Tuesday, September 1

(According to Blogger, this is my 200th post... Just thought I'd mark it with a nice little celebration. Hurrah!)


VOICE
Over the weekend, Killer took care of gelling the one light in the Voice studio that we can't turn off. The effect is fantastic. As Two-Shots-Up said, "It's hella ambient." (She's from California...) Thanks, Killer!

We read Lady with the Lapdog aloud. Voice Professor took notes (I assume that they were about things that we'll have to watch for with our Standard American Dialect within the piece). We're going to continue with it tomorrow.


MOVEMENT
Today, we took the next step in "Little Bears". So far, for those who haven't been keeping track, we had been doing partner movement improvisation using the concepts of sheltering and being sheltered, and also finding "fulcrums" so that the weight of one partner can be taken by the other. The next step? Becoming little bears, of course! Moving with all the clumsy awkwardness of bear cubs, while keeping in mind the other notions we'd been practicing.

Observe the adorable clumsy awkwardness of bear cubs:

So did that feed your imagination enough that you can kind of picture our class time?

It's SO MUCH FUN. So much fun to watch, AND so much fun to do. I kind of want to teach it to everyone I know and do it every day.

We have to be mindful of safety during it, especially since some of my classmates have physical limitations due to past surgeries and whatnot. Movement Professor says that, "In contact improvisation, you are your brother's keeper." She also reminded us that the less you use your hands and arms, the better off you are.


ACTING
Today was presentation day for our Cultural Anthropology projects. We were supposed to take a maximum of 15 minutes, but I think mine went on for longer that than because I was answering questions mid-presentation... As a result of a couple of people's projects going long, Thrill will present tomorrow.

I'm continually reminded of how brilliant my classmates are. Part of what makes my education here so great is that I can really trust them to bring a ton of information to the table. With these projects, we're all getting all the important information about Ancient Greece in a fraction of the time it would take us to research it individually. And because everyone has done such a great job with their individual assignments, we can trust that we have our bases covered. It makes me feel really lucky to be a part of my class. I heart them.


AUDITIONS
Our auditions for the season will be on Saturday, September 12th. We'll each have 3 minutes to do 2 contrasting monologues (just like last year, and like URTAs). There will be callbacks on Saturday, September 19th.

Voice Professor has been in communication with the guest director for our season (who will be directing my entire class in Machinal by Sophie Treadwell), so she passed along some info to us. The guest director is going to audition us by doing a workshop the day after our auditions for everything else. For the workshop, he has asked that we all acquire The Proposal by Anton Chekhov (preferably the Paul Schmidt translation). We are to find scenes to work on with partners, somewhere between 1-2 minutes in length. We must be off-book for the workshop (which will be Sunday, September 13th... Oh my God, I just realized how soon that is. How did it get to be September already?). We need to bring a copy of the scene, and wear clothes that we can move in.