Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Wednesday, 2-23-11

Wednesday, 2-23-11

So Lawrence brought his laundry to Acting class today to fold it. We were supposed to rehearse an internal dialogue for our character doing some sort of activity, and I spent just about fifteen minutes going over it the night before. Essentially he’s trying to pick out a possible outfit for a hypothetical first date as he folds the clothes. We ran through these several times with various instructions from Matt. First, as rehearsed, then at full-voice, as loud as we possibly could. Then full-voice, but no longer shouting. Then whispering, but without losing intensity. Then silent, with only a few words blurting out. Then we left our space and interacted with each other, speaking our internal opinions out loud, and then confining them and saying something else while still being aware of the internal dialogue as we interacted.

All of this is a complex way of saying we worked on the interplay between external and internal life. But it was a very effective exercise! Good acting has a lot to do with knowing what your character is saying and what your character is thinking and what the difference is. Maintaining either an external life or an internal life doesn’t work, it just collapses into two dimensions. So it’s vital to keep both active.

By externalizing my internal life entirely (I think I called someone a disaster of a person), and then re-internalizing it, I became more aware of my opinions about everyone I was talking to. This relates back to endowments, which we did first semester. Through interactions with others Lawrence has already begun to endow certain people with positive and negative characteristics. Taylor Rose’s mandrill character is aggressive and violently rude to pretty much everyone, so it’s reasonable to say that Lawrence will avoid her on Friday. And if they do talk, you can bet he’ll be thinking some pretty nasty things about her, even if what he says is defensive or placating.

After we talked about this work, the other classes joined us in character and we split off into our committees for Friday. We spent the rest of the class in this way, planning for the dance, and talking to other committees when necessary. Lawrence is on the Entertainment committee along with Jacques (I think? Brian’s heron guy), Angel (a naked mole-rat), Sandra (Andrea’s lizard), and Stetson. Once put into an organizational and functional sort of facility, a lot of new interesting information came out about certain characters. I was shocked, for example, by how much of a control freak Jacques became. I would never have guessed, but once I had surrendered up my pen and notebook to him I had a very difficult time getting it back. It’s perfect, actually, because herons are far more solitary creatures than flamingos. But that negative side of it didn’t come out until we actually had a task to attend to.

One note: It was difficult working with Brian because his French accent kept influencing my accent. I kept noticing my Italian slipping into French and had to consciously snap back into it. But that’ll get better with time. Just requires focus.

I had dinner as Lawrence again yesterday, though I didn’t today. And when we meet again with the Music Committee tomorrow I’ll be in character as well. We’re also choreographing a small dance routine and Jacques is giving dance classes tomorrow evening in prep for Friday. Should be fun!

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