Friday, 2-25-11
So today was the Formal Dance. What an experience. I have lots to say about what happened, so bear with me.
This morning I cut myself shaving. Very very badly. Right along my jaw line near my chin. I put a band-aid on it and saddled up to go to Purnell, and on the way I thought about the possibility of using it somehow. I figured Lawrence would legitimately be pretty upset that he had cut himself shaving that day, and that might be fun to play with. But then when I was getting ready, Rachel suggested that it would be cool if someone had punched me, and I thought about that for a bit and realized it might be a really interesting choice if someone had called Lawrence a fag on the way to the dance and hit him because of his clothes. So instead of removing the band-aid and cleaning myself up, that’s what I had in the back of my mind. I only told people if they asked, but I committed to that being what happened before I got there, and that turned out to be a remarkably influential choice.
Most noticeably, when Taylor Rose’s mandrill-based character, Nikki (who swears and picks fights with everyone), criticized my attire, I got really emotional. Surprisingly emotional. And I wasn’t faking it. It immediately recalled “memories” of the fictional event that had happened before, where someone hit me because of my flamboyant garb. I felt this deep need to wrest an explanation from Nikki, and repeated to Mimi (Nicky Roble’s elephant) that “I haven’t done anything to her!” This brought me to approach Nikki a couple more times throughout the dance trying to talk to her and understand her and get her to apologize or something.
Though the dance got quite chaotic at times, it really did not seem too far from the truth of what a community organized event like that might feel like, with lots of different age groups and social backgrounds represented. Certainly, it was heightened, but the environment was incredibly genuine, and my responses were correspondingly realistic. In part, it also goes back to the same thing that happened with Watering Hole, where the overall commitment level of everyone in the room enhanced the exercise’s effectiveness for everyone.
Lawrence was several times called upon to try and restore order in the chaos as a member of the Entertainment Committee and thus acting as a sort of events coordinator. This was not always so successful though. During the dancing competition, for example, when I tried to tag out Michael McGuire’s lion, James, and Michelle’s elephant, James just responded. “No. Let the lady dance.” …and I backed off. There’s a pecking order that had to be remembered, and that was inherent in the physicality and psychology of all our animal characters.
One thing I struggled with was the accent work. I kept slipping between a more German sounding accent and the Italian I was striving towards. Barbara even asked me “Are you German?” …Oops. Oh well. I should’ve worked harder on solidifying the accent. As it was, it was sort of ‘generopean.’ Physically though I felt really good about what I was doing. I was very spinally oriented, I didn’t do too much with my hands, and I incorporated flamingo-esque undulations of the head, neck, and spine as well as other gestures like foot tapping and angular leg movements.
Something else that helped with the physicality though was at a mid-point in the dance when Barbara told us all to “drop into your animal characters,” and suddenly the room was filled with howling, cawing, and curious beasts. After a few minutes, we were told to resume our human characters, and Patrick Wilson observed that this helped us all with the specificity of our characters. It certainly helped me. Patrick said that in particular it helped connect us more with our lower halves, which were weaker in the first half of the dance.
Oh yeah, Patrick Wilson was there. It’s no big deal; he’s just kind of a famous actor. Oh Carnegie Mellon.
Anyway, let’s talk notable highlights of the dance. There was the dance competition, after which we named the winners (Kyle Selig’s brooding condor and Michael Campayno’s ex-con gorilla) kings of the dance. Antonio’s gorilla character, Terrel, also rapped, and the Entertainment Committee performed a loosely choreographed dance that we rehearsed last night. That was fun. The dance competition is particularly noteworthy because it’s such a cut and dry example of winning and losing… or, well, mostly losing. Each time a couple got out, their reactions were different. Some would argue, some would cry, some would accept it with dignity. But when the loss finally came, they had to accept it. As actors, we have to know when our characters lose and we have to embrace that and let it affect us as profoundly as possible.
The biggest surprise of the dance though was at the very end, when the final dance was interrupted by Kyle Selig, Michael Campayno, Antonio, and Carl bursting in with guns and holding us up. Nobody knew about this before it happened besides them and the teachers. They made us get down on our hands and knees and empty our pockets, and then they ran out. Everyone was shocked. It was a very intense moment. I went to the loudspeaker and asked that we gather all the kids in the center of the room to do a headcount and make sure we weren’t missing anyone. In retrospect I think this was one of the best character moments for Lawrence, since flamingos are very much invested in children and protecting their young. And I didn’t think about it at all, it was just the first thing I said to get people back on track after the robbery. Then one of the security officers came in and explained that they’d gotten away, but that the situation was under control, and Sandra said that she’d caught the whole event on video-tape (Sandra is Andrea’s lizard character; she’s super creepy and just carries around a camcorder all the time).
After that, we lay down and relaxed out of our animal characters, and got together to discuss the whole event.
The discussion was pretty brief since we were running out of time and still needed to clean up the room, but a lot of interesting stuff was said. Taylor talked about how important it was for her character to have an objective instead of just being randomly destructive, and she noticed how after she decided she wanted to make a friend and found this difficult for her character to do, she became very morose and upset. Carl talked about how bad he felt betraying the other members of the Security team when they staged the robbery, and how cool it was to have that in the back of his mind for the entire dance. It’s like what Michael Shurtleff says about always having a secret, and letting that add depth and intrigue to your performance. That was their secret. And that whole thing was pure genius. They came up with it themselves too and just asked Matt if it was okay; and it was perfect.
One final note about Lawrence (for today—I’m sure there will be further discussion on Monday): We were asked to consider character arcs, and for me, there’s been an interesting arc across this whole process. From the get-go of creating a human character, I resolved that I was not going to make the flamingo A) a girl or B)necessarily gay. I felt those were both very stereotypical choices. There’s no reason why flamingos are particularly intrinsically girlish or gay in and of themselves. They have both males and females and predominantly have life-long heterosexual mating relationships. They’re a pretty close analogue to human society’s concept of the nuclear family. But of course, across the whole process, I got a lot of surprised looks. At first, “Wait, he’s not a girl?” and later, “Wait, he’s not gay?” To quote Legally Blonde: The Musical… “is he gay, or European?” Well, I don’t know. At the end of the day maybe he’s just sexually fluid. I didn’t really care and I didn’t want that to be a defining characteristic of who he was. But it often felt like I was fighting a losing battle.
In the end though, I had the right instinct, I think. If I had chosen to make Lawrence a girl, or gay, I would have gotten caught up in “playing a girl” or “playing gay” instead of making more specific, non-general choices. It would be the same if I was playing an overtly gay character. I should never go into a job like that thinking, “okay, I need to play gay.” I should instead be thinking of what defines him as a human being specifically, his movement, his vocal pattern, his psychology, etc. Which is exactly what we did with our animals and what I did with Lawrence.
So yeah, Lawrence ended up looking and acting a little stereotypically gay. Was he gay? I don’t know. After the hold-up, there was one final slow dance to “calm everyone down,” and it was suggested that if anyone looked like they needed comforting, we should help them. Brian Pettitt-Schieber’s French dance-diva guy, Jackson, was pretty upset by the robbery, and I saw him, and we danced. So maybe this traumatic event allowed Lawrence to get in touch with a latent side of his sexuality. Or maybe they were just meant to be great friends. In a way, Jackson really is Lawrence’s soul-mate among all our characters. He’s the only other true artiste, and Lawrence would certainly admire that sense of vision and propriety.
But overall, I’m just really happy with how Lawrence turned out. I’m sad to say goodbye, because as we’ve also discovered through this project, there are ALWAYS more layers to a given character. There are always more facets to explore. Because every discovery, choice, or assumption you make about a character or person leads to a bunch of other questions. So you’ve never completely explored a role.
But every show comes to an end. And every exercise. This one was particularly interesting, and led me to very deep places in my process. I had a really awesome experience with it, and I’m excited to use animal work in the future. But, having said all this, I must now say that even if I haven’t finished Lawrence, I am finished with Lawrence. =]
(Afterward)
(This is from King Kong. Notice the marks on his Serkis's face)
