It feels as if we've been running around like chickens with our heads cut off. We've been trained to give tours of our Production Building, our Mainstage, and Stage II (the theatre where the smaller, edgier shows and the Player shows are) in which we are tested. We've been dutifully searching high and low for monologues for our monologue workshop series. We've started rehearsals for our fall show/one of our tour shows. We've been attending the ballet and jazz classes twice a week. We've been attending rehearsals understudy rehearsals. We've had IPA workshops and Fitzmaurice workshops and playwriting workshops. And it's not like we have it nearly as busy as Players in past years.
Usually, the Players are in the Mainstage shows, some, even 2 Mainstage shows in the fall. That is in addition to the 4 shows we are rehearsing and performing! Due to budget cuts and a script not totally ready for performance (it has been replaced by The Glass Menagerie, not too shabby, eh?), the 5 new Players aren't able to be cast in a Mainstage show. When we were first told this in the middle of the summer, we were all a little disappointed, but then so many learning opportunities have opened up.
I've mentioned before, everyone here is willing to learn and everyone is willing to teach. The job-in (people who aren't part of the resident acting company) dancers have been teaching us back-to-the-basics ballet and jazz. Dancing is one skill that make most of the Players pee their pants, but twice a week we are doing barre work and stretching. We are improving our dancing and vocabulary so when that dreaded dance audition comes, we will kick its butt...with a turned out foot of course. It's amazing how much people have improved just within the last couple of weeks, not to mention how sore I am from not dancing for 4 years.
A former Player turned resident actor is leading us through a Fitzmaurice workshop. Fitzmaurice is a voice technique that focuses on total relaxation of your muscles to facilitate free breathing. It's pretty fascinating. Basically it's doing really uncomfortable yoga positions until your muscles start shaking, or "tremoring" in Fitzmaurice terms, then relaxing the rest of your muscles to allow the tremor to travel your body. We had an hour and a half workshop one night, and afterwards, I could breathe and speak so well! Just wait Alisa, I'm gunna be a good breather yet. I know it seems pretty new age, but if you are at all interested, here's a website http://www.fitzmauricevoice.com/.
The director of our first two shows and the two shows in the fall, John Hardy, has been giving playwriting workshops. He has his PhD in playwriting and is a great actor and a diligent dramaturg. He's pretty gosh darn a genius. Here's his website, http://johnhardytheatre.com. I have learned soo much about the inner workings of a playwright's mind and have started collecting ideas for a play of my own. I can't believe I have the balls to even consider writing a play. That would have never happened before the Barter.
Our artistic director, Katy Brown, has offered to do a Monologue Workshop series with us throughout the fall. We gave her a list of all of our monologues and she told us what kind of monologues we needed, what monologues were overdone, etc. She knows, she has done the casting for the entire company for a while. My assignment was to find 3 contemporary monologues, ones without accents, by last Saturday. Now, finding monologues was always something I never knew how to do. I used to be so unsure, but having to find them this summer, I now have confidence and found some pretty good ones. We've also been assigned a partner each week to have coachings on our monologues. This is when I realized I do actually know something about acting. I can see and express all of the lessons we've learned throughout our time here. It's also really great to have an environment where we trust our peers to give sound, non-catty, advice. This week our assignment was to put a contemporary monologue up on its feet. We show them tomorrow, wish me luck!
The play we are doing in the fall and will eventually take on tour is The Call of the Wild. Some of you may have read the book by Jack London and you may ask, "how can you write a play about a book told totally from the perspective of a dog?" It can be done, I tell you. Cathy Bush (http://catherinebushplays.com/), our resident playwright, has written a kickin play. There are probably about 30 characters, but only 6 actors. It's going to be awesome. I play a mexican, 2 dogs, a husky, an irishman, and a wolf.
It's amazing how much I grew during The Reluctant Dragon and not even know it. You may remember in previous blogs how frustrated I was with not being able to talk during the play, but unbeknownst to me, it made me grow leaps and bounds as an actor. Our first rehearsal, I dove into the world of the play with such abandon. I couldn't believe how many problems I gave my character to solve and how much I gave my character to do. When I say "giving my character problems," I'm simply talking about giving my character motives. What does the character want from the other people in the scene? What physical obstacles does the character have to move around? Stuff like that.
Another skill I took away from Dragon was the ability to be aware and respond to other people's movements onstage. It's actually frighteningly scary how two people can be so in sync with one another.
Well, that's all for now. Until next time...
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