5/2/13

Today was Shakespeare first up. we got more or less straight into it with presenting and working our verse in front of each other. The purpose of these exercises - as Evelyn emphasised - is not to give you a polished Shakespearean monologue, or even to give you any technical understanding of the language or form, but to first and foremost find a way into the text on a level of personal connection. That's why she had us pick a passage of verse that we connect to on a deeply personal level (a phrasing that immediately triggered alarm bells in my anti-method-acting brain) - and the importance of this became apparent today. One by one we'd get up to work, and start by just delivering the text to the group. Then Evelyn would sit us down and ask questions of us about why we chose the piece, what it is about this text that we connect to etc, until the performer is at a place of true connection, with themselves and more importantly with the group, and then speak the text from this place. It's quite daunting to watch people do this at times knowing you'll be doing the same, and at its worst the exercise could feel a little like a group therapy session, but once you get past that there is no doubting the usefulness of accessing the text in this way. Every person (including myself) who worked in this way today went through a huge shift in the quality and tone of their delivery during their work with Evelyn. I was working Romeo's "banished" text, and I was really pleased with the connection I managed to find today (Evelyn said I did "beautiful work"). And while the discoveries we all made were great and led to better work, the thing I'm holding on to most from today's class was Evelyn's insistence that this isn't the performance - you layer on more choices and colours on top of  this and may come out with something completely different - but what it is is a base of connection from which to access the text, to get you started on the path of working the text.

Voice/Movement with David and the graduate actors was next up. Started the class off again with the name game that promotes looseness and focus under pressure - I really like this game and find it gets me into a really good space to work afterwards. Then we moved into more Fitzmaurice voice work, and I've got to say I'm noticing improvements in my ability to do this work since I came here, and also in the way I'm able to produce sound and find resonance after doing the exercises. While I still don't understand technically how the exercises work to open up my vocal capacities or whatever (haven't got around to reading that article David gave me yet...), I definitely notice a difference in my voice and breathing after doing only a few exercises. We took the additional step of adding text to the breathing and sound we were already making, and it was encouraging to find that the breathing habits that the work tries to cultivate remained, and actually helped, through the delivery of text.

Then onto more work on our Deep South dialect. We reviewed all the work we did last week, and covered some new feature of the dialect, then spent the rest of the lesson repeating sentences and talking to each other in the dialect (some better than others). We also watched footage of Foghorn Leghorn, the Governor of Mississippi, and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof for a bit of reference material.

Last up was with the graduates again as they embarked on their first read-through of Twelfth Night. It was just a chance for them to hear the text out loud with each other and to bring their research and preparation into the room. So I sat and listened to them read, and when we took breaks between Acts I participated in the discussions about what we'd just heard. David was great at running the session, and gave some really good reminders of some of the "rules" of doing Shakespeare, and also clarified a lot of confusion around common misconceptions about performing Shakespeare (such as the myth of the absolute necessity of taking a breath at the end of every line of verse). It was a reminder for me of the universal complexity and struggle of approaching Shakespeare - even though all these actors are highly trained they still have a lot of trouble dealing with the complexity of the language, which is kind of encouraging. It seems the only way to get better at Shakespeare is to do lots and lots of Shakespeare, and I really like that.