First up this morning had "Shakespeare in Performance" (300 level class). I really love Shakespeare and so was very excited about this class. Prior to the class, I'd been told to have a 16-20 line monologue in verse prepared for the class, so last night I spent a bit of time learning Romeo's "banished" monologue, which was actually great fun. We didn't really need the verse today in any formal way - just to use in a couple of exploration exercises so that we had some text. And I also found out we only need 6-10 lines memorised for Thursday's class.
The class itself was good - we spent the first wee while just doing introductions, to each other and to the course, and then we did this extended exploration exercise dubbed "The Walkabout". It was similar in a lot of ways to exercises we've done before at Toi, but with a different form. What it's about (or what I took from it anyway) is allowing a whole range of different qualities to be present within yourself and discovering where they live essentially. It was really nice to get back to working on the floor again after what seems like a really long time, and to ease back into it in the way of an exploration like this was great.
Next up was my first Masters level class: Voice/Movement with David Nevell. For this I'm in with a class of 7 graduate actors who are all in the second year of their three year Masters course. Playing with the big boys, if you will. We covered the whole floor of the room in gym mats before we began (a real luxury for someone from Toi Whakaari) and then the first half hour was again an intro to the semester. This class in particular seems very broad and diverse in its content because, as David pointed out, this is these students final semester of formal Voice/Movement training and so it's about maintenance and growth in these broad core areas. Again there's going to be a dialects component to this class, and for the four weeks I'm here we'll be covering a Deep South dialect (think Mississippi or Louisiana) and English Estuary (basically the most common dialect of modern London). Very exciting and very very useful.
We then got into some work from the Fitzmaurice voice technique, which is what David teaches. Again the exercises had definite similarities to work I've done at Toi previously, with the Linklater and Estill methods, but with variations and different forms. The work seems to be centered around finding freedom and availability in your voice, which often means finding the same in the rest of your body - a similar aim to most of the voice training I've encountered anyway.
Last class of the day was a 200 level Voice/Movement for Character Transformation class. Today's class was nothing more than an introduction to the semester's work, so lasted only an hour. Before attending this class however, David gave me the option to choose between it and working on the Twelfth Night with him and the graduate students - very exciting. I said I'd attend one of the Voice/Movement classes so I could get a taste of it and then make up my mind, but I think I already have. While the Voice/Movement class does seem like it would be very valuable, it also seems a lot more like ome of the work I've already done or will get the chance to do at home, and also just by the fact that it's a 200 level class, more basic than the work david and his students will be doing. Also coming into the equation is the thought 'how often will I get the chance to do intensive Shakespearean script analysis work with someone like David and a group of graduate actors?' Probably not often. So in this class' slot on Thursday I'm going to go with them and see what they're doing, and I'm pretty sure that's where I'm going to want to be.
Phwoar. There's so much to write about every day. I'll try and get more concise in future, honestly. Just an interesting thought that connects to yesterday - I was talking to one of the graduate actors, Stephen, today about the different cultures and attitudes of our drama schools, and how I'm finding that there's a lot of drive and hard work from the students here in Fullerton. He observed that there was, but he thought that a lot of the time it only really came from a sense of meeting the requirements or beating the competition, and that there was a real sense of laziness regarding personal drive and forging individual identity as actors and artists. He was basically saying that people would do what they had to in order to make it through or get good grades or whatever - which often will be a lot - but they won't do anything extra, or think about doing something themselves. And it seems to me that that's what Toi's all about, and I feel we are mostly very strong in this area. And I suppose that in a lot of ways it's that kind of work that has brought me here to Fullerton and then is taking me on to Paris. An awareness of the kind of actor I want to be - the work I like, the work I do, the work I want to do - and what I can do to help myself get there. And so now I'm going "how do we get the right balance?" And I don't know. Just interesting food for my thoughts over the coming weeks.
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