Wednesday, 1-12-11

Wednesday, 1-12-11

Today in class we began by performing our walks and having the class guess who we’d been assigned. On Monday, we were randomly given names of other students across the three Acting classes and had to observe the way they walked in order to replicate it in front of everyone today. I faced some difficulty in approaching the task because the person I was assigned isn’t in any of my other classes and as she is a Dramaturgy major I didn’t even know where she spent her days really. I got very brief glimpses of her on Monday and again this morning in the half-hour break between Yoga and Acting, and had to base my walk off of that. I wish I’d had more time to observe, because I found that wherever I couldn’t collect specific information, I had to fill in with assumption, or generalities. And as Matt Gray quotes: “Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups,” (Under Siege 2). I made note of her posture and the swing of her arms, and the general length of her stride, but after that I was forced to fill in the blanks myself. Without wanting to assume (see above), I instead tried to use more imaginative or visualization-based tools to inform my actions, e.g. placing my center high in my body, living in an upper space and traveling with a grace and fluidity that I have always thought to be distinct in her. I hoped this would essentially do the job of assumption without actually resulting in gross misrepresentations, but I’m not altogether sure of how well it worked. When Daniel guessed correctly, it was largely because of the way I was sitting cross-legged before getting up to walk. The purpose of the assignment was to make us more aware of the many disparate strides at our disposal as actors, and in that it was certainly effective.

I was a little surprised when I myself didn’t recognize the person who was imitating my walk, though others seemed to immediately get it. Michael McGuire got the loping stride that is so characteristic of my walk, but he turned his feet out much more than I do (I kept noticing the rest of the day). Part of it may be that in order to clearly represent our assigned person to the class, we exaggerated certain aspects of the walk to be as specific as we could. It’s amazing, though, how unaware I can be of my own gait.

Speaking of gaits (I guess I haven’t spoken of anything else yet), after we split up into our three separate classes, we warmed up by crossing the floor in four different quadrupedal animal strides: the lateral, wherein the right arm and right leg move together, followed by the left arm and left leg; the contralateral, wherein the right arm and left leg move together, and so on; crab, wherein movement is contralateral but to the side instead of foreward; and the marsupial, where the arms and upper body are flung forward with a leap of the legs to catch up on the second beat. The marsupial was the most natural for most of us, and the crab the most foreign, and Matt noted that for our upcoming Animal Projects, we need to approach whatever movement style our animal uses with the same attitude and sense of ease as we found with the marsupial. Even if we choose a crab, we must practice that movement with a sense of freedom and naturalism that we lacked in the warm-up exercise. A fancy way of saying that if something habitual like moving seems forced instead of easy, the character (or animal) will not come across well. It will instead cause the entire performance to be stilted.

After the animal warm-up, we spent the rest of class experimenting with creating characters out of altering our walk. The main thing we had to pay attention to was avoiding making decisions about the character too early, e.g. “I’m going to be nervous,” or “he’s a badass.” Instead, we made decisions about where we placed our weight in our feet, whether on the outsides of our feet, the insides, the heel, or the balls of the feet, or any mixture of those four between the two feet. From there we let the simple weight distribution in our feet grow into a fuller physicality, starting with experimentation in the length of our stride, the rise of our knees, the sway of our hips, the placement of our center, the swing of our arms, the tension in all of our body, and finally allowing our feet to inform a facial expression and a character, and interacting non-verbally with each other in these assumed characters. By not making big character decisions early on, we surprised ourselves with the smaller choices we made along the way. By choosing a mismatched weight distribution in the first round, I came to inhabit a lopsided but charming sort of ruffian, and by walking on the balls of my feet in the second round, I took on the persona of a slightly pompous but timid sort of statesperson. The second part of the exercise was to interact physically with our environment and fellow performers, allowing reactions to happen organically based on our characters’ senses rather than a preconceived emotion. As Matt says, emotion is unpredictable, but the senses are reliable and can be relied upon to read realistically to the audience whereas playing pure emotion is usually sloppy and unconvincing. If emotions arise through attention to our characters’ senses—that is, the visual, the auditory, the tactile, the physical environment and so on—then they will be clearly identifiable as arising through a natural psychology of the senses rather than by the determination of the actor to be sad or be angry. For myself, it was fun to see how relationships with other performers developed without thinking about them, simply reacting based on the physicality of the character, his sensory awareness, and whatever I endowed the other characters with—whether it was a particularly unpleasant smell or a particularly attractive one, a general distrust or an affection.

Matt asked us to take a look at the soles of our shoes to see where they are most worn, and thus where we distribute our weight as we walk. My converse have the most wear on the front part of the heel and on the front of the toe, suggesting that I don’t fall particularly hard on the back of my heel at the beginning of each step but do place a lot of weight on the foot through the middle of the stride and as it leaves the ground on the toe. My brown shoes on the other hand have all of their wear towards the extreme front and back, suggesting I have fallen hard on their heels at the beginning of my steps. I expect this discrepancy is probably due to the fact that the converse have less comfortable support in the heel, and so I’ve grown to step more gingerly on the heel while wearing them. No such restrain with the brown shoes. My set of nice dress shoes have the same wear pattern except that they have almost no wear towards the front of the shoe, probably because I pick my feet up more lightly while wearing them to avoid scuffing. All pairs of shoes have even wear along the sides, suggesting that, as I thought, I have a fairly even distribution of weight across the width of my feet and don’t have an extreme out-turning or in-turning of my feet. It’s interesting to see such dramatic differences between sets of shoes. No wonder actors sometimes begin character development by finding new shoes.

My assignment for Friday is to find a stranger off-campus and talk to them for a few minutes, asking them questions or something, and then take on their physicality and personality and perform their responses as a monologue, in character. As them, that is.