Wow, I can’t believe it’s been 12 days since I last blogged. These 8 weeks are flying by so quickly, and I have kept very busy with all my schooling, researching, and touristing. Right now I am writing this in the laundry room on the 2nd floor of my building. I just put in two loads to wash, and, scared shitless of someone stealing the few clothes I own if I leave, I have set up camp down here to wait out my cycles. I am actually writing this on a real notepad with a real pen, and shamefully, five sentences in, my hand already hurts. I would bring my laptop down here and type as I go like usual, but I’m also scared of getting mugged. Not that it’s likely to happen, but you never know about laundry rooms.
I believe I’ve already introduced you to Dean. As I said before, I was paired with him in my Scene Study class and we were given a scene from Good Will Hunting to perform. It went decently well. I just told myself that this was my first big acting challenge: smile and flirt with someone who totally repulsed me in reality, and make it believable. I wonder if that’s what it feels like to be a hooker. Anyway, we ran through the scene several times until we knew the lines by memory. It wasn’t hard. It’s a short scene. But after we laid our scripts to the side, Dean’s pronunciation of certain words got weirder and weirder. One particular word, “arbitrary”, somehow eventually morphed into “obituary.” As in: “Eating caramels is just as obituary as drinking coffee.” I kid you not. Since I am working on curbing my know-it-all-ness, I resolutely bit my tongue and didn’t correct him. Mercifully, someone else in the class noticed and corrected him for me. And then I was finally able to let out all the pent-up laughter that had built up during the last week along with the roars of the rest of the class. The last time we did the scene, the teacher made us yell the whole thing at each other like we were truly in a crowded, noisy bar. It was ridiculous, especially since the actual room we were in was pretty quiet, but afterwards, everyone said the yelling version was much better than before. We have Scene Study class again on Friday, so I’m gonna pack some throat drops just in case he makes us rehearse it that way again.
Speaking of the Scene Study teacher, his class is a constant exercise in restraining my mad bursts of giggles. He reminds us to figure out the character’s innate need, or what drives the character to do what he or she does. Which would be all well and good, except he accompanies this reminder with a hand gesture that is a sort of pounding on the lower part of his stomach with the side of his fist. He walks around the classroom making this gesture, and I’m very sorry, but my sordid mind goes immediately to a very wrong place, and I have to turn away. Go ahead and make the gesture yourself. You’ll see what I mean.
Now, a little about Improv class and Voice/Movement class. These two are similar in that they usually have us bellowing strange sounds, acting absurd, and trying to generate as much silliness as possible. Luckly, silliness is kinda my forte. Seriously, this stuff would not be out of place in an elementary school. Ok, I take that back. Some things happen in class that are definitely not child-appropriate. However, I quite often find myself getting excited when I hear the words "play" and "game," grinning like the cheshire cat while crawling around on the floor like a large land mammal, and wiggling around in my chair when I have to pee. Am I reverting back to an earlier stage of maturity? If this is what acting classes do to you, why didn't I sign up sooner?
In Improv, we play a lot of games like Slow-Motion Tag, the so-called Torture Puppets (where two people are puppets and their movements are controlled by their puppeteers), Therapy (where the “psychiatrist” has to figure out what’s wrong with the “patients”) and other similar games that remind me of a really bad episode of Who’s Line Is It Anyway? We are beginners, after all. If you throw me a giant invisible cucumber, it may take me a minute to figure out what to do with it.
There’s one game we play a lot, and it’s called, like, “Space Freeze” or something. Everyone gets in a circle, and one person goes to the center and starts acting out some mini-scene with a lot of physical movement. As soon as you get inspired by some motion they made, you yell “FREEZE!” and then take their physical position in the circle and start your own mini-scene, based on the position you froze them in. Sometimes a person’s mini-scene will go on too long, and you can see them getting impatient for someone to freeze them. This happened today, and I froze someone out of pity. As I took her place, stretched out on the floor, I realized I had no idea of what to do. Then, inspiration struck, and I stuck out my leg and started saying things like, “Oh yes, that feels good. A little more to the left. Thank you, I’m going to sleep now.” Too late, I realized what that sounded like, and then someone murmured something like, “Oh, it’s sex.” Um…no. Actually, it was a foot massage. After that, I kept my red-faced self silent for the rest of the game. There are few things worse than badly mimed sex in mixed company. Even if it is supposed to be a foot massage.
In Voice/ Movement class, we usually do some yoga poses to get limbered up, and then the rest of the class is filled with strange voice exercises- Zooooom. Fuh! Pewwwwwww! Bodega Topeka Bodega Topeka- and synchronization games that involve lots of focus and almost no talking. For example, one of these games has us all strolling silently around the room, paying attention to one another, and then we all have to jump up in the air at the exact same time without anyone leading or saying anything. You just have to feel when everyone is going to jump, and then you jump. It sounds a lot more impossible than it really is. It gets less impossible with practice.
In today’s class, we did something really interesting. The teacher told us to all go outside to the street for 20 minutes and observe the way people walk. Then we had to pick someone and learn to imitate their walk, ideally without them noticing what we were doing. Some of us were less stealthy than others. The boy from Turkey, Burak, got yelled at by a guy for following him for three blocks and aping his swagger. Siting, from China, even went so far as to follow her quarry into his office building, though she wisely decided not to get in the elevator with him. My favorite part of the assignment was watching as my classmates walked by, always in a noticeably unusual way. If I looked ahead of them a few feet, it was easy to figure out who they were mimicking. Then we all went back to the classroom and demonstrated our walks for each other. The object of the game was to try and guess what the person was like who the student followed, based solely on the way they walked. Some of them, we nailed. Others were surprising. There were at least two walks we thought belonged to women, but that turned out to belong to men. Pure comedy, baby.
One other class we have is called Monologues. So far, this class has been similar to Improv and Voice/Movement. We’ve done a lot of strange things, like passing a sound around the circle, walking across the room with imagined physical impairments, ranting in gibberish, and even staring at someone in the eyes for five whole minutes without looking away. I try to look at it like this: the more foolish I feel in class, the less foolish I will feel out in the real world. We are going to start working on our first monologue this Friday. I have chosen three that I like out of a book I bought at the Drama Bookshop, an literary oasis of everything theatre and film. My favorite one so far features a girl conversing with her cat, telling him how much she hates him. I can definitely relate to that.
I really want to talk about the awesome friends I have made so far, but that will have to wait for next time. I have to get in bed because class starts early in the morning, and I have to be well-rested so I can slap Bailey good and hard in the face and yell a bad word at him in a lovely scene from When Harry Met Sally that we will be doing in Audition Technique class. Apparently, I am Sally, because I keep winding up with scenes from that movie. Oh well. I'm perfectly happy to follow in Meg Ryan's romantically comedic footsteps. Does this mean I should start working on a remake of Joe vs. the Volcano? You know it’s my favorite movie of all time. I already know all the lines by heart. Or maybe I’ll write Joe: the Sequel in which Joe and Patricia wind up floating to Australia where they meet Crocodile Dundee, and learn to live in peace with nature under his wise tutelage. Because I love Paul Hogan too. You see? I told you so. I positively frolic in silliness.
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