Wednesday, January 21

Movement
We jumped rope today for the first time since... wow... probably the last week of November. And it was not as easy as it used to be. It was really good proof that if you're not diligent in practicing things, your skills fade. I mentally applied that note to my acting technique. There's really just no replacement for consistent work over time.

We played "God/Creature" with our movement monologues, which I always enjoy. Our Movement professor observed us working, and stopped us to give individual notes. Mine were about paying attention to my alignment (as usual).

We also explored the monologues with movement two at a time, while the rest of the class observed. And, as my professor pointed out, it showed how different everyone's movement vocabularies are. When we're moving freely, we show a great deal about ourselves. It's interesting.

Our homework was to go through the monologue on our own ten times tonight, and to begin to pay attention to patterns in our bodies. Your body starts developing patterns around certain bits of text, and it's now our goal to notice them and create phrases out of them.


Voice
Today was our first day of working with vowels in IPA. We discussed forward versus backward placement of different vowels, how much the lips are engaged, and diphthongs (which are when two separate vowel sounds blend together to make new sounds).

Our professor recommended looking at IDEA - The International Dialects of English Archive. It's a website that has samples of real people from all over the world speaking in their regional dialects (reading passages -- like "The Rainbow Passage" or "Comma Gets a Cure" -- and then talking about themselves). How cool is that?

Our homework for tonight is to find ten words with the vowels from the words "green", "sit", "met", and "apple", and then write them all in IPA.


Acting
Our professor spoke at length about transformation and characterization. He said that the first semester was all about "The Creative Process" and learning "how to leave myself alone". This semester, we're adding in some of "The Calculative Process", while trying to maintain the Creative Process that we've been discovering.

We spoke about our character observation work. In order to allow the essence of the person you've observed to live, you have to focus on receiving. You also cannot try to explain who the person is, because, as our professor says frequently, "If you name it, you will kill it." You cannot know everything about the character, because you ARE the character. People do not know everything about themselves. As soon as you start analyzing, you are putting yourself at a distance from the character, and will not be able to become them.

A good example of this is in villains. Let's say that there are two brothers who are opposites; one is innately good, and the other inherently evil. Let's say that a friend writes a play based off of them, and the "evil" brother goes to see it. He will automatically assume that the "good" character is the one based off of him, because in his mind, he is good. The vast majority of the time, villains do not know that they are villains.

Our professor says that often, your best reading of a play is the first read-through, because you haven't really judged the character yet. If you start to judge it, you end up spending the entire rehearsal process trying to get back to what you had in that first readthrough.

He says that your first introduction to a character "forms an embryo". If you work in an organic way and nurture what you started with, then the embryo will grow into a human. If you grab a scalpel and try to dissect it and see what it's made out of, you will kill it.

When you are directed to do something, you have to figure out the given circumstances that make you do it. You have to determine what it is that you're receiving.

Do not become a puppet of the director, the playwright, or your own preconceived notions. Do not BUILD a character; let it GROW.

We, as actors, are not the authors of the story; the audience members are. It's when they come up to you after the show and tell you what they saw that the story is being determined... and you have to tune them out. Because you might not realize that what you were doing read as "envy" or "love", but you cannot play what they tell you that you are playing. You will end up hitting notes falsely.


Halfway through class, we got our assignments for the Novel Project. We've all been assigned characters in some Vonnegut short stories, and will be adapting them into scenes.

"Find Me a Dream" - Me & O.D.

"A Night for Love" - Wifey & Big Show

"The Lie" - Newbie, Killer, D-Train, & Thrill

"The Foster Portfolio" - D-Train & Killer

"Miss Temptation" - Two-Shots-Up & Thrill

"Long Walk to Forever" - All-the-Way & Iceman


We started experimenting with small portions of the scenes in the same fashion that we worked on our text etudes at the end of last semester.