The Home Stretch

So today officially marked me being past the halfway stage of my work here at Fullerton. Woah. That went quickly.

First up was Dialects, beginning with the usual vocal work and general warm up. Then we moved into the first part of our work on the Irish dialect. We got this work started off with watching clips from Waking Ned Devine and copying what we heard under our breath - I found this fairly simple, I think I've got a good basic handle on the Irish accent, but quite a few people really struggled. Then we systematically worked through signature sounds and other features of the dialect until we'd covered all the major important points. Again in this work it was interesting how much some people struggled with some of the sounds, particularly the pure vowels. I guess it again comes down to the American accent being so strong, or perhaps a lack of exposure to these sounds, or both, but it was a real hard time for some people to change the way they make a sound or to even hear the differences between the sound they're making and what they're supposed to do. So this work took up most of the remainder of the class, and then in the last five minutes David handed us all our IPA tests back. He announced happily that everyone had passed (which included me!) and when I got my paper back I had an A with 94%! Not too bad for three classes learning about it I thought. So I was very happy with that.

Then came Svetlana's class. My scene didn't get on the floor today, which was probably a good thing given the mood Svetlana was in. It was brutal. Several people in tears by the end of the class. The one thing Svet hates more than anything is when she gives an actor a note ("Every note I tell you is gold. What, you not want them? Do you know better?") and they don't take the note and incorporate it into their work on the scene. And that happened a lot today. I don't know whether it was people not understanding the notes she was giving, or inability to put them into practise, or laziness, or being overwhelmed by the whole thing or all of the above, but Svetlana got mad. We only got through two scenes today because she was working so hard trying to get what she wanted out of them. And I could see that the actors wanted to give her what she wanted, but for whatever reason were largely unable to. Some favourite quotes include:

"You know how to make acting choices? Or you can only bring me yourself, which is obviously wrong."
"Don't look at floor. Floor will not help you. You find what you need to say in your environment, in the space. Everything you need is right there so don't be so lazy and f***ing find it."
"No! You need to find it. Right now you know your speech."
"You know you can still act while is other person's lines, right?"
"Don't go to tears, go to action."
"Stop just getting angry. Is so weak. Chekhov didn't write about angry people. Sure, they can smash something, but is from pain or from fear."
"Don't just try to change. Changing for the sake of change is idiotic and idiotic choices will be born. Think only of objective and choices that are correct and different will be born."

And then of course a bit of the usual "Is so boring guys, you are so boring", "You are horrible actor right now", "I never see such bad acting guys, you are all so bad today", "Who teaches you to act this way? Do you learn nothing from my class?" "You are emotionally unavailable. I don't know how to fix it. You are like robot" and so on and so forth.

Overall though, while I did feel that Svetlana pushed very hard (yet more and more I realise that it's part of her teaching approach to help an actor get to a certain place - outiside of class she's lovely), I felt that people on the floor today probably weren't working as hard as they could or should have. It was a massive reminder for me that really as an actor all you need to be clear on is objective, obstacle and circumstance. If you know - and I mean absolutely know - these and all their complexity and layers, and you totally and honestly physically inhabit them, then everything falls into place. And when you approach the work in the way that Svetlana teaches there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to know these three things inside out. So I'll be going on Wednesday with any luck, and I'm determined to work hard and smart while I'm on the floor.

Last up I was meant to be filming my scene from Rounders, but John, our teacher, was away so class was cancelled. Don't know when or if we'll get to make that up, but I hope we do because it would be great to put something on film while I'm here and also to have the chance to be directed by John. We'll see how that pans out though.