Today was interesting, to say the least.
I was kind of dreading this day, to be honest, because I am not an actress in any sense of the word. The last 'production' that I was in was Harlequin, and it was a school production put on during the fourth grade. I was a witch and I sang maybe six lines. So you can see why when I saw that we were doing drama workshops all day today, my heart may have dropped just a little bit. And then commenced beating at about 1000x its normal speed.
But, much to my surprise, there was nothing that I really needed to worry about. Our drama professor was a very relaxed Irishman, Dr Adrian Curtin, who as it turned out actually got his PhD from Northwestern University. He had a very inviting energy which I think put all of us more at ease (at least those of us who are English and not theatre majors). We started off by chatting once more about the production of Macbeth we'd seen at the Globe and then segued into how such a production would have been put on in Shakespeare's time. He gave us two handouts about the basics of reading/acting Shakespeare and then introduced cue scripts. These are what the Shakespearean actors used to learn their parts, and I have so much more respect for them now. Rather than receive the entire play script, they only had the last few words of the line that came before theirs - their 'cue' - and then their line. It makes for a much more organic and imperfect production, but one that has a lot of advantages. Dr Curtin explained how this encouraged the actors to play off of each other and the audience a lot more, and the play changed according to who was putting it on.
About a half an hour before breaking for lunch he distributed cue scripts to us for the first three scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream, divided us into groups, and informed us that we'd be acting these out in our afternoon session. Cue the nervous glances around the class. I was seriously impressed with my group - the majority were non-native speakers of English who were tackling Shakespeare of all the things. Somehow I ended up with the part of Titania, who of course has an extremely long speech in the scene of the play we were assigned. We read through it - terribly - for that last bit of time and then broke for lunch, though we promised to come back early to practice. (Thank god we weren't required to memorize the lines. It would have been a disaster.)
After lunch and a warmup - which involved humming and tag - we all buckled down and it was obvious everyone was taking this seriously. I don't think anyone in our group had much acting experience, but we all tried our best. After a bit more rehearsal time, it actually started to look like something cohesive. We were able to come out of our shells a bit more and really play off of each other, which I enjoyed. To be honest, I had no idea I'd have so much fun with acting. It was a good thing that we got our lines mostly down, though, because it was time for the three groups to reconvene and perform. I really loved watching the other groups, and our professor encouraged us as the audience to verbally react to the scene, just as people would have done in Shakespeare's time. I was incredibly nervous when my turn came to go on 'stage' (AKA the middle of the circle we were sitting in on the studio floor), but I think I created a passable Fairy Queen. I certainly had fun with it, even if my sadness wasn't entirely believable! (My anger at my cheating fairy husband may have been, though. I think every woman can summon that anger from somewhere...)
I think this is the most fun I've had in class so far and I'm looking forward to the next workshop! Maybe I can manage to pop a tear...
Also, on our way back from a visit to town today, we saw a rainbow - a sign of good luck for the rest of the week, in my opinion.
I was kind of dreading this day, to be honest, because I am not an actress in any sense of the word. The last 'production' that I was in was Harlequin, and it was a school production put on during the fourth grade. I was a witch and I sang maybe six lines. So you can see why when I saw that we were doing drama workshops all day today, my heart may have dropped just a little bit. And then commenced beating at about 1000x its normal speed.
But, much to my surprise, there was nothing that I really needed to worry about. Our drama professor was a very relaxed Irishman, Dr Adrian Curtin, who as it turned out actually got his PhD from Northwestern University. He had a very inviting energy which I think put all of us more at ease (at least those of us who are English and not theatre majors). We started off by chatting once more about the production of Macbeth we'd seen at the Globe and then segued into how such a production would have been put on in Shakespeare's time. He gave us two handouts about the basics of reading/acting Shakespeare and then introduced cue scripts. These are what the Shakespearean actors used to learn their parts, and I have so much more respect for them now. Rather than receive the entire play script, they only had the last few words of the line that came before theirs - their 'cue' - and then their line. It makes for a much more organic and imperfect production, but one that has a lot of advantages. Dr Curtin explained how this encouraged the actors to play off of each other and the audience a lot more, and the play changed according to who was putting it on.
About a half an hour before breaking for lunch he distributed cue scripts to us for the first three scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream, divided us into groups, and informed us that we'd be acting these out in our afternoon session. Cue the nervous glances around the class. I was seriously impressed with my group - the majority were non-native speakers of English who were tackling Shakespeare of all the things. Somehow I ended up with the part of Titania, who of course has an extremely long speech in the scene of the play we were assigned. We read through it - terribly - for that last bit of time and then broke for lunch, though we promised to come back early to practice. (Thank god we weren't required to memorize the lines. It would have been a disaster.)
After lunch and a warmup - which involved humming and tag - we all buckled down and it was obvious everyone was taking this seriously. I don't think anyone in our group had much acting experience, but we all tried our best. After a bit more rehearsal time, it actually started to look like something cohesive. We were able to come out of our shells a bit more and really play off of each other, which I enjoyed. To be honest, I had no idea I'd have so much fun with acting. It was a good thing that we got our lines mostly down, though, because it was time for the three groups to reconvene and perform. I really loved watching the other groups, and our professor encouraged us as the audience to verbally react to the scene, just as people would have done in Shakespeare's time. I was incredibly nervous when my turn came to go on 'stage' (AKA the middle of the circle we were sitting in on the studio floor), but I think I created a passable Fairy Queen. I certainly had fun with it, even if my sadness wasn't entirely believable! (My anger at my cheating fairy husband may have been, though. I think every woman can summon that anger from somewhere...)
I think this is the most fun I've had in class so far and I'm looking forward to the next workshop! Maybe I can manage to pop a tear...
Also, on our way back from a visit to town today, we saw a rainbow - a sign of good luck for the rest of the week, in my opinion.
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