Wednesday, February 4

Movement
More alignment review.

I know that this alignment work is good for me (and have seen the results from it -- it's all definitely working), but sometimes it's hard to feel the benefits in the moment. My body is really loose (too loose, in fact), so I don't feel stretches that my classmates do. And sometimes I can't feel whether I'm moving the correct parts of my body (like different sections of my spine, or muscles deep inside the body like the psoas). I feel like I'm just filled with dead zones. It's occasionally frustrating.


Voice
We started diphthongs today. I think I have a pretty good handle on them. The ones we started with were in the words "here", "pay", "air", and "like".

I've had questions about the "air" diphthong for a long time, as it changes a great deal with different dialects. For example, in my dialect, "marry", "merry", and "Mary" sound the same. In other parts of the country, those are three different vowel sounds. Likewise, I think "Barry", "berry" and "bury" are homophones, whereas others might not. Same with "fairy" and "ferry". We didn't really discuss it much, so I guess I'll have to start looking things up in my Pronunciation Dictionary.

RANDOM TANGENT: my latest weird find in my Pronunciation Dictionary came when I looked up "oral" and "aural". I say the two words differently (so that "oral" starts with a sound similar to "obey", and "aural" starts with a sound like "awe"), but I've heard people say them the same (both with the "obey"-ish vowel). According to my dictionary, they should sound the same... but both should have the "awe" vowel. SO WEIRD.

Our homework for tonight is to come up with 4 examples of each of those diphthongs and IPA them.


Acting
I put on a black party dress, pantyhose, high heels, an "engagement ring", and make-up before class today in order to be as close to the correct state of my character as possible. I also took off my glasses and did the scene with the world looking a little bit blurry.

Things were a little shaky at the start (I denied a couple of impulses; one I was aware of, one I wasn't), but they started to flow. And not long into the scene, I suddenly had this wave of emotion flood over me. I (meaning the character, not the actor) didn't want to cry, but needed to. And so I broke down and wept (which is actually exactly what the character is supposed to do, but is something that I as an actress thought I wouldn't be able to do). I guess my professor was right about proper recording of given circumstances turning events into inevitabilities. I couldn't help but cry.

O.D. made some strides with his character as well. We got together tonight and worked for a bit on learning some more of the story (we're adapting the dialogue from a Vonnegut short story... it's not actually a play at all). I hope that it continues to bloom and grow, bloom and grow forever.