This morning, this is how I felt about grad school:
...minus the drugs, and mostly focusing on the "Time! Time! There's never any time!" part...
This afternoon, things changed.
I'm in a class called Directing and Teaching Young Actors, and it's been really amazing so far. We're learning a lot of different games and activities that help actors connect with characters and present them truthfully, instead of "ACTING!" (My professor, Elise, who also helped teach Rasaboxes, calls it "Schmacting" and I love that term... I might adopt it!) The class (all 3 days of it so far) has made me really excited to go back into rehearsals and into the classroom and apply a lot of the techniques, which is really what I was hoping would come of the program as a whole. This is the class that I decided to add last minute (and overload my schedule past the allotted 20 credits) and I'm really happy I made that decision. The workload is still insane. I shouldn't be writing this post, I have a TON of work to do tonight, and I barely slept last night because I had so much work to do to prepare a presentation I had to give this morning... but I really wanted to share!
Anyway, in Directing and Teaching Young Actors (DTYA), we are assigned groups who are playing with directing techniques for a small scene. I LOVE my group (we're all coincidentally in the same morning class as well), and we're doing a short section from David Ives' All In The Timing called Words, Words, Words. I was hoping this would be the scene that we were assigned-- it's essentially about 3 monkeys sitting in an enclosure attempting to type Hamlet for a college professor conducting an experiment... For anyone who knows me, I LOVE MONKEYS. And I love David Ives. And the scene is smart, hysterically funny, and really well-written. It's just plain fun. We all agreed that doing this scene would be FUN, and a relief from the break of the much more dense, intensive morning class. (Which I'm also really enjoying, by the way... just in a completely different way...)
Anyway, to cut to the chase of this post: One of our HW assignments for tonight during our scene rehearsal was to work through the scene without scripts, using only gibberish, and to explore the space of the scene. First, most of my group members and I (one was in Seattle to go see a production and wasn't around) went out to dinner and just talked. Not so much about work, but just about life and normal people conversation, and it was nice to have a brief break from all the Grad School-ness of our current lives. I'm constantly reminded that I'm surrounded by amazing, talented, diverse people here, and I consider myself truly honored to be working with them.
After dinner, we went to the playground by our apartments as part of our rehearsal and PLAYED LIKE MONKEYS ON THE PLAYGROUND. And it was what our class likes to call "Deep Fun." Yes, it was a blast... but the activity brought us all to a deeper level of understanding of our characters and their actions and relationships within the scene. We played in the space and related to each other in different ways, played with different atmospheres in the space (curiosity, anger, irritation), and just PLAYED. After all the stress of the work, and negative amount of time I have to get an insane amount of work done, it was really nice to be able to just go out and PLAY and be PRODUCTIVE at the same time. And it wasn't just us running around like goofballs. It was really freeing, and allowed us to get out of our heads for awhile and just delve into our characters with body, breath, and movement.
The rehearsal put me back in a good mental place to (hopefully) get the rest of my work done tonight, and get a good night's sleep!
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