Wednesday, November 4

VOICE
We finished speaking the 3rd and 4th sentences of the Portia monologue individually. My notes were:
- make sure that the word "converted" has a light medial "t" (as opposed to a "d" sound)
- don't let your voice press

Our exam is going to be Tuesday. We are to bring our dialect books on Wednesday.


MOVEMENT
We did "adagios" for the first time, which are slow sequences involving things like arabesques. I totally loved them. It's like kicking in super-slow-motion. And, well, I love to kick. Arabesques? They're my new favorite thing.

We did some waltz-based stuff, too, where we were crossing the floor in pairs.

After class, Movement Professor came up to me and just said, "Yes." I asked her what she meant. She said that I'm getting it and really improving. And she said my "lines" are looking great. I was so excited!

Man, I love ballet.


ACTING
Acting Professoressa said that if some emergency arises in the middle of a Shakespeare performance, the actor usually says, "More of this will come anon," before exiting. I had previously heard of actors substituting forgotten lines with, "I am amazed and know not what to say."

We watched the 2nd chapter of the DVD Playing Shakespeare, which we had already read. It was on 'using the text'. I didn't agree with all the scansion choices made by the people in the video (like the suggestion that "Good Queen, my Lord, good Queen, I say good queen," from The Winter's Tale should be TEN STRESSED SYLLABLES in a row. I understudied the role of Paulina last year, and I would NEVER stress every syllable in that line! It would lose all meaning!). But it was interesting...

I think the best lesson that I got out of this chapter was something that I've extrapolated on more than they discussed it, which is the REASON that we work so hard to do all of this work on Shakespeare. We, as actors, have to go through hell analyzing everything, scanning all of it, knowing what every word means and how it connects to every other word... Because if we do it, then the audience won't have to. We do all this work to make it as accessible to them and easy to understand as possible. Everything we're doing, we do it so that the audience can get the story, just as we would want in any play.

If having to do tedious, insane work is going to make it easier to convey a story to the audience and have them understand it? Then I'm all for it. Of course I'll do it.

We went through a few more of people's sonnets, analyzing them and trying to figure out their "other" (who the character is talking to), "need" (aka objective), and "doings" (tactics).