Friday, October 2

VOICE
Something interesting I learned: Shakespeare wrote in a dialect. And the dialect he was writing in (and spoke himself) was probably closer to a Southern American dialect than it is to RP (standard British). (Voice Professor said that Jane Lapotaire wrote about this.) In fact, it's closer to most American dialects than it is to RP. So anytime that you've seen Shakespeare plays where American actors were conjuring British accents? Yeah, that's really not necessary. In fact, it's more likely to screw people up than to help them nail flow of the language.

We're going to be working with a Juliet monologue (from Romeo and Juliet, if that wasn't obvious) to work on our scansion whatnot. We started by looking at the metrical feet of the poem and figuring out what was iambic ("unstressed-stressed", like the word "because") and what was trochaic ("stressed-unstressed", like the word "mother"). We also found some examples of spondee ("stressed-stressed") and pyrrhic ("unstressed-unstressed") which are often found together (i.e. "that was SO FUN!"). There are also feet with three syllables, like anapest ("unstressed-unstressed-stressed"... my instinct is to use "limousine" as an example, but I guess that could be said with the first syllable stressed too... so you'll just have to guess on this one) and dactyl ("stressed-unstressed-unstressed", as in "Angela").

Voice Professor also explained a concept that she has code-named "red houses", which is when two words next to each other form a concept in a way that both words need to be stressed. So in the monologue we're working on, examples include "dark night" and "light love". So those word phrases are spondees, and usually some words before or after them are pyrrhic.


MOVEMENT
Movement Professor started having us do contact improv in groups of threes and fours. It was interesting, but I think most of us were too tired to be able to do what we wanted to with it.

Next week, we're going to be starting our 6-week ballet unit. I'm looking forward to it.


ACTING
We ran all three of the excerpts of plays we're doing for The Greeks.

I obviously wrote down more notes for Andromache than the other two, since more notes were directed specifically at me. I had tried really hard to follow my impulses during the run and live in the state of "I am" with Andromache. And as a result, I got more notes than I have ever gotten before. They included:

- Don't stress too many words in the same line.
- Don't let your "need" get too casual.
- Don't forget to use prop fan to fan self.
- Don't say lines as monosyllabic (meaning all words stressed) unless you have a good reason.
- Don't play the futility of the situation.
- Invest more in the proposition of having the areopagites imagining themselves in your shoes.
- Play more with the vowels of words.
- Don't make faces on words like "pointless" and "evil".
- Link lines together. (I got this note on many specific lines.)
- Don't fall off vocal energy.
- Land lines (which means not only "sending and landing" as it did in Voice class last year, but also involves not letting them have a downward inflection pitch-wise... And I got this note on many specific lines.).
- Keep talking through while fighting to escape.
- Stop putting stress on words like "must", "not", and "don't".
- Pick up cue for final monologue faster (i.e. find a quicker impulse)
- In the phrase "who are our masters", be careful not to emphasize "our" because of trying to distinguish the vowel from "are".
- In the last monologue, highlight the words "happens" and "happened" with verbal quotation marks.

Despite all the notes, I think I made progress. There were a few lines that finally came out of me in a way that was natural and useful (even if getting there did involve not linking or landing for this rehearsal). So that's good. It's just incorporating everything that makes it difficult.


MYSTERY PLAYS
Another day, another rehearsal. We were all pretty tired (as is to be expected when you're rehearsing until 11pm on a Friday after having classes and rehearsals all week). But we're moving along. Head of Program said his goal was to have the whole play blocked by the end of rehearsal on Sunday.