Friday, 1-21-11

Friday, 1-21-11

Today all three acting groups met together with Matt Gray since the other two freshman acting teachers were in New York. It was a group of 38 students altogether. We warmed up for the majority of the period, playing exercise-games Matt Gray style and culminating in group improvisational movement and sound work called ‘Slavo,’ which was supposed to engage us physically with each other and get us breathing and sweating. It was a very Dionysian exercise (I’m now taking a class devoted to Nietzsche and we’re starting with Birth of Tragedy so if thoughts like that slip out, that’s why.) and I enjoyed it a lot, even if it was an exhausting way to warm up for an exhausting activity.

Embodying the flamingo can be quite exhausting. The trick is to not let the tiredness manifest in a negative way: breaking character, becoming sloppy or unspecific, etc. instead, if my lower back is getting tired from being constantly arched, I am trying to find solutions to the problem while staying within the animal’s physicality—essentially solving human physiological soreness as if it were the animal’s soreness and approaching it as the animal would. Since my upper torso is really part of the flamingo’s neck, I can relieve the tension in my lower back by simply raising my “neck,” straightening up momentarily, cawing, flapping, and returning to flamingo-neutral. Or I can bend forward, examining something on the floor, or take a resting pose, tucking my “neck” in to my body and thus curving my back the other direction. Of course then I also have to lift one leg up, which I can only maintain for a limited time right now.

Another way to approach tiredness is to simply reject it, concentrating on a greater attention to detail to distract from any complaining of the body. Especially in the early stages, I need to remember that tiredness is not something to give in to. If I’m getting tired, I need to stop focusing on how tired I feel and start finding other things to focus on. What are the flamingo’s surroundings? What can it hear? Smell? What is the temperature? By constantly relaying a sort of psychic dialogue of sensory input and animal response, I can have natural and specific improvisation with a minimum of artificiality. And by concentrating on that “psychic dialogue,” as I have termed it, I can reasonably distract myself from superficial tiredness for a good long while. The body is capable of a great deal, but it is a whiner, and the great temptation is to give into that whining. As Matt Gray always says, as actors we must train ourselves to go towards conflict, to go towards pain and embrace it. So there you go.

Matt Gray talked today about avoiding a pattern of our animal’s “greatest hits,” or a series of remarkable behaviors that we can repeat ad nauseum instead of actually acting naturally. We need to be observing our animals at their most boring, not just when they are performing some exciting action or task. Ninety percent of the time the animal is not doing anything super exciting, and that should reflect to some extent in our work. We have to be accurate to the animal’s physicality and personality all of the time, not just when performing its “greatest hits.”

One thing that helped me today was keeping a straw in my mouth the entire time. Fit between my lips, it forced me to keep paying attention to my mask the entire time, which is something Matt told us could use work on Wednesday. Further costume additions will help of course.

Tomorrow morning I’m heading to the National Aviary to observe the flamingos in the flesh, up close and personal. That’s the idea at least.