3/24/09

Tuesday, March 24

I think that part of what makes my program so special is the relationship it has with the community. There's an Adopt-A-Student program in place, and as a result, we develop close relationships with people around. Today, we were given the very sad news that a woman who was a large supporter of our program and our theatre passed away over the weekend. She was wonderful to me, and I am heartbroken over the loss.

That put a bit of a dark cloud over my first day back to classes.


Movement
Movement Professor, sensing that our bodies were not ready to go straight back into tumbling, did stretches with us for the majority of class.

We also worked with "Clouding". It's a group activity in which the group lifts one person, and then supports their body as they move in space. It's kind of like crowd surfing, but way cooler. I was a little too nervous to be clouded today, but I'll probably go tomorrow.


Voice
We went over the female monologue from The Wood Demon today, and will go over the male one tomorrow. We asked questions about pronunciation. All-The-Way and I had the most... I actually still have more (I never asked about "laughing", for example), but we ran out of time. Voice Professor came up to me after class and encouraged my question-asking, saying that it results in everyone coming to a clearer understanding of the IPA work. So if we have time, maybe I'll ask a couple more questions tomorrow.


Acting
We worked on Act I of Three Sisters using the costumes we found over break. All the guys playing officers (Big Show, Iceman, Killer, and Thrill) got matching uniforms out of props storage. I think they might have originally been used as marching band uniforms, but they work for our rehearsal purposes and they look pretty great (side note: men in tight white pants = hilarious).

I started as Másha and Newbie started as Anfísa, and then we switched. Másha is pretty depressed and weird at the beginning of the play, which is lucky because I was already in a similar emotional state when we began.

We ended up getting about 2/3 of the way through Act I. Kulygin (O.D.) and Natasha (Wifey) haven't made their entrances yet, but we'll definitely get to their parts tomorrow.


Analysis
We started by discussing more of Caucasian Chalk Circle after getting our papers back. We then compared it to our latest read, Orestes 2.0. Brecht took problems his society was facing and set them in the past in order to get his audience to look at them with a sense of disconnect. Mee took a myth from the past and modernized it in order to achieve a similar effect.

We're going to spend one more day on Orestes 2.0, and then move onto another Mee work: Big Love. The full texts of both plays can be found online (LEGALLY!) here.

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