The penultimate day

Started the day with my last Shakespeare class with Evelyn, and it was a really good one. The first thing we did was to learn and run through the elements exercise that I've done many times before, each in a slightly different way, and Evelyn's version was different again. The same basic principles apply to the physical positions, and the positions themselves are more or less the same with a few differences, but Evelyn runs through it fast and many times, rather than just once or twice at a slower rate. We had to run through the whole thing 25 times with a partner before class even started. It brings you to a place of being "your quintessential self." And I like that.

Next up was an exercise called a punctuation walk - which Evelyn had never tried with a third year class but wanted us to be her guinea pigs. Again, I've done similar exercises before, but there were many differences in the way Evelyn does it and I really got a lot out of it. Basically you walk your lines of text, one step per syllable, and for every piece of punctuation (or capitalised word, or proper noun, or long spelling etc) there is a physical action or change of direction or something that you must do. And there is a lot to do when you look at the text in that way. But they aren't just arbitrary actions - like every time there's a semi-colon roll on the floor and imagine you're covered in maple syrup - but they seek to get to the heart, in a physical way, of whatever direction or help that piece of punctuation is trying to give you. It takes the sense of the punctuation away from your brain and puts it in your body, so it's not such a daunting thing that you must think about but it represents something that you do. I really noticed how helpful viewing the punctuation in this way can be during the afternoon session on Twelfth Night. Reading the text with it in mind, using the punctuation as a sort of road map, there are so many concrete cues as to how to move through the text that it's amazing. I think the biggest revelation for me was in Shakespeare's use of the colon, which is used frequently - the action that Evelyn assigned to it really made clear to me the progression of thought through both sides of a colon and what kind of action it implies within the character. Awesome.

The last exercise of the class was one where we started to look at the scenes that people are going to be working on in partners. In the exercise one set of partners sit very close to each other and connect with one another, while two others each act as a 'feeder' for one of the pair, whispering the lines to them blankly so that they can then take them in and repeat them to their scene partner. It was a cool exercise to do at a point before anyone had started learning the lines for their scenes at all, and I found that it really shifted the way you experienced the text. As the person being fed the lines you weren't concerned with remembering text or sense or doing a good performance or anything, your job was just to listen, absorb and then send the text to your partner. And while it is nowhere near a performance level by any means, it helped me to experience moments of genuine connection with the text and with my partner in a scene that I had done literally zero preparation for. In that way it's a very cool tool, and it made the text very immediate.

So that wrapped up my classes with Evelyn, and I then moved into the last of my classes with David and the graduates. We started off with another self-led Fitzmaurice warm-up and I continued to find out more about my own understanding of the exercises and how I can make it useful for myself. We just did a shorter warm-up today because David wanted to spend more time on the Estuary dialect, so we then moved down to his office to continue that work. We went through all the signature sounds and sound substitutions methodically, practising as we went, using the handout David created as a guide. I think I have a reasonably good handle on this dialect, and I think it's probably partly down to the exposure we have to British TV and film in NZ. And it's one of those accents that once you start doing it it's actually hard to stop. So we watched some clips out of Rock n Rolla for a bit more reference material, which was really helpful, then talked some more, and then time was up. The end of my last Voice/Movement class.

So then we went on into Twelfth Night, picking up where we left off near the start of Act 1 Scene 5. And again we moved slowly and meticulously through the text, with David leading everyone in being very disciplined in the way they work through it. We often stopped on single passages for extended lengths of time, discussing the devices, the sense, reading and re-reading, all the while growing a greater understanding of the play and characters and text. I really love this kind of work, and as I said before, the work I'd done with Evelyn this morning gave me a sort of fresh lens through which to view the text, and that was really exciting.

A couple of things struck me today about the differences between the actors here and actors at Toi - well I mean they're things that have struck me for a while now, but today I became a bit clearer about what it was exactly that I was being struck by. So many of the actors here work so hard and really apply themselves very studiously to what they're learning. But while they're doing this, a lot of the time I feel that what they are searching for in their education here are very concrete skills and tangible tools to use, even at times rules that they can apply to their acting work. And I am not in any way trying to imply that that's a bad thing, because we absolutely need that stuff (and at Toi it's the stuff we go a bit lighter on perhaps, the core technical skills). But what strikes me is the way in which they apply these skills or tools at times. It's sometimes like they look at a problem or question in their work as having just one answer, and the answer to that problem must lie within one of their tools in their kit they've accumulated, but they struggle to find which one to use, so they use too many of them. Or they can latch onto one of these tools and seek to apply it in too many situations, in places where it's not quite right. It's like they haven't developed as keenly their ability to read context, and to invest in reading what exists in a problem in order to solve it, rather than just band-aiding it with a patch of technique. It's something I've noticed a lot in my classes with Svetlana and the seniors too: she will ask a question to the class about what's wrong with a scene or something, and if the actors don't know the answer they just rattle off a bunch of these technical buzzwords in the hope that one of them is the right answer, that it's a quick-fix to the situation. Problems (or opportunities to learn something) can become multi-choice questions that they just have a stab at because they want to be right. It seems to come from a desire or need for there to be one way, one answer, right or wrong, and to be able to get it right. While this isn't a bad thing, and in many ways makes for really hard work and discipline in these actors, it makes me really appreciate the ability to not know something that at Toi is held so important. The skill of not knowing, and of sitting there anyway in the discomfort until you can figure out what needs to be done. And, from that, the ability to find a way forward that is suitable and organic and that fulfills what is required in the best (not the right) way. And that's one of the major differences I think I see between the two schools.

So now I have one class left: Acting with Svetlana tomorrow where I'll get up and perform my scene from the Seagull for the final time in front of one of the world masters of performing Chekhov. So no pressure. There is a real chance that the class won't actually happen though, given how sick she's been over the last week, and I haven't heard any updates since Wednesday. So who knows? I hope it goes ahead, because that would be a very anticlimactic way to end the Fullerton leg of the journey. And what better way to end the trip than with a good old fashioned Russian ass-kicking.