Words, Words, Words... An Actor's Journey: Weeks 6 & 7

Monday, August 15, 2011

Weeks 6 & 7 (CSC Apprenticeship)

Hello all! My apologies for the hiatus. It's been such a wonderfully busy four weeks since I last posted! We just closed a very successful run of All's Well That Ends Well on the Boston Common, and the Apprenticeship is coming to an end next week. But more of that with upcoming posts; on to catching up with what's been going on.

Week six began and we are CLOWNING! Antonio was our instructor for the workshop, and worked tirelessly with us to bring out our inner joy and encourage us to, well, fail. Failure, we learned, is one of the elements that makes a clown funny. We played Master/Servant, an exercise in which there is a clown with power, and a more submissive clown. We discussed the role of power and how it can effect scenes and any approach to a character. We endowed a rolled up newspaper baton with the power of the Master, so whoever held the baton, held the power. We at first improvised gibberish dialogue, then moved to actual dialogue, and finally incorporated the relationship struggle into our scenes for Shakespeare on Love. The week of clowning really opened me up to the art of failure. The clown is putting everything into their objective and we all found that the laughter thrived when the clown accepted the failure or impossibility of being funny onstage and lived in it. Antonio taught us how important it was for us to enjoy the laughter we bring to the audience, as we enjoy the thrill and happiness to being onstage.

In week seven, I was EXTREMELY pleased that we would be spending it working with Noah Tuleja from my home-state of RI! We worked only on hand-to-hand combat, and it was wonderful to get back into it. I am not sure if I have mentioned this before on my blog, but I have a deep love for stage combat; the choreography, the thrill of making an audience gasp in suspense, it's just incredible to me. Noah was fantastic! It was clear that he enjoys the work and also that safety was his first priority. With work on stage fighting, often times the adrenaline kicks in and the choreography can quickly become dangerous if it goes to quickly or is not precise. Noah was great about explaining and showing clearly the steps and the movements that make a fight onstage look believable to the audience. He showed us the basic punches: cross, jab, uppercut, and some slaps, chokes, and kicks. We got to pick our scenes and create our own moves after Noah gave us the first few beats. It was exciting and opened me up to the possibility of becoming a stage combat choreographer someday.

Stay tuned for weeks eight, nine and ten as well as an All's Well post. I've got to get ready for week ten!

All the best,

Micah