Private Moment (Jackson Gets Down)

I performed my Private Moment for Jackson today, and I think I made some key discoveries that will help me as I continue to develop this character. In thinking of what to do for the Private Moment, I was really trying to pull some characteristics I had found with the blue heron that worked well. The key, I have found, to performing the blue heron is to imbue the heron with some kind of human characteristic. Matt is always talking about animals with human characteristics, and that helps me understand (get inside the mind of) them, because then I can judge how they will react to certain situations. (And if there is anything to be learned about acting from animals, it is how to react with complete and utter honesty. For example, an experienced CMU actor will not react in the slightest if the walls in the studio next to him start to shake, as often happens in our acting class - but how would a bird react if the walls started to shake? A bird, due to its lack of awareness of what's really happening, would perk up, recognizing a threat, and take every sound and movement into its awareness).

So, the upshot of this method of looking at the blue heron is that I took a key characteristic that I found in it and translated that to my Private Moment. I chose the word "proud," because, based on the costume I picked and the way I worked my character before the Private Moment, this seemed to me to be something I could hold on to. My blue heron, as all blue herons are, was king of his ecosystem. He will eat anything without prejudice, and he does a very good job of not getting eaten. With his incredibly large wingspan, he can soar off to different places with grace and ease, and finding food for him is never a problem. As I explored this in the exercises done after I picked my costuming (a blue polka-dot shirt, tight black corduroys, and flashy LaCoste white shoes), I found that this new human character wanted to be graceful, at ease in his situations, but he did not like being offended and had a very high sense of who he was. In translating this to a Private Moment, I decided to try dancing, because that is perhaps the perfect example of a being using their body with grace and ease while being proud at the same time. What really called to me for this moment was using dubstep - when I listened to it with my animal brain, I found that it had Jackson had a peculiar attraction to it.

So, for my Private Moment, I decided to go for it - to just throw it all in the wind and make a strong choice. Using the word "proud" as my guideline, I decided that, to Jackson, it didn't matter what people thought about his dancing, which freed me to dance however I wanted (a good thing considering my lack of dance training!) My choice was to have Jackson get ready in his house, prepare himself to look good, then go out into the street and start dancing to dubstep. The conflict of the moment occurred when Jackson accidentally tripped and fell - he was surprised that he had fallen, and it shook him up, but he is the kind of person that will get back up again and continue dancing, and that is what he did.

This moment worked for Jackson as a starting point, and comments from Matt afterward really helped me develop the character. Matt suggested that I really investigate Jackson's relationship to his dance - that perhaps "dance is a connection to his soul," and so when he falls, the fall is more severe - the stakes are higher. Instead of simply being embarrassed that he fell, perhaps he must stop the dance because his connection to the dance has now been severed. These ideas were quite interesting and will give me some things to consider as I rehash my Private Moment. What I would like to develop for the next showing of the Private Moment is 2 things: a better definition of who Jackson is, and a stronger story within the moment itself. At the moment, there is not much of a story because the stakes aren't very high, and I haven't found a strong ending - but by finding the conflict, the obstacles, the reversals in the action, and deciding on a strong ending, I will have something stronger to show the class.

A Number

I wanted to jot down a couple thoughts I had on the acting in A Number, because, as both a director and an actor, I am trying to develop my skills at seeing what good acting looks like, and what challenges me or affects me the most.

• The first thing I want to talk about is Denver's performances. I say performances because I really liked the variety in Denver's characters - for each scene I could tell that he had really worked on creating the specifics of different characters. In the first scene, as Alex's son he had raised, he went through a specific journey of finding out he was one of 20 clones - and through that journey I saw a specific character portrayed. Then, in the 2nd scene, and then again in the 4th scene, I saw a very definite other character - angrier, with more passion, and with a bone to pick with his father. What is quite interesting and quite relevant to the work I'm doing now is what Denver talked about during Conservatory Hour - that he actually used a dog as his "animal" for the clone of the second scene. This was quite interesting because I could tell, especially by the way he handled his chair, that he had this 'dog' attitude about him. And then, of course, his third character, which in his dim-wittedness was quite funny and provided a cute, although not incredible, ending to the show. So it was a good example of two things: how to differentiate 3 characters played by 1 person in the same show and how to use an animal in a performance. Bravo, Denver! Thank you for keeping me engaged.

• Alex's performance as the father of the clones was the more difficult role, and made me realize something important about acting. I think Alex did a very good job, and he played it his best. Although sometimes I was looking for a little more variety in his character, he was responding well to what Denver was giving him. The issue was, I think (and this was confirmed to me by Jed Harris and Matt) that it is not really possible for a CMU School of Drama student, a 22-year old, to play such an old role - and I think especially a father's role - without having enough life experience behind him. Jed was telling me that "in ten years, he'll be itching to get his hands back on this role to give it another shot," and I think that that is an important thing to think about when casting, or deciding which show to do. How well can even the best CMU actor perform an old man's role? I saw the same problem in The Wind Farmer - I really just wanted the actor to be older, to act older, to move slower and with more weight into the floor, instead of young and sprightly. I even left the show thinking, "Is it possible for a man to play a father's role like this without having had kids, or without having done extensive research into what it's like to lose a kid?" I'm not yet sure. Matt thinks it's possible, but I'll have to see - I just haven't seen it done yet.

Michael Chekhov Exercise - thoughts

Every so often in Acting class, you do an exercise that just kind of blows your mind - tears it apart and forces you to rethink the old judgements and barriers you had to what was possible. I'm happy to say that the exercise today was one of those days. We did a Michael Chekhov exercise in which we explored 4 movements: Molding, Floating, Flying, and Radiating. I want to discuss two things - 1st, how exploring Flying changed how I will relate to performing the blue heron in the future; and 2nd, how exploring Radiating actually brought me to tears, and what that teaches me about the power of the human imagination. (Side note: Molding and Floating were both interesting, but I did not experience them as deeply as I experienced Flying and Radiating. I was sitting back in my judgement corner for a lot of Molding, and it was honestly difficult for me to imagine what Floating upwards through water would feel like. But I was working very hard through both of them and it payed off for the last two).

So, Flying! That was such an incredible experience. We floated up through the air until we were up on top of a tree branch, and then we were invited to fly to another branch in the room - and all of a sudden I realized the mistake I had been making with the heron for so long. Every time I imagined the heron flying, I imagined him starting at the ground and flying up to something - so every time he had to flap his wings to get up into the air. Here, though, we were already in the air, and when we were flying Matt told us to imagine we were lighter than air - and all of a sudden I had a breakthrough from my old way of heron flying. Instead of flapping my wings, I simply spread them out, and the wind took over and glided me to the next branch. Instead of flying, now I was soaring! The key difference was that before, I had never imagined the heron to be lighter than air, perhaps because my legs were always connected to the ground and that distracted me. In any case, and after watching more heron videos, I have found that the heron, with its giant wings, actually doesn't have to flap its wings very much - it can just gracefully soar from branch to branch. Discovering this was an epiphany, and something I will bring into my work in the future - not just with the heron, but with any character that needs to have the appearance of being lighter than air.

The part of the exercise that moved me, and made it a game-changing exercise in the end, was the Radiating part - the end. We stood on a small silver platform and were raised up, up, up, through the clouds, through the atmosphere, out to the edge of space. What really got me into the exercise was that I took my time with it - I closed my eyes and imagined seeing the ground from tree level, then from cloud level, then from atmosphere level, until I could see the curvature of the Earth. We were then told that the energy from the sun, our life source, was actually mimicked by a small sun within all of us that was radiating outwards, heating up the Earth with our hearts. I don't remember exactly when I started to cry, but I know it was at the point when I realized, without a doubt, that I was completely and utterly alone - completely cut off from the rest of the human race. Writing about it now, it seems a little ridiculous; I mean obviously I wasn't, right? I was still in Studio A. But my imagination took me to a place I had never been before, and I swear I experienced what it was like to be in outer space. And I honestly don't know how astronauts do it. It was just about the worst feeling I've ever had. I suppose because they go up with other people, it's not as bad, but that feeling of loneliness is fucking brutal. It was slightly relieved when Matt told us to start accepting the radiation from the other members of the class in space with us, to both radiate and accept radiation at the same time, but I think that relief was quickly replaced by more angst when Matt told us to direct our radiation at a place somewhere on Earth that was important to us. I, of course, directed it straight at my wonderful home in Stone Mountain, GA, and I imagined my mother cleaning the kitchen inside and my father sitting at his computer, and at this point I was bawling, but I kept radiating. And radiating. And accepting radiation. It was a new feeling, but something I need to keep using in the future in my characters, because I rarely stop to think about the energy I am giving to my partner - just what I am receiving. And I need to be experiencing and understanding both in order to be an effective actor.

Anyways, after I stopped crying and came back down to Earth and debriefed with my fellow actors, I realized my imagination can really take me places I've never been before. It really is a transformation in sensuality - how specific and authentic can you make your environment, your where? How does this outer environment affect the inner self (because it always does)? As Matt said, the exercise doesn't work on you emotionally - it works on you sensually. The emotions are just a byproduct of the specificity of your where and the strength of your imagination.

Besides a revelation in how strong I can make my "where," I also have 4 new tools in my toolbox: Molding, Floating, Flying, and Radiating. As the blue heron, I will definitely work with Flying, but I am also going to try experiment with Radiating and Molding too - like how could Molding be used when I stand up or sit down? Like Matt said, "Flying into Molding is a clearer beat change than 'OMG my life is changing!'" So these 4 techniques will be new ways to approach a character, an action, a beat change, and give me a new perspective on what I am doing as an animal/character.

The Problem with Niche Theatre

We had a really interesting conversation in Acting class today that I want to write down my thoughts on, because it's something I've been dealing with since coming to CMU. Before I came to CMU, I didn't really know how the theatre business worked - I mean I had a general idea, but I didn't know a lot of the specifics. One of the specifics that really blew my mind was how cultish the theatre is, and how people can be so put off by it. But I mean, why should they be? It's not that much different from film, right?

Not true, and here's why. First off, people see it as over-intellectual - like they can't just sit back and enjoy it when it's really "good" theatre. My sister, a chemical engineering student at Georgia Tech (go Jackets!) is exactly like that. I talk to her about theatre and it often times puts her off, and quite understandably. See, this is the issue I have, which is that many of these stereotypes that people put on theatre - well, see, actually they're kind of true. I enjoy theatre I have to struggle with to understand, something I have to uncover like it's an egg waiting to be hatched, but a good portion of people, and perhaps the majority, don't enjoy struggling to understand theatre. They want to see a good story, well-acted but not necessarily creatively directed.

Another shocker for me, and this relates to the first point, is that theatre is often times made only for theatre-goers - and this is exactly how I felt about the new work Blind Alley Guy. I actually enjoyed Blind Alley Guy, despite the fact that I couldn't always follow it, but I was not immune to the fact that Blind Alley Guy was made exclusively for Eugene O'Neill fanatics. Like, seriously. It was basically a creative way to show Eugene O'Neill's notes on his final play and the things he was struggling with as he wrote it. Instead of writing O'Neill's final play, the deviser/director took the script notes and created a play out of them. Now, this is a really cool idea for a play, and I think it worked out reasonably well for them, especially on their first try - but what is the point?

The problem is it was a niche theatre piece, a piece made only for theatregoers, and unfortunately, leaving the theatre, I did not gain much from it. I was not taken on a journey, I did not feel for the characters, and all those other things you're supposed to get from a theatre piece. Or are you? Perhaps Blind Alley Guy didn't want to take you on a journey, didn't want to make you see the characters go on an arc - perhaps it just wanted to be clever and kind of funny, which it was. So is this acceptable as a piece of theatre?

I would say it is. Here's the thing: it would be naive to say that theatre has only one purpose. Obviously, a Eugene O'Neill play is going to give the audience different things than a Broadway musical (and you could even argue that different showings of the same Eugene O'Neill play is going to give the audience different things on different nights.) Maybe the director of Alley Guy only wanted me to leave the theatre with what I did. In that case, he accomplished his goal. The only thing is that I was not fully satisfied. I was intellectually satisfied, to some extent, but not emotionally satisfied, and that angered me. And the only reason I was intellectually satisfied is because I am a director and I appreciate the work done with O'Neill's scraps of script, even though I knew little about his life before seeing this play.

So what I'm trying to say here is that I think theatre can do a lot of different things, but some of those things won't always satisfy the audience in the way they want to be satisfied. One of the things a theatre piece can do is be niche and only play for the CMU School of Drama and no one outside of it - and that's perfectly fine as long as you don't have higher aspirations. A theatre piece can also just try to be clever and interesting but not emotionally appealing, and that's also perfectly fine as long as you don't have higher aspirations. But I have higher aspirations for what I put onstage, and I have higher aspirations for what I think CMU SOD should be putting onstage, so next time, Blind Alley Guy - do something my sister would enjoy.

The Wind Farmer

I have just seen Dan O'Neill's The Wind Farmer, dir. by Jessica Mills, and I saw some very specific things in it that I have been working on in acting class that it would be beneficial for me to discuss. Overall, I didn't think the script was bad - the subject matter was very interesting, contemporary and relevant, and the characters could have been really engaging - but unfortunately it appeared to me like the actors were generally playing on one note and that they weren't going anywhere. I also thought that the stakes just weren't very high, in any of the scenes, despite the constant arguments between the characters.

There are several reasons for why I reacted as I did above. The first, and most glaringly obvious flaw in all three actors' performances, was simply the pacing of the dialogue. It was so fast that I almost had trouble keeping up. I can see how keeping the dialogue fast made the scenes funnier, wittier, etc., but no one was listening to each other or responding to what the other person was saying. There were a few times when the characters' reactions would actually jump the previous character's line by a few seconds! What would have made more sense, if the director was really intent on keeping a quick pace to the play, would have been to keep the daughter's lines fast and, in contrast, slow down the father's and the stranger's lines. But the way it was, there was no contrast, and no believability to the rapidity of their speech.

Stemming off of this, I really didn't see the characters going anywhere, or taking blows, or trying different tactics. I could see them going for the objective - I could see the stranger convincing, to his best, that the farm should be sold, and the old man, to his best, convincing the stranger that his connection to the farm was more important than the world's need for green energy. The issue was that "the stranger convincing the old man that the farm should be sold" was really just the stranger yelling at the old man for 10-minute long scenes, and the old man yelling back. What would have been stronger, if the old man was really this intent on keeping the farm, would have been if the old man, at the start at least, ignored the stranger completely, and didn't let him inside the house so easily. Then the stranger would have had to work to get inside the house, and even getting into a conversation with the old man would have been an achievement. As it was, nobody achieved anything.

The yelling I mentioned above was repetitive and, accompanied by the pace of the dialogue, the reason I felt like the scenes weren't going anywhere. During the play, I kept thinking about the opening scene to Inglourious Basterds, one of my favorite Tarantino films. In that opening scene, the villain of the movie, Hans Landa, comes to the Frenchman's house to make sure he is not hiding Jews. Landa's men are waiting outside to kill the Frenchman and anyone inside the house if there are any Jews inside, and we learn halfway through the scene that there are Jews hiding under the floorboards. Now, the stakes here are obviously incredibly high - but the two actors (Christoph Waltz and Denis Menochet), in ironic contrast, engage in quiet, cordial conversation that in fact increases the tension because they are not yelling at each other! Hans Landa does not need to yell at the Frenchman, because he has the force of a Nazi regiment behind him; and the Frenchman, because the stakes are so high, doesn't dare yell at the Nazi officer. Now, imagine if the scenes in The Wind Farmer had been treated this way? If, instead of yelling, they quietly battled, leaving most under the surface, making the yelling a climax instead of the norm? I assert that the scenes would have been stronger and more engaging to watch.

Finally, as a result of the quick-paced dialogue, the lack of listening and really giving and receiving blows, and the repetitive tactics in pursuit of the objective (i.e., yelling), the play simply did not have very high stakes and I didn't care what happened at the end - I didn't care whether the farmer signed it or not, and I wasn't fully engaged by the question of whether his land was worth more to him than to the clean energy company. The debates in the script were quite interesting, and if paced correctly would be very engaging to interact with - but as it was, I felt like I was watching more of a political debate than a piece of theatre.

Animal Brain, Human Brian

We had an exciting exercise today - we took our first step towards our transition into human characters. Starting with an animal character improvisation, we, step-by-step, began to exchange our animal parts with human parts. The first to go were the feet - suddenly I had a heron's body with human feet! Then ankles, knees, thighs, hips, etc., moving up into the upper body and finally the head. But never, of course, the brain - the brain was still an animal brain. Then we explored the room, trying out our new human limbs for the first time, seeing how we would treat and react to the various things in the room. Then we began interacting with people with the word "Hi," although the way we used the word "Hi" was completely up to our interpretation and did not have to have anything to do with a greeting. Finally, we were allowed to use names, and to play with the sounds of different names, and perhaps even introduce ourselves.

Reflections on the Exercise

I found a lot of cool new things in my animal today as I transitioned into a human being. Having human limbs, as a start, was absolutely revolutionary - especially having hands. When I obtained hands, I just wanted to touch everything in the room, to see how it felt to grasp it in my fingers. What an experience! It was like I had discovered a new color. I touched not only things in the room, but my own body. I felt what it was like to have human skin, human teeth, human fingernails, and with my animal brain it was like I was exploring my own body for the first time.

Not having wings or a beak was another huge transformation. Moving my arms was a surprise for me, and I even was acting like I had a phantom beak - trying to poke at things with my mouth and my tongue without fully realizing that they functioned completely differently from my beak.

I also experimented with what it was like to lie on the floor, to roll around, to make movements that the heron could not have accomplished. While I don't know if I'll be able to bring these movements into my human character for the bird, I still liked to experiment with them to challenge my animal brain into exploring the world around me. That's what I really liked about today - it was about exploring our environment in a completely new way, much like I explored Studio A during Watering Hole. Except this time, I was exploring it as a newly transformed human being. So I tried out lots of different things and made discoveries of Studio A that I had begun to take for granted as both Brian P-S and the blue heron.

And, of course, interacting with the other characters was just as fun, because it was so completely new. I was meeting people for the first time, except they weren't really fully formed people because we were trying out so many different ways of interacting with each other. I used "Hi" in about 10,000 different ways, trying to elicit different responses from different people. I used it to attack Jordan, for example, but I also used to seduce Andrea. We were all playing, in a state of anything-goes, and that was really engaging to be a part of.

After today, I'm really excited to see where our characters go from here. Honestly, I think my character could go in several different directions; I'm going to need lots of exercises like the one today to decide on what works for the blue heron, and what doesn't work. But getting to play without limits today created a state of fun that really opened me up to what is possible.

Watering Hole

Watering Hole

Yesterday the entire Acting class came together and performed Watering Hole in Studio A. The experience was messy, fun, and exciting - I was subjected to stimulations that my animal, the blue heron, had not yet experienced, so there was always something new to play with. I’ll discuss Watering Hole in terms of what worked, what didn’t work, discoveries I made, and any other thoughts that I have on the work we accomplished yesterday.

WHAT WORKED:

• Exploration. The first aspect of Watering Hole that I really enjoyed was that I got to really explore Studio A. The room was quite different from the way it usually is, and when we walked in the room, we were immediately suggested by Barbara and Ingrid to take in the room as much as we could - to become comfortable in where we were and what there was to engage with in the room. The exploration that I undertook in the first 5 minutes established the “where” for me very well, and I immediately identified the places where the blue heron was most likely to hang out: in or around the water in the middle of the room, or the water near the window. I also found my food sources. What was nice about the complexity of the room is that, as the exercise progressed, I was still able to discover new things about my where even after my focus had shifted away from exploring everything in the room. As the exercise progressed, I found that the heron would always be, in the background, in a state of exploration - the heron is always ready to discover what’s underneath a pile of newspaper or around the other side of a block.

• Keeping focus on the immediate. For much of the start of Watering Hole, I was overwhelmed - so many noises, so many animals, so much movement! A real blue heron would be completely freaked out by 3 elephants and a tiger scampering by. But I found a way to focus my attention so that I could handle what was going on around me and respond specifically and appropriately, and that was by focusing mostly on what was happening within about a 5-foot radius of me. That way, I could have interactions and specific communication with the other animals instead of trying to communicate with every other animal in the room. So, for example, instead of looking to see what Kyle's condor was up to on the other side of the room, I would instead look to see what Jordan's llama was up to right next to me, so that we could have some kind of interaction. In terms of what I learned from this, it became clear to me that in a seemingly overwhelming state of chaos, it is important for an actor to pay specific attention to each thing in turn instead of trying to take everything in at once.

• Maintaining the physicality. For such a long improv (more than 1hr, I believe), I really had to prepare ahead of time how I would occupy my time so that I didn't revert back into my "greatest hits." The biggest thing I found when watching the heron videos and going to the aviary was that a bird spends much of its time in one place, in one position physically, but with perhaps some isolated movement in the head or wings. So I spent much of my time maintaining balance on one leg, or two legs, or enjoying the feel of the water on my talons. I didn't force actions onto the bird, but rather I tried to work from some sense of instinct that I think I've developed over working with the bird for two weeks. Which brings me to my next point on something I tried that worked well, which was:

• Working from reactions. What is interesting about animals is, of course, how instinctual they are - and what that means in practice is that they spend much of their time reacting to their environment. What I found is that I didn't need to think of new actions to play or new things to do as the heron because there was so much to react to in the room. I could simply let it wash over me when I was unsure of where I was at the moment, and let myself listen both physically, visually, and aurally, and respond to that. I think I'm repeating myself a little here, but the main point is that a big thing I learned yesterday was listening to my environment and reacting honestly to it.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK:

• Eating. My beak, despite my best efforts, is simply not up to par with the strength and capabilities of a heron's beak. I've tried to reinforce it with plastic cut from a gallon of milk, but that hasn't done much. So during Watering Hole, I was finding tons of food that the heron would eat, but I didn't have the satisfaction of being able to pick it up and eat it. I mimed it, of course, so I could practice the movements of eating, but it was disappointing for me not to be able to realistically portray the heron eating - especially because I feel like I have the movements down very well after watching so many videos of the heron eating and after practicing it in class.

• Flying. Flying through the classroom was quite difficult for me today because there were so many animals in the room - I wanted to fly over them to get to the other side of the room, but of course I had to use my legs to get there and maneuvering between them was difficult. So I flew, but the flying was not natural or graceful like the bird - it was dodgy and uneven. I wasn't really able to take advantages of the undulations of flying while I was doing it.

• Killing/Being Killed. When we were allowed to start killing and being killed, I immediately looked around and realized something very grave: everyone is a threat. I could no longer be next to a bear or monkey without being afraid that they were going to attack me. Right from the start, I could tell that Taylor was after me, and sure enough she assaulted me about 30 seconds into the killing section. I tried to fly away, but due to a wing malfunction I didn't move very fast and she nabbed my wing, rendering me almost immobile. I ran straight into a herd of elephants who I thought were trying to kill me (turns out they were just trying to push me away), and so I just decided to lay down and die. It was a very anticlimactic ending to the exercise. As the blue heron, I am actually king of my ecosystem, and I was planning on nabbing a naked mole-rat or two before I was killed, but I didn't get the opportunity. However, that initial realization of "Oh my God, anyone can kill me now" was quite interesting because, in one moment, my relationship and method of communication with the other animals completely changed. It's like people who walk around and take everyone else as a threat to their existence - they're not very amicable or fun to be around because they're always on the look-out. I'm not sure to what level an animal is always on the look-out; I think it's a background instinct, part of that background listening that is on the other side of the coin of constantly exploring the environment around you. It's hard to know when you can't get inside the mind of the heron, but I think I can find a compromise in the future between knowing that I could be killed and having the courage to step outside of that and explore my beautiful environment anyways.