This week's acting classes
An overview of what's happening in
classes
Tuesday we had two scenes in the advanced class.
Chris and Amy performed a scene from Closer for a second time after having done
it first two weeks ago. They made many improvements upon the scene based on
notes from the previous presentation. The second scene was between Frances and
Antonio and it was from Antoine FIsher. I was impressed by the simplicity with
which they played the scene. Frances has grown
considerably.
Both scenes, however,
suffered from a lack of specificity. It is one of our cardinal rules:
be
specific. If you are talking about an even
from your past, the first time you saw a rainbow, had sex with someone, a first
date, a meal.. anything of which you speak... as you recollect it you should
have a set of
specific
memories that you are talking about down to the last detail. When you make a
choice, react to a line, choose an intention or objective, the parameters of a
relationship, be
specific.
The reason for this is that you are living a life that is made of real events
you should know what those events are. You are creating a character that must
interact with the people and world around him/her and that character has
specific feelings about many things. All of these choices must be justified by
the text.
In Wednesday's beginning
class we were pleased to welcome a new student, Shayna. After introductions
and discussion we completed simple activities and began urgent activities.
Wesley was our guinea pig for the urgent activities. On a scale from one to
ten, the class agreed that Wes' activity rated about a 4 in urgency. This is
often the mistake made with urgent activities.
The way to make them more urgent is to
increase the conflict and the stakes. You
have less time to complete the task, if you fail to complete the task the
consequences are more dire, there are even greater obstacles to overcome... all
of these can make an activity more urgent. After clarifying this point we
decided to continue urgent activities next week so they could reassess. Then I
introduced knocking which we tried once with Zaney and _____. As is usually the
case with the first set of knocking exercises, they encountered difficulty
repeating while engaged in an activity. The most common mistakes are to turn it
into a scene or, as they did in this case, make all of the observations about
the activity rather than the person they were with. After a couple of runs of
the knocking exercise we discussed the coming emotional activities. We closed
with trust exercises. Chris and David from the advanced class came in to join
us for exercises and I hope others from the advanced class will come in to work
with us in the future.
Posted: Thu - March 16, 2006 at 10:55 PM