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.
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