12/2/09

Wednesday, December 2

VOICE
I read my British monologue out loud, and it turns out, I have a ton to work on before tomorrow's exam. I understand all the shifts, but I can't quite do all of them.

The hardest things for me are the things that are NOT shifts between Standard American and RP, but that are shifts for me from my personal dialect into Standard American and RP... So, for example, I have a midwestern sort of diphthong in words like "apple", "man", and even "Angela". In words like "am", "had", "have", and "Jack" in this monologue, I have to remember to shift, even though it doesn't look like a shift on paper. I found in class today that it helps if I think of it as German... I guess my mouth has to do something similar to how I think of umlauts or something... I don't know if any of that makes sense, but it worked for me, so I'm going to keep thinking about it that way and try not to over-analyze it.

My other strong diphthong comes out on the second vowel of the word "vibrations". It's supposed to be the first vowel in "alien" as opposed to the diphthong in "pay"... Apparently, I'm doing it wrong. But to be honest, I can't hear it. I really can't tell when I'm doing it right or wrong. I've been practicing tonight (with Two-Shots-Up, who was kindly helping me), and for tomorrow I'm going to try to shift it almost to the "eh" in "met", and hope for the best (it's not really the right vowel, but at least it's not the kind of wrong that I've BEEN doing... so at least Voice Professor will know I'm trying).

One of the other notes I got was that Voice Professor thought I wasn't using my real voice, but was going into a weird character voice. I didn't notice it (and certainly wasn't trying to). I guess I was just nervous... And when I tried to adjust my voice from her note, she said that I lost my forward placement. Blergh.

Other words I have to watch out for are "been", "very", "notorious", "domesticity", and "solitude".


MOVEMENT
Today was ballet day. We did some bar work, which, let me tell you, really hurt after not doing it for 3 weeks. And the fact that we're all sore from contact improv yesterday probably didn't help.

For the showing on Friday (come if you can!), we're doing a little choreographed bit of ballet to an a cappella cover of Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" by a group called Sonos (you can listen to it here). It's just a short little thing, but I think it's pretty cool.


ACTING
We got to my monologue today. Acting Professoressa said that I did it with "technical excellence", which made me happy. :)

We decided that my need for my Constance monologue is going to be "to get them to tell me not to kill myself." It's sort of weird, I know, but it was really helpful. And it's both active and positive, which is great.

I think I'm going to end up cutting my monologue a little differently in order to give the end of it more bite. That'll be nice.

Acting Professoressa says that in classic texts, you have to ask yourself, "Where does my character get her ideas? What feeds her imagination?" The characters didn't have television or movies or newspapers. Many of them are secluded in court. Do they read a lot? Do they gossip with chambermaids? What makes them think the way they think about the world?

No comments: