I am writing from McDonald’s across the street from iO. I wanted air con and quiet to read my new novel (Thursday Next – First among Sequels – John Barnier lent me the first few, now I’m ripping through this one).
The photo is half of a massive golden arch at a Macca’s downtown. The first Macca’s was in a suburb of Chicago (Des Plaines). I don’t think any tour buses go there, but it would be a cool tour – a Fast Food Bonanza tour.
Improvising today has been fast and furious.
Shad, our new teacher, is a bit of an “engineer” in Bill’s taxonomy. He first called out each person’s name and asked us to tell something interesting or funny about ourselves. That was at least an opportunity to find out people’s surnames!
He then explained that the stage is a megaphone. If there is nothing interesting or funny about you there is no reason to be on stage.
Warm up was a Fosse-off (as in the choreographer Bob Fosse). Pairs mirroring gesture and voice across the stage.
This week is all about scenes. We began with
– three line scenes
– three line scenes with a count of 5 between
– scenes where you give information about your character with every line
– scenes where you give information about your scene partner with every line
– touch to talk.
Curious thing was that everyone excelled at either more about themselves or more about their scene partner, and had definite rationalisations about why that was the best choice. Of course it’s just a preference (or training).
Then Shad referred to the Inner Game of Tennis, which came down to a single principle – focus on the ball. Our ball for this morning was “make every word count”. He promises us 8 balls – one per class.
According to Shad, the formula to make everything gold is:
1. Listen (notice)
2. Make it important
3. Respond emotionally to that importance.
Making every word important morphed into make every thing important (it’s Tuesday!).
We practiced the gold formula by doing scenes:
– 2 minutes long but only 3 lines of dialogue
– where every line began “I can’t believe you just said that, that makes me feel…”
– where every line began “It’s important to me that you said that because..”
Advice from the mouth of Shad (shadvice?):
– words only need to say what we can’t say with our bodies and emotions (like a song in a musical, which is all about emotions too strong to express except musically)
– self-awareness gets in the way of our learning (we walked before we could talk, otherwise we’d have told ourselves we couldn’t do it), that’s why we need to just focus on one thing
– apathy is not a good emotional choice
– passive aggressive is what we do all day, on stage you can cut off their head with a shovel, and they get to play the guy whose head gets cut off – go all out with the emotion
This afternoon a guest teacher, Steve, let’s see what he has to say for himself!
