Wednesday, February 11

Movement
We continued doing alignment work focusing on our arms. My arms and torso are pretty loose parts of my body already, so I don't always feel the effects of what we're doing right away. But for some of my classmates, these things are helping a lot. Big Show said today that something Movement Professor did to his arm made it feel better than it has in years (he had an old injury there). It's good to know that the things we're doing are working, even though it's not always easy to feel the differences in myself.


Voice
More IPA practice exams to prepare us for the real thing on Friday. I tried to do mine today without using my vowel chart (as we won't be able to on the real test). I got one of the symbols for a diphthong wrong, but I knew what I meant. :) The word that proved the trickiest for me today was "firefly". The first syllable has a triphthong in it, which I didn't hear when I was writing it out. Oh well. I'm still doing a lot better on this stuff than I was.

I'm starting to understand the "All/Honest/Fathers" differentiations. It turns out that this is one case in which being "seduced by the spellings" of words (something that Voice Professor usually warns against) is not always a bad idea.

Voice Professor gave us a take-home practice exam. I can already tell you that the word I'm not sure on is "children" (I THINK that the last syllable has the "met" vowel, but I wouldn't be shocked if it's the "sit" vowel or the "run" vowel). In theory, I could just look it up in my pronunciation dictionary, but somehow that feels like cheating (even though this is only a practice test, and it is not being graded... I am moral beyond defensible logic, apparently).


Acting
We're still chugging along on our Vonnegut scenes. Big Show and Wifey had a particularly emotion-filled run of theirs today. All-the-Way and Iceman have found a really layered and complex take on theirs. In general, everyone is just really doing great work. More importantly, everyone is consistently improving. Our characters are growing, our stories are growing, and clearly we are growing as actors.


Homework
I got together with my group for Analysis class briefly to discuss how we're diving up things for our presentation on the use of imagery in Titus Andronicus. There's so much of it... I hope that the four of us will be able to squeeze everything into our allotted 25 minutes.


Tech
I've had box office duty several times recently (I filled in for Killer tonight, as he was going on in The Imaginary Invalid again). One of the people who worked there asked me if I thought that working there was teaching me anything that would help me in the future. I told her that more than anything, it has shown me how much people in box offices get abused. I will always be kind and patient to them, especially when asking for comps. :)