3/30/10

Tuesday, March 30

KING JOHN
Last night was our first performance of the King John late night, directed by 3rd-Year KS. We had a great crowd! And it was a lot of fun to tell that story. It's been a long time since I was in a Shakespeare play (not just a reading, or a scene, or an understudy role... but IN one. The last one was in 2006), and it was nice to get another chance to be in one.

If you missed it, we're having another performance! It will be Tuesday, April 6th @8pm in the Cook Theatre. Hope you can make it!

FIZZ
Over the weekend, I saw a staged reading of Fizz by Rogelio Martinez, which is part of the Unplugged Festival of new works. It's about the president of Coca Cola in the 1980's, and it was awesome. So, so, so funny, but also poignant. And the 3rd-years who were in it were fantastic. It was wonderful to see.

VOICE
Today Voice class was optional, for anyone who hadn't finished their Irish transcriptions, or who wanted extra help. So I went. Because Irish? It's super tough for me. As I may have mentioned.

There are tons of shifts, and they're all super specific. And, unfortunately, the text we're converting has the dialect written in, which just makes transcription harder. (Why do playwrights do that? WHY?)


MOVEMENT
We started off by walking around as our Commedia characters. Then we got out the mats, and started moving as the animals that are connected to our Commedia types. (My character Vittoria, is connected to both pink flamingoes and love birds.) Then, we had to "evolve", from the animal into the character, keeping some of the animal characteristics in tact. It was really funny to watch.

Then, we were put into groups of 3-4 characters that often work together (my group was me, Wifey, Iceman, and Two-Shots-Up... aka Vittoria, Columbina, Harlequin, and Harlequinetta), and had 2 minutes to come up with a scenario to play out. Then we played them out, using Grammelot.

Grammelot is a way of speaking gibberish that is based off of the sounds of another language. Some people find it's easier to create Grammelot based off a language they know. Some people find it's easier to do Grammelot based off of a language that they DON'T know. I'm in the latter category. I've studied German and Italian, so I'm going to do French Grammelot. All-The-Way is already really good at her Italian Grammelot. I was impressed.

If you want a good idea of Grammelot, watch this video. It's a bunch of Italians singing a song in "English Grammelot" (aka, what they think English sounds like, including a couple of actual words, and mostly gibberish ones).



ACTING
We moved our set pieces down to the theatre, where we'll be doing our Acting Showing at the end of this semester. Acting Showings are usually done in a classroom, but we requested the stage and got approved.

We began staging the "Comedy of Errors" scene (All-The-Way & Killer) and the "Two Nobel Kinsmen" scene (O.D., Thrill, Newbie, & Two-Shots-Up).

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