1/22/09

Thursday, January 22

You know, for the most part, I'm pretty good at keeping my life organized and everything under control. But every now and then I have a week when I just feel generally out of whack. This is one of those weeks. I blame the fact that I still don't have my Winter's Tale understudy lines down, and the show opens tomorrow (which means if the actress breaks her leg tomorrow, I'm on). A legitimate reason to freak out, I think.


Movement
More movement monologue work. We did them with two people moving simultaneously while everyone else watched and tried to identify patterns that were developing (as it's a lot harder to notice them when you're doing it). The pairs would do the monologues a couple of times, and then the class responded with things we noticed. Then the pair would go one last time, keeping those elements in mind.

I went with Big Show. We were told that we had good kinesthetic response (meaning that we were reacting to what the other was doing), but to be honest, I hadn't paid much attention to that (as it wasn't really the goal of the exercise). I was told that my physical vocabulary is pretty "acrobatic". One of the patterns that has come out is "lunging", and another is being in the same position on the floor at a specific piece of text.


Voice
More vowel work.

The type of speech that we're learning is called "Standard American Dialect", which, frankly, doesn't seem very standard at all. We're learning to say words like "Glorious", "Warrior", "Florida", and "orange" so that the first vowels are the same as the "aw" sound in "law" or "caught". We're also going to learn the "ask list", which are words where the "a" vowel needs to switch from sounding like "apple" to a "middle a", which sounds somewhat British ("ask", "last", "dance", and "ghastly" are some of the words on the ask list).

My professor says that the hardest vowels to identify the differences between are the ones in "law", "honest", and "father" (yes, those are three different vowels), so we're going to have to be careful when learning them and look things up a lot in our pronouncing dictionaries.

Our homework for tonight is to come up with 10 words each for the vowels in the words "who", "would", and "law", and to IPA them.


Acting
We continued doing etudes with our Vonnegut texts. I think O.D. and I were doing a pretty good job, until the point where the text ended but the scene didn't. We ran out of recorded (i.e. memorized) things to say, but had to stay in the scene (we only end things when our professor says "thank you"... or sometimes when one of the characters exits the room/stage). It's not always easy to stay with the scene in these situations, because you (as an actor) KNOW what happens later in the story, and you become reticent to break from it.

O.D. and I added some more lines of improvised dialogue to the end of the scene (pretty well, I thought), but the energy had definitely changed. I guess that's something to work on for tomorrow.

Our professor started leading some of our classmates through the same sorts of lines of questioning with their characters as he has been doing for our Person Observations. These aren't necessarily questions that you can answer from the text (just as with the observation ones they're usually false memories that you're developing on the spot).


Analysis
We started discussing King Lear today, and my inner-geek rejoiced!

We began by addressing things that make this Shakespearean text different from the other plays we've analyzed thus far (language, structure, imagery, rhythm, etc.). Our professor also brought up the convention of compressed action in Shakespeare (i.e. when a character witnesses something, and then says she's written a letter about it... even though she never left the stage and there was no time for her to have written it).

It looks like King Lear is going to lead us through the pathways of Religion and Nature. Interesting stuff.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Woohoo on your inner-geek! For religion in King Lear, you might consider the fact that Gloucester dedicates his suicide to the gods only to have the attempt become a farce... Or Albany's prayer for Cordelia's safety toward the end of the play, which is never answered (or worse yet, answered in reverse). Anyway, if you're interested in more on King Lear, check out Shmoop. Have fun with the analysis!