Thursday, April 2

Yesterday's post, in case you hadn't realized, was an April Fools Day joke. So APRIL FOOLS! I will indeed be keeping up with this blog... Or at least attempting to do so. It's tricky sometimes... Which is why I'm so behind...


Movement
Last Thursday, Movement Professor gave a great speech all about how we should be looking at graduate school. It was really fabulous, and I couldn't possibly recreate it here, but here were a few of her points:
- It's a luxury to have the opportunity to attempt things that are scary, difficult, or impossible for us.
- The way we treat things in class is the way that we're habituating the way we handle things for our careers.
- We need to face challenges with openness and creativity, not skepticism and analyzation.

We've gone back to tumbling a bit. I can do dive-rolls over a person. All the guys in my class can do dive-rolls over TWO people (Thrill has even done THREE!). It's very impressive.

I can go into an arch (or a "bridge") position and then walk in circles using my hands and feet. It's pretty cool, I think, although it may have been the reason that I messed up my back last week...


Voice
I'm having trouble with glottal attacks, particularly with sentences that begin with vowel sounds. Voice Professor recommended that I practice saying vowel-words with an "h" sound. Then I can subtract the "h", but keep the feeling of it. Also, linking words together can help prevent glottal attacks because it continues the breath. Glottal attacks can only occur when you stop the breath on its journey.

We discussed that the word "a" is almost always pronounced as a schwa ("uh").

We don't have normal Voice class this week in favor of a Linklater Workshop (more on that later). Voice Professor gave us a list of things to work on with our "Wood Demon" monologues while she's gone (such as putting the tongue at the tip of the alveolar ridge on the word "selfish").



Acting
Another great speech we had last week came from Acting Professor. March 27th is "World Theatre Day". Acting Professor reminded us that it's important that we take our art seriously, because it is only when we take it seriously that the world takes it seriously. He had Big Show read Augusto Boal's message in honor of the occasion. (You can -- and should -- read it here.)

And, as always, there were just a bunch of pieces of wisdom that we've learned:

- Acting Professor pointed out that in Three Sisters, we see characters dealing with trivialities in lieu of handling their major problems. In life, we often only take the parts of things that we know how to deal with, and we let go of the other things. We sit, we eat, we talk, we drink tea... and meanwhile, our destinies are being decided.

- When entering the theatrical space, Acting Professor says it's important that you enter as though you came from somewhere. Don't come from backstage. Don't exit to backstage. Understand where the character came from and where they're going.

- When you're working through text in units, try to begin in moments where there would have been pauses in the text (sustained or preparatory). They make good points to mentally delete.

- As actors, we are trying to take deep, complex things and make them simple, but still truthful. The mistake is making them primitive and shallow. That can cause us to be truth-like instead of truthful, life-like instead of alive. We must not ignore the passions in the play to take the easy road of playing emotions.

- We have to take energy from our partners, the space, and eventually the audience. If we hold, we'll be cutting ourselves off and only yielding to inner-impulses, which are not inexhaustible. We must be in constant touch with the world around us, no matter what is happening.

- Some of us (Thrill, Newbie, O.D., and me) are working with older characters in this piece. Acting Professor says it's important not to play these characters using external characterization. We're not going to worry about physical age, but rather what age the person's SOUL is. We are still concentrating on essences, and we should not attempt to spoon-feed the characters to the audience.

- We have to ask ourselves how deeply we practice our technique. If you practice it deeply, you will be able to use it deeply. If you practice it somewhat, you will only be able to use it somewhat.

- We always need to give ourselves 100% freedom. It's not good to just be comfortable and safe at 30% freedom. We need to take risks and be bold in order to learn.

- When recording, it's important that we work on the side of the inclusive, mentally recording all stage directions.

- We have to take the given circumstances in as mines that we set in our paths, so that we'll have reasons to explode in the scenes.

- When we get notes, we need to take the notes and do them. We need to take them very seriously and work on them.

- We need to respect our colleagues, and respect their time. This includes their time in our scene work. We should not be indulgent in our pauses.

- We have to work decisively and boldly.

- Don't pause unless Chekov says to pause. He tells you when to pause. If you pause elsewhere, the written pauses will no longer be meaningful.

- The voice of your professor saying things like, "Very good... Just let it..." as side-coaching mid-scene needs to become your inner-voice.


Analysis
We read Big Love by Charles L. Mee last week. The best conclusion we came to about the action was about embracing humanity in its variety. It confused me.

Today, we discussed These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich. I greatly enjoyed it. We got into a class discussion about whether it the action was rooted in workers against the system, or women against society (I was in the former group... pretty much all the men in my class were in the latter).


Linklater Workshop
For this week, Voice Professor has gone up to our school's main campus, and a voice professor from up there has come down to us. They're familiarizing the other's students with their own specialties (so the undergrads are getting a crash course in Fitzmaurice and tremoring, and the grads are getting friendly with Linklater).

We've done a lot of work with opening up the throat, as well as freeing the tongue and the jaw. It seems that Linklater work and Fitzmaurice work are just different ways of accomplishing the same goals. It's good to have options in your toolbox.


Tech
Tonight was my first night as Assistant Stage Manager (ASM) for the musical Three Postcards. I'm excited about it. :) It was only their first run-through, but the actors already seem to be in a really great place. I can tell that the rest of my semester is going to be exhausting as a result of it, but I think it's going to be fun.