Friday, September 25

VOICE
The reason that we do vocal extremes preparation is because we want our work to be understandable even though it's in heightened moments. We started moving on to other vocal extremes besides screaming, such as shouting, wailing, crying, and laughing. Voice Professor says that in laughing and crying, your body is doing basically the same thing: going into rib squeeze. There's no way to prevent it (and try to support well) without it sounding really fake and terrible.

In one of my lines in The Greeks, I shout "Sh, look! I'm leaving!", so I asked Voice Professor what I should do to go from the unvoiced sustained "sh" into a shout. She said not even to try putting it in one breath, as a "sh" takes so much breath out of you. So I'm taking a cheat breath after "sh" now.

We have our exam over this work on Tuesday. We're supposed to prepare "triangle hum", "head roll hum", "silent scream/scream" and "silent shout with text/shout with text."

MOVEMENT
Movement Professor is trying to strengthen our obliques, but I feel everything in my abs instead. She checked my form on the exercises and says that my obliques ARE engaging. Her hypothesis is that I'm not strong enough to use them entirely yet. I think it might just be that my rectus abdominus is so weak that it is easily pained. All I know is that my stomach looks a lot better than it did when I got here, so I'm going to trust whatever she says.

We played a little bit of "God/Creature" at the end of class (aka "Master/Slave", "Lord/Serf", "Sounder/Mover", or whatever other term we come up with until someone says they find it offensive).


ACTING
I had a lunchtime rehearsal one-on-one with Acting Professoressa to work on my opening monologue in Andromache. She says I'm making great progress, and that she's excited about the development of it. I still don't feel particularly confident. I hope I grow into it.

One of her most frequent notes lately has been "stop making statements." This is regarding using lines as statements of fact as opposed to using them to get your "need", and to affect the other person. She says this problem is almost always fixed by a change in point-of-view.


PRODUCTIONS
Our first rehearsal for The Mystery Plays!!! So exciting!

Head of Program (formerly known as Analysis Professor... who will probably also at some point be called MP Director, knowing me) started out by telling us to write the following phrase on the first page of our scripts: "[Head of Program] believes I can do this." He said that he doesn't give "cookie notes", and that there will be times when things are hard and we will forget that he believes in us, so he wanted us to have that written reminder.

His biggest rules of rehearsal are:
- Once a scene has been staged, get off book as soon as possible.
- After being given a note, do not say, "You told me _______ before." It doesn't matter what he said before, because NOW he's saying THIS. (Or, as Iceman put it, "So, do what you say, not what you said.")
- After being given a note, do not say, "I thought I was doing that." Because clearly, if he wrote it down, you weren't doing it (or you weren't doing it ENOUGH, or weren't doing it the way he wants).
- Take CAREFUL blocking notes. You can request a moment to write notes down if you need to, but do not rely on the Stage Manager.
- Do work on your own time. He will EDIT what we bring in; he does not want to GIVE us what to do.

We did our read-through, which was neat. Our first preview audience will be on October 27th (OMG OMG, we only have a month to do this... And we're in classes... WHOA).

After the read-through, I threw out my hypothesis for what the action of the play might be, in the style that we would have last year in Head of Program's class. My guess? "To alleviate guilt." We'll see if that holds true.