Monday, 1-31-11

Monday, 1-31-11

Today in class we spent a good deal of time talking about movies we’d seen over the weekend. Matt made the point that since our brains are in their last developmental growth spurt, we should be taking advantage of it by doing things like learning foreign languages, watching at least one foreign film every week, and reading a play every day. That sounds awesome. I should try and do a little bit of calculus every few weeks before I turn twenty so that I don’t lose my math-y brain either. And as for all those other things, maybe I’ll make a serious attempt at that after run crew ends in a couple weeks. I have been doing a pretty good job of watching a movie I haven’t seen before every weekend, which I definitely was not doing last semester. It’s definitely important to keep up on the industry considering I intend to be entering that industry in three and a half years (that soon?).

After we finished talking, we worked in our animals for about forty minutes. I got black tights over the weekend and those work really well to make my legs look more spindly and flamingo-esque. Flamingos are very skeletal creatures—they’re defined more by the curvature of their spine and the linear quality of their legs than by anything else. Matt wants me to work more with a slower tempo on Wednesday, because the precision and determination of each step is very effective.

Wednesday is Watering Hole, where all our animals will come together for a long improv session to finalize this portion of the assignment. Then we’ll begin transitioning our animals into human characters based on the animal, which I’m excited for. I think I’ll name him Florence.

I’m exhausted again, so this may be another short entry. I’ll include my thoughts on The Town, though, which I saw on Sunday. The Town had a lot of problems in pacing, and failed to fully explore the most interesting relationships in the movie. There were a lot of shots of people walking places when there could have been things actually happening. The writing was mediocre, but more importantly, The Town seems to have missed its own point, or perhaps it never knew what its point was to begin with. The most interesting characters (played by very good actresses as well) were given entirely too little attention (and thus the very talented actresses were completely underused). It was their relationships to the main character that I wanted to be explored, and in that the movie failed me. The conclusion was, in particular, a drawn-out mess, which is another pacing problem. If the movie was about escape, the final line didn’t make sense. In general, most of the problems were with the screenplay, but it just shows how even very good actors tend to make stupid decisions and thus do dumb acting when given so little to work with.

That’s it for tonight. I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about Watering Hole on Wednesday.

Friday, 1-28-11

Friday, 1-28-11

Matt was back today. We finished off the rest of our research project presentations, talked about those, and then did our circus tricks.

Matt noted that there were three main ways of inserting facts in our presentations: 1) Listing them off, book report style; 2) Inserting them ironically, like “there wouldn’t normally be a fact here, but there is since this is actually a research project, which is humorous!”; and 3) Working them in naturally to serve the purpose of the performance. He also described the second approach as being “meta” or self-referential, and observed that while none of us did the first, we all at least flirted with the second option and only a few of us actually got to the third place in our projects. This is important because it implies that we made a subconscious distinction between presenting our research projects and an actual performance, when really there should be no distinction. All action is to some extent a performance, particularly any public action. A speech at the Golden Globes will be judged just as publically as the same actor’s performance in the movie they were awarded for. In this business, we can’t afford not to treat every public presentation with every degree of specificity, thoroughness, and commitment that we would a film or stage performance.

For instance, in my case, (though I do think I worked a lot with the third option), I did not have the same level of character specificity that I would normally bring to bear. I was not specific in my where, and had only a general notion of who my character was. How much more interesting would it have been, Matt pointed out, if I had solidified why my character was talking about envying the flamingo? What if he was at an addict’s support group? AA? What’s a scenario that would be appropriate for a character who sits down and talks about flamingos for a few minutes?

The danger with being “meta,” as Matt points out, is that it can become an excuse for sloppiness. Though “meta” performance is very popular in contemporary comedy, when it is successful it has usually been treated with the same specificity and attention to detail as any other script. The thing we need to bear in mind is that ANY and ALL assignments for Acting should have me asking the same basic questions we learned to ask first semester. Where does this take place? Who am I? How do I feel about what am I doing? What are the stakes? What is at stake for my character in particular? I need to keep reminding myself to ask these questions whenever I begin working on a project.

As for the circus tricks, they went quite well. Though none of the tricks were particularly impressive in the traditional sense of circuses, that wasn’t what was important. What was important was to perform a trick as the animal, something the animal would think was impressive, or else something that the animal doesn’t want to do but is forced to do anyway. The trick itself is completely unimportant in comparison to what is revealed about the psychology of our animals in the process of the exercise. As my flamingo, I walked on foppishly to “Whipped Cream” by Herb Alpert and, staring confrontationally at the audience, raised one of my feet off the ground and balanced on one leg. Then I repeated the same action, but this time, on a BLOCK! Not particularly exciting. But my flamingo thought it was pretty hot shit. What I could have explored further was finding the opposites to work with set against the music. Whenever music is added to something, a whole array of opportunities arise to work in cooperation or in conflict with the music, and conflict is something I could have explored further. Maybe I treat my trick with a deferential reverence similar to prayer, entering slowly, with purpose, and lifting my leg as if it was a fragile piece of glass… all still set to the upbeat Herb Alpert. That would be pretty funny.

My costume really came together today. I need to find white stockings over the weekend and I think that should round it out perfectly. Otherwise, Animal Projects is reaching its first climax with Watering Hole next week (Wednesday). I’d write more, but my run crew assignment starts tomorrow morning so I should try and be asleep as soon as is physically possible.

Thursday, 1-27-11

Today I spent about two hours working on my flamingo costume. I sewed pink fabric onto the wooden dowels I got to make (admittedly kind of rough looking) wings, and used cardboard, tape, and a shoelace to make the beak. I'm pretty pleased with the overall effect though. Pictures of me in full costume will hopefully go up sometime next week. For now, here are some pictures of the wings and beak.


(In retrospect, I shouldn't have used my bed as workspace. The comforter is covered with tiny threads of pink fabric now.)

Today in Movement we did some work with our animals, applying the Bartenieff Fundamentals of Developmental Movement we've been learning to our animal physicality-work. This was nice because we had a good long time to work in character, and a very specific set of movement ideas to explore. The Bartenieff movement work looks at basic levels of connectivity through the body, beginning with Breath and working up to more complex dimensional exploration, like the diagonals of the extremities, the centering of the body in the hips, or other unconventional muscle exercises that give us simple, physical ideas to work with. Looking for particular explorations of, say, the Contralateral connectivity in the flamingo was an interesting way of improvising with the animal and looking for new ways of moving.

I'm also looking at music for my flamingo circus trick for tomorrow. I'm thinking something by Herb Alpert would be appropriate. I want to do a sort of balancing trick but the problem with balancing tricks is then I actually have to be able to balance something. Haha, maybe I can balance something light and square-ish on my cardboard beak.

Wednesday, 1-26-11

Wednesday, 1-26-11

Matt was sick today, so my class split between the other two Freshman Acting teachers, each of us going to the teacher we had not had the previous semester, so I had Barbara for the day. We spent a lot of time working in character as our animals, and Barbara gave each of us a cue to aggressively defend our territory, or something of ours, and the rest of us simply reacted to the incensed animal in character. The key here was not to simply defend inwardly, but to make specific and active choices, choosing one animal in particular at a time to scare off, to direct your anger at. This was always noticeably more engaging than when an actor simply reared up and inspecifically roared or hooted or whatever. Once they chose a particular target for their physicality and vocalization, not only was their performance more cogent, powerful, and intimidating, but it engaged them with their animal more naturally and more believably.

Another interesting point of this exercise was the way naturally timid or non-aggressive characters had to act when defending their territory. For myself, I for the moment accepted that my flamingo was not going to just run away and cawed and flapped as flamingos do when squabbling with each other. Making loud sounds and spreading my wings would hopefully scare away whatever encroaching animal approached, but if not the flamingo would be poised to turn and fly off. Other had to find different solutions though. Jimmy, whose animal is a sloth, described his approach as just “pleading that nobody would kill me,” which may legitimately be the closest thing to aggression a sloth can summon. An important thing to take away from this is that no matter how timid you think a character is, if that character is forced into a situation where they must find some way to defend themselves at all costs, the excuse “my character would not do that” just doesn’t cut it. That excuse is never sufficient, really. The actor’s job is not to shut out opportunities, but to justify actions and bring life to all action within a scene. Even if the action one chose to play was “please don’t kill me,” a subtext to whatever lines were being said, that’s still stronger than shutting down and losing the inner life of a character because “this character is just too timid. He wouldn’t defend himself.”

I broke out more costume pieces today, and overall I think it’s coming together very nicely. The main challenges I need to address (preferably by Friday, but over the weekend at the latest) are the wings and the beak.

For the wings I’ve been using wooden dowels, but I want to attach pink fabric to them somehow. I’m not sure how to get the black band at the bottom of the inside of each wing, but that’s something I’d like to include as well, optimally.

The beak is particularly challenging. I’m not going to try to make it open and close, but even just to get the shape of it and to get it to stick to my face will be difficult. My plan, though, is to attach it to a pair of glasses (maybe sunglasses? I have some that might work.)

In other news, I wrote a new ten-minute play for Adv. Playwriting. The assignment was to write a ten-minute play or scene where a story is told by one of the characters, or a well-known story’s structure is paralleled in the structure of the play. I kind of did both, basing my play off of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” It started out as a pretty simple concept, but it grew a lot in the writing of it and I like it a lot. It’s the first ten-minute I’ve written in a while, and it got me thinking I should try writing more, and out of that came an idea for a showcase fundraiser that my entire Freshman class could collaborate on. Oftentimes playwrights will write plays with particular actors in mind for particular characters, and I thought it might be cool for Sam and Kyle and me to try and write short scenes or plays for every one of the Freshman actors and MTs, and perform them back to back to back one evening to fundraise for the Senior showcase. That could be cool. I’ll talk to them about it tomorrow.

Monday, 1-24-11

Monday, 1-24-11

Today in Acting we warmed up with Slava work but for some reason I didn’t feel as engaged as I did during the work on Friday. I had to keep reminding myself to stop retreating inward and refocus my attention on the people around me. It could be just a result of having an extremely busy weekend and thus being preoccupied with other things. I’m not sure. But it’s something interesting to notice and be aware of. As long as I was able to notice it and keep re-engaging myself I think I was able to participate fully anyway.

After the warm-up we talked about what we’d seen over the weekend. I brought up Scott Pilgrim because I’ve noticed that every time I watch it I become more critical of it. To be clear, I really love the movie. I think it’s highly enjoyable and altogether a solid story. However part of what I love about it is that it has real flaws and things that could be improved upon. Though these don’t necessarily detract from my enjoyment of the movie, I do noticed them and I think they do detract from the movie’s quality independent of my personal opinion.

Matt Gray described Scott Pilgrim as one of the movies that will define our generation, and I think that’s true. But for a movie with such a unique world they do very little to properly set up the fantastical elements of that world in the early part of the movie. To my mind it’s a fairly simple fix: In the comics, several characters repeatedly mention the fact that Scott Pilgrim just happens to be “the best fighter in the province” as if it were some off-hand and perfectly normal fact. That tells us two things. A) Fighting can be expected to occur frequently, and B) Scott is going to be above average at it. Just those two things, in combination with what we already know about Scott and the environment of the film, would go a long way to bringing the audience up to speed faster than the movie currently does. It is hard for me to be completely objective about this since I read the comics before I saw the movie, but I do think that overall the movie does a very good job of adapting the story into something simple and cinematic, but could go farther to bring the audience along for the ride assuming that they may not be familiar with the comics.

Another problem with the movie is the ending. They basically trade a dramatic finisher for a gimmicky bastardization of one of the elements that’s explored further in the comics, and I think that’s one of the movie’s biggest blunders. They try and tie in Nega-Scott with the Nega-Ninja from the video game earlier on, but I found that to be unnecessary and weak. It was good for an easy laugh, but I think I would’ve rather had more focus placed on the defeat of Gideon, both symbolic and literal. Why not make Gideon the Nega-Ninja? Or do something more original without throwing in a reference to the comics that isn’t fully supported. Sam French suggested that Scott could have defied expectations by refusing to fight Gideon at the end and ending the cycle in a different way, which would have been a much stronger arc. I’m not saying that’s what they should’ve done, but it’s a possibility.

But back to Acting class. After we talked we went straight into the presentations of our Animal Research Projects. The presentations had to be creative, that is, a performance or interactive game rather than a book report. I went first. I chose to go the minimalist route, and simply sat myself down in a chair and performed a monologue I’d written up over the weekend. I had spent about an hour altogether writing and rehearsing it, and it wasn’t hard to be natural with it since a lot of it just relied on knowing the facts. The idea behind the monologue was that I was a sort of caricature of myself saying “I wish I was a flamingo… here’s why.” I tried to make it funny and delivered it dead-pan and serious, and I think it was well-received. It felt successful. In retrospect I think I could’ve gone a little farther with it—found ways to include more of my research and so on—but it got the important information across and it was enjoyable. I liked what I did.

The other projects were, on the whole, also excellent. Interestingly, the least successful ones were the ones where the person was so obviously and blatantly going for the comedy that it distracted wholly from the information they were trying to get across. As I was discussing with Chris Douglass later in the day, most comedy works best when it’s subtle, where the normalcy is there so that the ludicrous stands out all the more. If everything is ridiculous then it becomes flat, predictable, and awkward to watch.

We’ll be finishing up research presentations on Wednesday and our assignment for Friday is to prepare a circus trick as our animal and perform it for the class to music. The circus trick doesn’t have to be wild or crazy, or anything our animal just wouldn’t or couldn’t do—it could be as simple as kicking a ball. That’ll be fun.

On the costuming front, I procured a bunch of pink clothing at Goodwill yesterday and dowels for the wings today. I’m still worried about the beak, but then again it’s not unexpected that it will be the most complex piece to manufacture. Funny story: Kyle Wilson went to Goodwill with me yesterday and we waited for about an hour and a half for the 500 bus to come by to take us back to campus. We took shelter inside a Laundromat where it was warm. What was humorous though was that when we first got to the stop we asked this woman with an iPhone when the bus was coming, and she said “10 minutes.” After about 40 minutes, I went out to ask iPhone lady if she would like to go into the Laundromat for a while and I would stand outside and watch for the bus. She declined, and said “I think it’ll be coming in a minute.” Another 40 minutes passed and she left. Then after a while the bus came. iPhone lady was nowhere to be seen. It’s just funny how far people will go to defend the claims they make, even if they aren’t originally their claims. I mean, how much clearer could it have been that the bus simply could not be expected to just show up within a few minutes? Anyway. I hope she got home okay. I’m attaching the script I wrote for the monologue I performed today. There was some variation due to improv, but it’s mostly pretty accurate.

"I am not a flamingo. I envy the flamingo.

I know a lot about flamingos. And when you know as much as I do about flamingos you can’t help but envy them. I wish I was a flamingo. For starters, the flamingo’s neck is so flexible that they can reach their back-feathers with their beak for preening. That would be useful. I hate it when I’m at the beach, and I’m contorting my arms this way and that trying to spread the sunscreen-… anyway. I can never find anyone to spread the sunscreen on my back for me.

That’s another nice thing about flamingos. They live in flocks. Their whole lives. The bigger the flock, the happier the flamingo. All day, every day, their walking around together. Eating together. Enjoying each other’s company. Fighting. Squawking. Marching. Flapping their wings. Making themselves pretty. I can barely find four people who tolerate me, let alone hundreds.

The American Flamingo doesn’t have any natural predators. There’s the occasional wild dog or egg-poaching eagle, but generally flamingos don’t have anything to fear. That sounds nice. The flock isolates itself away from other animals, in warm, moist, wetlands. I think that’s the most comforting phrase in the world. “Warm, moist, wetlands.” I’d love to live in a warm, moist, wetland. If I got hungry, I’d just stick my head in the water and gurgle for a bit, and my specially designed beak and tongue would filter microscopic organisms into my esophagus. And then all the carotene would make me pink and pretty.

I tried to turn my skin orange eating carrots after seeing an episode of Magic School Bus.

Flamingos aren’t that different from humans though. They’re very devoted animals. They mate for life and then they raise their chicks together, as a team. Heck, lots of humans don’t even manage that anymore. Flamingos court each other by flapping their wings at each other, touching beaks, and synchronized marching and head bobbing. Sounds like my parents. They lay their eggs on mud piles, and after a month it hatches and they feed it for a few months until it can feed itself. And then it only takes the chick six years to reach sexual maturity…

…That would be awesome.

But the best thing about being a flamingo… besides having a bunch of friends around all the time, besides being mostly isolated and safe from predators your entire life, besides being naturally graceful and beautiful, besides skipping adolescence and jumping right into having sex… the BEST thing about being a flamingo is that if you want, you can spread your wings and fly… you weigh less than ten pounds… you’re only about four feet tall, and hell, you live in paradise already. But if you want, baby you can fly. 30 miles an hour… 35, sometimes. They’re completely free. Graceful. Beautiful.

…I wish I was a flamingo.”