Absent: Ash
Guest Instructor: Mondy Carter. Mondy will be running class next week, Feb. 19 & 21.
We worked with several moments of silence.
General considerations:
Earn the silence. Bring pace and energy up to the moment. Too many pauses, and halts will deflate the important moment you are after.
Use the space. As the space decreases your options diminish. You literally have nowhere else to go.
Rule of 3: repeat, repeat, replace.
When your character is in an altered state (ie. drunk, crazy) beware of trying to play the condition. Remember: the drunk person is trying to act sober and the crazy person thinks himself sane.
As we move forward, it is time to assess our characters. We have all been watching Lionel, Sylvie, Celia, and Toby in a variety of situations. Lets begin to amass our understanding of these people.
Assignment: write your observations of each of these characters in relation to the other. Confucius reminds us that we are defined by our role(s) in life: father, daughter, teacher, student, and so on. How then are our characters defined by one another?
For your midterm work, please write up profiles of your characters as they are in relation to one another. For example: "When Lionel is with Celia, he..." "When Sylvie is with Toby, she..."
Discuss the ways in which other characters trigger or shape your character. For example: "Toby 's drinking tends to cause Celia to be..." "When Sylvie makes sarcastics remarks, Lionel becomes...."
Please have these observations for me in writing on our last class of the term: Feb 28.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Day 7
Absent: Tyler, Ash
Jean-Louis Barrault: "The greatest moments of drama happen in silence."
Harold Pinter: "Silence occurs when it suddenly becomes impossible to speak."
Alan Ayckbourn: "The best plays have at least silence."
We began to look at the moment of silence, its effect and structure.
Consider: Sound = Movement; Silence = stillness. By working with combinations of sound, movement, stillness, and silence we create greater or lesser moments of silence.
What happens in a silence? Suspense, Decisions, Reflection. The silence gives us all a chance to feel the events. When we listen to words, we are always on some level, in our heads, decoding the language and thinking of meaning and sense. In silence, we immerse in the emotions of the moment. The silence also gives the actor an opportunity to listen to the audience and to refresh connections between audience and stage and among fellow actors.
For the actor, the pressure of performance can increase our sense of time. The management of time, as we have seen, is important craft for comedy. Generally, the audience will stay with a moment of silence longer than we think if that moment is well-made and full.
We looked at invented moments-of-silence. Assignment: identify a moment in your scene for presentation on Thursday.
Jean-Louis Barrault: "The greatest moments of drama happen in silence."
Harold Pinter: "Silence occurs when it suddenly becomes impossible to speak."
Alan Ayckbourn: "The best plays have at least silence."
We began to look at the moment of silence, its effect and structure.
Consider: Sound = Movement; Silence = stillness. By working with combinations of sound, movement, stillness, and silence we create greater or lesser moments of silence.
What happens in a silence? Suspense, Decisions, Reflection. The silence gives us all a chance to feel the events. When we listen to words, we are always on some level, in our heads, decoding the language and thinking of meaning and sense. In silence, we immerse in the emotions of the moment. The silence also gives the actor an opportunity to listen to the audience and to refresh connections between audience and stage and among fellow actors.
For the actor, the pressure of performance can increase our sense of time. The management of time, as we have seen, is important craft for comedy. Generally, the audience will stay with a moment of silence longer than we think if that moment is well-made and full.
We looked at invented moments-of-silence. Assignment: identify a moment in your scene for presentation on Thursday.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Day 6
Absent: Ash, Carly
Time & Space
We began with some simple movement work on guarded/unguarded postures and eye contact. Work to create a sense of "atmospheric pressure" and examine the use of space. We worked "A Christening" with Mitchell and Paige, playing with the tensions of the offstage spaces: child in the tombstones vs. child in the pews.
In re: Time. Our acting lab gives us the opportunity to take time. An important element of comic acting is timing. The comic actor needs to manipulate and manage time on stage, using stillness and silence to gauge
the audience. We will explore this with another activity in the coming week.
Time & Space
We began with some simple movement work on guarded/unguarded postures and eye contact. Work to create a sense of "atmospheric pressure" and examine the use of space. We worked "A Christening" with Mitchell and Paige, playing with the tensions of the offstage spaces: child in the tombstones vs. child in the pews.
In re: Time. Our acting lab gives us the opportunity to take time. An important element of comic acting is timing. The comic actor needs to manipulate and manage time on stage, using stillness and silence to gauge
the audience. We will explore this with another activity in the coming week.
Monday, February 4, 2008
Day 5
We began with ball tossing, getting us in step and rhythm as a group.
Structured improvisation:
1) Play traditional games: chess, Jenga, cards, etc..
2) Conversation from standard topics: the weather, food, etc..
3) Select a life position: IOK/YOK; IOK/YNOK; INOK/YOK; INOK/YNOK
4) Select an ego state: Parent or Child.
Note: as we go forward with this work, we are trying to look through the text towards elements of character transactions in order to build our "actors' tool kit."
We finished with a backward reconstruction of a scene, noting how the end choices become more fully informed as we work "upstream" and discover the logic of the scene.
Assignment: work with this backwards method as you prepare your scenes. Building from the end backwards puts you n a better position to move towards strength as your scene develops.
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