10/22/09

So today I presented my movement piece. I was a little worried about how the whole thing with the cloth would play but it played rather well and people enjoyed it. I was really encouraged by the fact that be liked it. I'm a sucker for praise. A lot of people said they could really see the character's journey, that made me feel really good because I felt that was the most important thing to get across. I've been trying for weeks to get the right builds in that monologue, and I felt like this movement piece thing really helped me do that. I thought about doing a lot of really descriptive gestures that described the action words in the monologue but for one thing there weren't many action words and the ones there were were kind of boring. I also thought about doing the movement I would put in the piece normally which would just be a lot of punctuative and identity gestures. But I thought, I need a task, I need something to hold on to, something to do while I say this. I also didn't want to do a lot of gestures that would conflict with the period, since it's a lot of very nineteenth-century language. Plus this is a very subdued character, she's probably thinking a lot about propriety and she's been taught to be very composed and guarded, so I thought maybe she could act out her feelings on a small object like a handkerchief, then I thought, but since this is supposed to be an exaggerated piece, why not change the cloth as the character abandons her fears more and more. I think that choice provoked a lot of things because I'd sit there and think, "Okay, the descriptive word is wild, how do you show wild with this coth," and I'd have to come up with something to do with it, and that would either feel right or not, or sometimes I'd just be thinking the words and I'd find myself doing things with the cloth I didn't really plan. Most of the time I was really concerned that the audience see what the character is feeling rather than provoking that emotion in myself. I probably won't keep a lot of the gestures I used in the piece when I put the words back because realistically my character wouldn't be performing a magic trick while giving this speach, but this excersize connected me with that piece in a way that nothing else could. I think this might become something I'll do to prepare monologues, not necessarily to use when I'm in a show, but for auditon purposes. I'm finding it's really helpful to me to have somthing real and physical to focus on when I do a monologue, like in Acting II when I was doing my God's favorite monologue and Joe was my opposite and he kept walking away from me and I had to try and stop him and I was chasing him around yelling at him and touching him and trying to block his way, and that real frustration it created connected me to the monologue and gave it drive. So I think this excersize could be something I could do to help me prepare when I don't have anyone to be my opposite. All in all I felt super good because people said good things about my piece, and I was really flattered that Anthony said I should keep working with pantomime.

I felt really weird with the mask on, not only because I couldn't breathe freely, but also, I was trying really hard not to change anything because I didn't want it to be a different piece, I wanted it to be the same piece with the mask on. So I tried just to change the things that violated the rules of the mask but there were definitely times when I thought, crap they can't see my face here, I've got to do something with my body to convey what should be on my face. What was really funny was that with the mask on I didn't move my face at all. I thought I was gonna still be trying to do my expressions under the mask, but it really surprised me that when my face was covered I didn't feel a need to move it because I knew they couldn't see it. I also found myself trying not to do things I saw other people doing with the mask on. I saw a lot of people speed everything up when the mask went on. I don't know if that was because they couldn't breathe or because it suddenly made them a little self conscious or what, so I tried to go the same pace as I had before, I also saw a lot of people who when they put the mask on suddenly lost a lot. With some people it felt like when their face was hidden the emotion was gone, and something that was loving or playful before suddenly became hostile, and there were others who you could always tell exactly what they wanted to convey no matter what. I hope I was one of those people.

10/15/09

Today we created a movement piece from our monologue. At first I wasn't sure exactly what I was supposed to do but Anthony said something about maybe performing a task, like baking a cake or something like that. So I decided instead of a task to use an object. I think I mentioned a while ago that my character should be a girl Edgar Allen Poe. So I thought about what young women were like in his time. For the most part they were educated at home, taught more how to run a house than anything else, but they were taught to read, and they would have time for reflection and study. I decided first that she is probably very smart, but very socially bound and she knows that. I wanted this monologue, which is actually a poem, which is a very private communication between the writer and the subject (so private Poe didn't even include the name of the subject in the title) to have a sense that she's tired of holding back how she feels about this guy but she's quite embarrassed about it because it's not socially acceptable and she's very afraid he'll reject her. Her journey is that at first she's very shy about it she tries to avoid his reaction a little, maybe every now and then she gets carried away and then gets embarrassed and pulls back and by the end she doesn't care any more and risks it all. So I thought at first I could have her play with a handkerchief and sort of enact her feelings on it. So I started with the handkerchief and then I thought, maybe the handkerchief could change with the journey too. So I start out playing with a little handkerchief, unfolding it, wiping my face with it, toying with it, wringing it, then as it goes along it gets bigger and changes shape until at the end it's a big blanket spread out for both of us (me as the character and my other) to sit on. I found this really helpful in finding the builds, the little climaxes and falling actions in the whole piece, because I was sort of tied to this piece of invisible cloth, I had to include it in almost everything I did, so I had to find a way to include it which in a weird way informed a lot of my choices. Like at one point I was wringing it and I turned away, and I thought, I've got to show him this cloth, I've got to use this cloth to show him what he means to me. So I had to turn around and I had to move the cloth with the words, which created a build. Plus I was trying to use the action words in the text, and there were a lot (motionless, shivering, arisen, murmur, hangs, speak) so I had to use the cloth to show those things.

I was definitely thinking about how this was going to look and how this would express my character to someone watching it, but I don't think that harmed it much, because every now and then I thought, "Would she really do that?" and I'd think "That's not the emotion I was conveying before, but is this a better choice." It forced me to think about how I was conveying her. It was also really helpful to picture someone actually watching me turning this hanky into a blanket, and that really helped to motivate the embarrassment because I would get carried away playing with it and then think, "oh, he's still watching, this must look silly to him, I better pull it back." Anywho, I'm really excited about this piece and I'm gonna try and find some ways to provoke myself with it more.

10/14/09

Yesterday Britania and I were performing parts of our monologues for each other trying it with different qualities of movement in our gestures. I chose to do the same part of the monologue with different qualities. Of any of them Britania said she thought that flicking looked the best, I thougtht that was odd, because when I think of flicking I think of it as a casual flighty thing, and this monologue is a very heady very weighty monologue. But I think the flicking lent it a sort of nervous
quality that played more interestingly than heavy gestures would. That was probably the most beneficial exercise yet. It helped to see how the qualities played for parts of the monologue and decide which ones were the most interesting choices. It was much easier I thought than trying to identify my character with an element or an animal, although, being a wolf and ferret really did help.

10/8/09

Wow, it's been for freaking ever since I posted last. In my defense I've been very busy with Macbeth and all the usual excuses etc. Now that that's out of the way, here are my insights.

Tuesday we started moving like the animals we are like and not like. The animal I picked to be most like me is a wolf. I picked a wolf because I noticed that I lead with my head an wolves obviously follow their noses. Plus I noticed that when I'm just walking around campus I kind of trudge. And even though I bounce when I walk, there's a lot of heaviness to my steps, and yet I move pretty fast. Wolves are the same way, they run and they clip along pretty quickly, but they are very strong animals. The animal I picked that is unlike me is a ferret. Ferrets are really funny to watch because their bodies are so long they have to scrunch up their backs to be able to run which makes them run with this funny bouncy movement. So they're like these long slithery creatures that bounce around like dorks. Their very perky and very dumb. I think intellectually I'm a ferret and physically I'm a wolf. Honestly I thought the animal thing was going to be kind of lame, but I found that when you're trying to mimic that animal it actually informs character choices really well. Saying my monologue as a ferret/person gave it an entirely different meaning than saying it as a wolf/human. I realized as I was being a ferret that I have no idea what ferrets eat, or where they live in the wild. I said to Nerissa, "maybe ferrets are too domesticated, I'm not sure how or if they really live in the wild." she said, "black foot ferrets do" I said, "Oh yeah, but I'm not really sure where they live." she said, "The black hills of South Dakota" as if it were completely obvious. I thought, "Well good for them! I don't know what the hell the black hills of south dakota look like! I don't even know where they are! If you said to me 'forrest' or 'desert' or 'mountains' or 'plains' it would have some meaning for me, but I've never been to south dakota!" That's when I realized I needed to do more research. I don't really think it's necessary to know everything about a species of ferret from where exactly it lives to what it eats and it's genus and philum or anything, just to be able to imitate it but I should be able to at least tell you if a ferret is a forrest or a desert animal.
I also realized on Tuesday that I picked teh wordiest monologue ever. It's really hard to reduce Edgar Allen Poe to grunts and howls but hey, it can be done! And it actually really helped. There's a lot of places in my monologue where the character expresses a lot of vulnerability but reluctantly. And I really got a sense of how that should look and feel when I had to do it as a wolf. Because wolves aren't animals that show vulnerability easily, so the act of relinquishing power as a wolf felt really awkward, but that awkwardness was perfect for the character. Ferrets seem like very shallow animals and in this piece there's a lot of profound emotions and profound ideas. So saying it as a ferret felt like I was a ditzy girl coming out with these insights you would never think she was capable of having let alone expressing in those words. Those were both really valuable approaches and I think it would be really interesting to find a way to combine the two. Now I have to come up with an animal that is like the character in the monologue and one that's not like the character in the monologue. This is difficult because my monologue is actually a poem. I picked it because it was blank verse, it was about the right length and it has a pretty good arc to it, plus it's very classical language. And I thought, "if I can take this and make it accessible it will say something about my interpretive skills." I'll probably never get to use it in a real audition because that's all it's good for, but it's perfect for this. But now I have to pretty much invent a character. It's pretty easy to use Poe himself as a departure point for the character, because they are his words about someone he loved, and it's easier to inform the piece using events from his life than it is to invent them. But I'm a girl, so it's got to be sort of a girl Poe. Its' gonna take time.