Today we presented our personal warm-ups and I presented my gift piece. To be perfectly honest the warm-up had me at a stand-still for a while. I wasn't exactly sure how to construct a routine that would be the best for me. I don't have many routines, I'm not used to them, my brain doesn't work in them. That's why I'm not that good of a student, I've never had the will to establish helpful routines. So I just started playing with different things during our warm-up time for The Spitfire Grill. I've felt lately like I needed to do something to warm up before performances, but I wasn't sure what would help most. So during Spitfire vocal warm up I would go into the dance studio and think, "okay, tension is here, lets stretch that, alignment needs to be this way lets do this" and I went through different exercises I've picked up in class and from work shops and people who I've seen warm up. I didn't have anything really set until last night when I went through the order of exercises in my mind. I find that when I construct a movement piece I need something for it to hinge on, a task or a goal, or something to hold. I decided my goal with the warm up should be to release tension and loosen myself up. It occurred to me this morning that the key to doing that for me is to pop my joints, so I aimed all parts of my warm-up at relaxation and popping my joints and today in class I felt better and more ready to perform than I have in a long time. I just wish I would have had all this put together for Spitfire. If I had been as loose and relaxed during the run of that show as I was today in class I might not have made all the rookie mistakes I made the last two shows, trying too hard to think of the next entrance, or the next piece of blocking.
I did my gift piece, which I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with. I didn't have as much time to work on it as I would have liked, which is no excuse, because I did have enough time. But even with what time I had I found it difficult to find a jumping off point so it didn't just turn into "A day in the life of Brian Cota." So the best departure point I could think of was my monologue. I decided to do my monologue as Brian. One thing I high lighted a few times in my letter to him was the difference between his movements in real life and on stage. So I put that in the piece by setting it in sort of an audition setting where at first he's just chilling with someone, talking to them, then he's called upon to perform, then he gets done with that and goes back to being himself. I tried to show the way some of his personal habits go away when he gets in his acting zone and some carry over. My biggest worry with today's performance is that it just looked like me being myself doing what I've been doing in class all semester. I hope I put his movement in it to a recognizable degree. I wish he had been there to tell me what he thought of it, but I'm kinda glad he wasn't because if he'd been there there would always be the chance he would think I was making fun of him, which was not my intention. I just wanted to show him what I see when I watch him, in the most accurate way I can.
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