Babblings on Acting

For the final time of the semester, we did our Monologues in class.

Mine went pretty well (I got an 'A') but, then again, I am not doing this for a grade. I got to thinking of where I started at the beginning of the Semester. I have done this particular Monologue 3 times in front of the class.

The first time was the read-through. I was one of the early ones so he was a bit easy on me. Still, I wish I had prepared more early on. Some phrases seemed awkward and my reading was quite dry. Sometimes I find it amazing how much inflection and gestures actually add to the performance.

So, I worked on it. I went and saw the teacher. We met as a group at my house on the weekend and we ran through it with each other. The words started to lose their meaning. They were starting to become just phonetics.

I played with it. My roommates got sick of it. I tried taking it to extremes. Bizarrely enough, I started to connect with it more when I tried it with different accents.

I then kicked myself (harder to do than it sounds). "Anne, you are a trained MUSICIAN. Use what you know!"

I looked at it again, this time through the lens of musical composition. The through-lines of a ballad seemed to fit best. Build up - Back off - Build up more - Back off - Climax - Resolution. That clicked with me.

The first performance went pretty well. The music concept, while it was working, still hadn't quite sunk in.

Focus. On some of our out-of-class rehearsals it seemed to some of the others that I would drift in and out of focus. Sometimes it worked great, other times I got, for lack of a better term, fuzzy. Before this class, I imagined that acting was:

Learn the lines.
Learn the movements.
Get into character.
Perform.

What I didn't understand was the level of focus and energy that acting takes. Keeping the focus is an act of will. Maybe it is like a muscle and it gets easier to do over time. I'm doubting that.

When I was in college, I had a professor (who was kind of a mentor) who told me that "Music is in the space between the notes." Sometimes you have to say something and then give it a chance to sink in. When I first started this, the whole thing would come out in even sentences, like a 4th grader reading a report. They were evenly measured and calculated. There were no gaps. The pacing was constant. But people blurt things out. Sometimes it takes a while to get what you want to say out. Some....times......they....speak....through...clenched...teeth.

That and I want to RUSH. The music connection helps me to slow things back down.

Anyway, I think pacing and timing were an epiphany for me.

Don't get me wrong, my acting is still VERY rough. I won't be getting any parts in plays any time soon. Heck, combine everything I am trying to learn with certain vocal challenges, and the whole thing still seems insurmountable.