Tuesday, March 23

VOICE
We picked up where we left off on our Irish dialect work.

I'll be honest: I'm terrible at Irish.

I rocked the New York dialect. That one was a piece of cake. And British RP was tough, but I worked on it super hard, and I ended up being great at it.

But Irish? It's twice as hard for me as RP was. There are SO MANY SHIFTS! And a lot of them are shifts that are very difficult for me to hear.

For example: compare the first vowel in the word "alien" to the vowel in the word "pay". They sound a lot a like, right? Well, in IPA, the first vowel in "alien" is written as [e], and the vowel in "pay" is written as [ei]. What that means is that "pay" has a diphthong, where the vowel is actually shifting from one vowel to another. "Alien", on the other hand, starts with a pure vowel.

When we originally learned the difference between these 1st-year, I made a note that for me, it was easiest to think of "alien" as a shorter vowel, and "pay" as a longer vowel. That's not REALLY what the difference is, but that's the only way that I could think of to tell them apart.

But in Irish? All the words that would have the "pay" vowel in Standard American shift to [e:], which means it's the vowel of "alien", but longer. You have to stretch out the vowel WITHOUT going to the diphthong.

I can't tell you how frustrating that is for me. It's hard for me to hear when I'm doing it wrong. And sometimes, I end up using the vowel of "get" (which is marked kinda like [E]) by accident.

I'm going to work as hard as I can on this. Wish me luck.

Our Irish dialect cheat sheets are due Friday.


MOVEMENT
A few days ago, we got the following e-mail from Movement Professor:

March 23 -- Perform your Stufffed Tukey for the Class. Everybody will perform, and then I will give any notes to address before the showing, in class, after everyone has shown their piece.

March 24 -- Character Work (as scheduled before break)

March 25-- Character Work

March 26 -- Commedia Presentations -- limit your presentation to 5 minutes, including your type's walk. You will be pre-empted at 5 minutes so be concise, and quick.


The Assignment for the Character Work was the following:

Find a role that you would like to play, and are right for. This role does not have to be age appropriate, but should not be as far from you as say, Lear or Queen Margaret.

I encourage you to pick a role that you would really like to do. Read the play, and take notes on every clue to the given circumstances of physicality that the author gives you about the character. Age, externals, movement qualities, etc will be noted, usually by other characters, and by the character him/herself. There are also ways to discover/create character that come from the rhythm of the writing, the period (as you know), economic class, and importanty, occupation.

You may also want to run the psychoanalytic game that you used to create your Restoration character.

With these given circumstances, begin to instinctively work on the character's walk. Then find a significant and essential gesture (psychological gesture) that exists within the behavior called for (or that could be called for) within the play.

For example, for George in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", it could be the way he picks up his drink. After that and Michael Chekhov qualities and dynamics that most closely describe your movement work on the character.

Bring your walk and psychological gesture into class, on Wednesday. I will then introduce Laban terminology that is useful to physical characterization, and other tools for physicality of character.

Let's make the most out of the last 4 weeks of your Movement Training!

We'll talk about the showing in class. I will also be setting up individual end of training conferences with each of you over the next 4 weeks.


So we came into class today and did our "Stuffed Turkey" Restoration monologues. I actually really like mine. It's a lot of fun to do. I think my ending is kinda weak at the moment, but I'll have time to work on it before we show them again.

Watching my classmates monologues was HILARIOUS. Oh man. Two-Shots-Up has an amazing sense of physical comedy, and is rocking it. Thrill changed his monologue a bunch since before break, and I almost fell over laughing. O.D. experimented with speeding his up, and it grew by leaps and bounds. Wifey has another prop in addition to her fan, which she throws around hysterically. D-Train and Killer are doing theirs in other dialects (Spanish and French, respectively), while the rest of us are in standard British RP. I wish we were working on them in class more than we are, just because they're so much fun to watch.


After school, I got an e-mail from Movement Professor about my Stuffed Turkey:

"Angela - The Rover/ Angelica

Excellent. Very beautiful. Soft quality that is linking lines well and moves throughout. Ease in face and gestures. Precise. Ends of moves are now clear.

Be sure to get the fan out before the beginning word so that you can get on the movement score. Pick up the tempo at 'who'. Add more vocal action and pitch shifts without becoming shrill (pitching up). Very good on getting the lines to run in their own tempo and verse. Gestures can be smooth, or quick, and accents can be more or less operative, just like words-- you are ready to work on this level of precision. On weakness, try moving backwards more onto the diagonal before. Not sure about move on folly.-- out of character? Gesture that she quickly wishes she hadn't made?

'Long worshipped idol...' list seems like it could be more creative. RP excellent and natural. Suggestion – listen to Noel Coward – for some more pitch and soft sound idea that is exaggerated – excellent work, felt a girl from a convent, actually."

So I still have things to work on, but I'm on the right track. :)



ACTING
We ran all of the tragedy scenes, and then got notes on them.

Some general notes I wrote down:

- Commit to winning every argument you have a stake in. LUST after winning it.
- Don't just make statements; USE your words.
- Energy should rise out of your Need
- Commit to LANDING words with vigor, confidence, and expectation


And notes that applied to me:
- avoid rushing the language
- getting much better at physicality
- good job at being a good match for Richard III in the argument
- don't be the character who just always says "no" -- figure out when the armor comes off
- be innocent
- make sure the "brothers" speech feels improvised, not planned
- WEAKENING on "What were I best to say?"
- "To veil the title as her mother doth." <- don't be sarcastic
- "Shall I be tempted of the devil thus?" <- don't be sarcastic
- Remember that at the end, Richard's offer is the lesser of the evils.


Our homework for tomorrow is to be ready to table-work our Comedy scenes. This entails:
- scansion
- Needs
- definitions
- operatives
- read the play again
- be an expert on the character
- know the performance history
- check different text editions