responding. I have no idea how I'm going to find 16 states of being by tomorrow. Yikes.


VOICE
We're going to have an exam over our destructuring (tremoring) positions next Thursday, so we're going to focus on a couple of them every day between now and then. Today we focused on First and Second. First involves laying on your back with your legs straight up in the air. Second is when you do the same thing, but then move your legs out to the sides. I quite like First, but I don't much like Second... it makes my whole body hurt.

It occurred to me today that I have no endurance whatsoever. Some of my classmates can stay in one tremor for several minutes at a time. Me? Thirty seconds and I'm done. My body just spazzes out so much that I can't do it longer than that. I can probably go for 90 seconds in Half-Plow, but that's the extent of it. So I guess that's going to be something for me to work on.

Also, when we add "fluffy, breathy sound" to our tremors, mine gets punchy sometimes. My professor says that she has had other students in the past who have had the same problem, and that I shouldn't be concerned. I just have a different brand of tremor from the rest of my classmates.


ACTING
Today was all about our Michael Chekov work. We've done archetypal gestures in the past (things like "push", "thrust", "pull", "drag", grab", "throw", "toss") where we start by doing actions to the air, and then try to use the actions mentally instead of physically. We have also worked with qualities, such as "flying" and "radiating".

Today, we worked with two new qualities: "molding" and "flowing" (sometimes "flowing" is translated as "floating"). We then worked to incorporate archetypal gestures into the qualities (e.g. "pushing" with a quality of "molding")

The way to remember the qualities is that they relate to the ancient elements: air (flying), fire (radiating), earth (molding), and water (flowing). It seems that different people relate to different qualities. For example, All-The-Way says she lives in "radiating", O.D. says he's in "flowing", and Big Show says he's "molding". I learned about myself today that I usually live with a "flying" quality, and I also spend a lot of time in "flowing". "Molding" and "radiating" are foreign to me, which is why I need to work on them. Those are tools that I can then use when working on different sorts of characters in the future.

We also discussed how the qualities of expansion and contraction affect us. My professor says that when you're working from your "artistic center", expansion signifies joy, whereas contraction signifies depression. He says that on occasion, students will disagree with this, saying that to them, expansion makes them feel fear and contraction makes them feel security. The tendency of most instructors is to want to tell people that "that's okay" and "everyone experiences things differently". My professor, however, says that those feelings occur when people are working out of their "everyday center". If they were working artistically, they would be open to other things.

Our professor ended class by saying that it's not always going to be easy for us to see the value in the exercises we're working on now, as we're not currently performing anything. He's teaching us these things so that we can use them in our 2nd-year. That's why it's important for us to spend time with these exercises on our own outside of class. If you read something in a book and need it later on, you're going to have to go back to the book and try to learn it when you need it. But if you've already worked with it in the past, then you can draw on it without needing to reteach it to yourself. I'm excited to have the opportunity to take the things that we're learning and put them into action in the future. :)