Tuesday, November 10

VOICE
Today we had our spoken exam, in which we attempted to speak our individual scoring for the Portia monologue we've been working on. I think I did alright. I hope.


MOVEMENT
We started off by lifting weights. Last year, I did a little bit of lifting when I had an injury that prevented me from jumping rope. At the time, I started with 5 pound hand weights, and then moved up to 8 pounds... But now, I've decided to scale back to 3 pound weights. And even with just the 3 pound ones, it was tough. For a lot of the stuff, we end up holding both weights in one hand anyway. Some people in my class are starting with 10 pounds.

We moved onto ballet after that. Honestly, I can't even remember most of what we did in ballet. Mostly reviewed stuff that we have learned in past weeks. The new things were more about combinations than new steps.


ACTING
We started off with watching the DVD corresponding to Chapter 5 of Playing Shakespeare, which is all about "set speeches" (aka monologues/soliloquies). Here are some notes I took during today's class (most of which are just reiterations of things we've discussed previously):

- Don't play the mood; play the need/intention
- Make discoveries. Everything is more interesting if you're discovering it in the moment.
- When addressing the audience in a soliloquy, choose one person (or areopagite) at a time to speak to.
- Make sure to hit all antithesis
- Keep "landing" lines
- Have an active inner life, and stay engaged in the scene
- Don't get your motor going by doing something artificial, like panting. It's a trap. and it's irritating to the audience.
- Go for the argument.
- Act on the lines
- Pick up cues
- Avoid being "woolly" (unclear)
- Clarity is our first obligation
- Is the outcome of your need immediate and verifiable?

Set speeches generally can be broken up into three sections:
1. React to what has just happened
2. Explore the ideas that have just come up
3. Arrive at a conclusion (or decided that you can't possibly come to a conclusion)


We turned in our sonnet assignments, in which we were to define all of our given circumstances (including partner, scenario, point of view, and inciting incident) and our tactics (aka "doings") for each of the four sections of the sonnets (three quatrains and a couplet). I think, in retrospect, that mine are all totally wrong...

We had to come up with "literal doings" and "sensual doings". I have sonnet 115. My doings were:

Q1: to comfort/to stroke
Q2: to engage/to grab
Q3: to bait/to tug
C: to excite/to massage

We'll see if any of those stick. Today, we went over Killer and Thrill's sonnets, and a lot of things changed while working with them. So who knows?



THE MYSTERY PLAYS
I did something really stupid backstage during the show today, and as a result, I was a second late on one of my entrances. It wasn't actually that big of a deal (the stage manager didn't seem to even have noticed), but it was really upsetting to me. I've been doing the show for two weeks, and for the most part things are running smoothly. It's unnerving to think that I could still do something like that. But I guess it's a good lesson about theatre: you always have to be on your A-game.