Today officially marks the halfway point through the
semester. By February, the first quarter
of my college experience will be over, and time is passing far too quickly.
Today, we turned in our Practicum, which is a “class”
consisting of logging every hour you spend doing anything that could be
remotely related to musical theatre.
Doing homework and watching Broadway shows is included in this. There is only a minimum of seven hours that
must be logged, but my average is somewhere around eighteen hours a week, and
that’s without even trying!
With every week of hours, we have to write a 100 word
minimum reflection to go with it, and there was one reflection that I wrote in
a fit of inspiration that I felt should be shared with the world. In a few words, it’s a summary of everything
acting class is.
Everyone should take an acting class.
Because this is not an acting class. It is a class in knowing yourself, in understanding how you would react under any circumstance. It is a class in vulnerability. It is a class in focus.
It is a class in being human.
We don’t learn to act here at AMDA. We learn how to be human, and then to apply
those skills to scenes and etudes.
For Acting 1: Foundations, the first semester acting course,
the entirety of the first seven weeks were spent working on four etudes, each
of which focused on a different sense.
We were instructed to play ourselves, at our own ages, under
circumstances that we would realistically find ourselves in. This way, we could understand that “acting”
is really just living under imaginary circumstances.
For example, if you have to drink coffee from a cup in your
scene, you don’t pretend you’re
drinking coffee. You actually drink
coffee in your rehearsal time, and you analyze your reaction to everything that
happens to you when you drink the coffee, and then when you get on stage, even
if there’s not actually coffee in the cup, you are still actually drinking the
coffee, and you can realistically react to it.
Simple. (sarcasm)
This is what I’ve always loved about acting. It’s literally living someone else’s life.
You can put yourself into a world you’ve never seen before, and you can actually live in it, not just pretend to. And in the process of learning this skill, you
become so incredibly in tune with yourself and with others around you, that you
really begin to understand what being a human is like, and all of the
intricacies and complications that come with it.
Actors aren’t the only ones who should be taking acting
classes. I think everyone should take an acting class, to better understand what it
really means to be a human.
Because being human is not as easy as you’d think.
 |
| An Assignment for Acting: Go to Strawberry Fields (just around the corner from home) and stand there for twenty minutes, taking note of everything your body does as you just simply see. It was supposed to be partly a study on how the body reacts in the cold ... but it was about seventy degrees that day ... |
Love,
Little Me
No comments:
Post a Comment