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.