Friday, 2-18-11

Friday, 2-18-11

Again, I’m a little late posting this. I’d better kick that habit.

On Friday in Acting we began with job interviews carried out by Matt Gray who collected our animal-characters’ resumes and asked us a few questions one at a time. It was a great way of warming up because it gave me plenty of time to get into character. I tried doing an Italian accent for the interview and wasn’t too impressed with it, myself, but Matt actually said it was fine. Just a hint of it is really all that’s needed to get the point across.

After the job interviews, we performed our private moments again. We didn’t get through all of them, but I went, and several others as well. In general, everyone was doing a great job taking the note of letting the animal do more of the work, being in that “animal brain” mindset for more of the interactions. In particular, Ashley Twomey and Zanny Laird were doing really nice, specific work that was far more effective than it had been in the initial performance. Ashley was far more fidgety and externally oriented (though blind) which was great for her naked mole rat character; and Zanny was kind of thrilling to watch in how completely feline every action became, right down to the way she ate gummy candies and consumed an energy drink.

As for me, I was much happier with my private moment the second time around. I took much more time with it, for a start, which helped. And even while setting up the scene I came upon new ideas, just thinking about the furniture with the animal’s mindset. For instance when I moved the piano bench in, I thought, “he wouldn’t ever sit on a piano bench,” and so instead he quite naturally just stood over the piano and kicked the bench out of the way when he played a few dramatic chords. I preened and examined myself with spinally oriented twists and turns after undressing, and focused much more on the legs than on the arms, and all that helped a lot. I was extremely confident in the work I did and felt much better about it afterwards, which just shows how much taking the notes you’re given and running with them can help. I spent about an hour Thursday night going over my notes and rehearsing for the next day.

Costume wise, Lawrence (he’s now Lawrence instead of Florence, since Florence from Florence is just too corny) is getting more eccentric by the minute. But it works. And it’s nice that it’s far out enough that just the act of getting dressed up like him puts me in the mindset of the character, which is a nice place to get to with one’s costume.

We’ll be doing the rest of the private moments on Monday, and I also need to bring in 3 songs that I think are fitting for my animal character. That will be fun. I’m thinking opera will be appropriate for at least one of them.