Friday Session

To aid in creating the best theatrical product we possibly can, our director has called people with substantial roles to come in on Friday's, to work on scenes outside of scheduled rehearsal time. This will mean we can add extra detail to our acting work and re-consolidate the work we've done in the week and fix the notes our director gives us.  

Whilst working on scene 2 Ben noticed I was internalising my thoughts too much. We had an in depth conversation about how as British people we don't externalise our emotions and reactions to situations mainly down to our social conditioning. However Americans don't do that. They have big personalities and are always expressing themselves. I connected this to the feeling when I hear American's on public transport you can always tell when one of them is on the tube because they voice virtually every thought they have in real time. They are not trying to internalise them they just have them and outwardly express them nearly 100% of the time. During scene I was reacting inwardly to what Claudia was doing to Skilling and that was wrong. If Skilling gets offended by a comment a man about his manhood or sexual prowess he's going to let her know he is not happy about it. This discovery was really useful to the rest of my scenes as well and it made me aware of any other time I was doing this.

In a part of the scene I was told to pace as I was trying to come to terms with Claudia potentially become president. However I couldn't quite connect with this and the move just became superficial. In order to find this outer experience I had to find this inner energy to propel me into moving. Ben gave me this exercise which I'd best describe as "egg hands". By moving my hands back and forth like I was shaking eggs this in turn effected my inner life and made me feel more anxious. This helped me because by finding the opposite (to calm down) it worked me up. This solved the problem of being disconnected from the thoughts I was having and allowed me to truly connect with the moment. 

After our director left in order to help learn our lines quicker and get a better sense of the subtext of the scene we were working did some improvisational work. Based around Mike Alfreds "Text, no text, text" exercise. This yielded some strong results as we started working from an instinctual place and we found out a lot about what our true motivations in the scene were. This kind of work is useful and we are going to hopefully approach all future scenes with this level of detail and introspection. I feel like I'm really starting to understanding Skilling on not just intellectual level but now on what's going on in his inner life. In order to progress with my characterisation I need to marry the research work and the instinctual things I am discovering in the moment so I can create a three dimensional character.