Words, Words, Words... An Actor's Journey: Week 2

With one Monday, (our day off) I had tried to pack everything I could do into it. And, I didn't allow myself any rest at all. Lesson Learned. While it was a wonderful day of parental visits and Red Sox wins, I really needed to sleep in and calm down off the first week. As it turns out, a six days a week, 9am-5pm summer intensive is just that, an intensive. I found out, actually, I realized and accepted something this week that has always been said to me; that whatever I put into it (the program, acting, life, etc) is exactly what I will get out of it.

Honestly, I did personally struggle the first few days of vocal class. And because I knew I was tired, I excused myself from actually putting in 100% of my effort. My voice was straining in each exercise and I was easily fatigued. But, feeling the energy of my peers and Christine, Yo-El and Antonio, I was able to give myself a [figurative] swift kick in the ass and doubled my efforts. I realized this week that if I feared looking silly or over-exhausting myself, my skills would never grow and hey-wasn't that the reason I signed up for this program in the first place? By Wednesday afternoon (the second day of the second week), I was ready to dive in again!

We began working on the "Breakfast Warm up" in Yo-El's Movement classes which, while aligning the spine nicely, energizes the body and mind. It is also somewhat demanding in that it calls for a lot of core muscle use as well as exercising flexibility and strength in the legs, arms, and torso; key to allowing for a "free, moving body." It also sharpens my focus, which is great especially for the rehearsal for "Shakespeare On Love" (our collected scenes and sonnets show) which opens in week three! The second half of our work week, we delved into creative expression using our bodies to depict our sonnets' arguments through movement. It is amazing how immediately grounded I felt and how seeing the movement pieces of my class mates, made the sonnets all the more clear and precise.

Our Voice class had us working hard to relax our "outer muscles" this week. These include relaxing of the limbs, feet and stomach muscles. We also did a lot of work on alignment, and imaging our core and vocal apparatus. This helped us to locate and visualize where our sound stems from and where it travels through before coming out of the mouth into vibrations of words.

In combining the alignment work in both classes, we set to work on our scenes. Putting them on their feet and beginning to layer them with meaning after we had read the plays out loud with our partners. We did some AMAZING games that really enlivened my scene. The first game we played was to work on our "tennis" (back and forth) with our partners called "No! It's not that, it's this!" in which one tries to convince their partner that they are the right/more important/better one. This adds specificity to the scene and grounds the characters in their objectives. The next game we played was to do our scenes in complete darkness, whilst pseudo-competing with other scenes for the stage. (Anyone could speak their lines when the energy dropped). Next we added a "playground" of mats, chairs, and blocks, and literally played in it like children before starting our scene. It took away the self-consciousness, added newly discovered motives, and kick-started our energies. I found with the Kate/Hotspur scene from Henry IV there are layers of violence, confidence, intelligence, and love fighting with Kate's own fear within her. We were able through this exercise to understand the hurt that was in the relationship, and to explore the deep love that Kate and Hotspur share. It really brought our scene to another level.

As we explored our scenes and sonnets more, six of us also began to prepare for rehearsals for All's Well That Ends Well that begin on Wednesday the 27th.

More soon! Here we come, Week three!!!

All the best,
Micah