November 29

Anthony!

I loved this class. I really did. We shouldn’t pick favorite among professors. So I won’t. But I have? And I did. I’ve learned a whole lot from this class, and I’ve learned about a lot of forms of theatre from you that I truly love. I really, really hope to work with you more in the future. I feel like I have so much to learn from you! Thank you for this awesome experience.

            Caleb

November 27

Gift project party times! This project really stressed me out, and I was sick for most of Thanksgiving break, so my bed-riddled, shivering self didn’t work on it as much as I would have liked to. Jenna is awesome, and I wanted to give her more, but I’m not sure I did a perfect job on this performance. Edward did a great job of doing me, though, and encapsulating me. I was so floored that he went home and learned an entire dance to a song that I do just for this project! It was flattering and I appreciated it. Edward is one of my favorite people.

            I think this is one of the best examples of our class’s growth as an ensemble, though. Everyone was so open to being represented. We all loved it, and laughed together, and enjoyed ourselves in a great, friendly way. A+ go team.

November 15

I got to be a narrator today, which was awesome. We played with music and sound effects, too. I did the three little pigs, and it was a fun experience. It also showed how doubling up on information can have comedic power, but you can’t just double up or it slows down the pace and bores the audience. We pow-wow’d as a group today and figured out what we wanted to do with our myth, which is cool. My plan is to write the script over the break. I’ve also started rehearsals with Paige and Edward on the scene I’m directing that they’re in, which is cool.

November 13

We did a space balancing exercise that I didn’t completely understand. I mean, I understood the rules and what we were supposed to do, but the ideas I was supposed to take away were unclear to me. Hopefully I absorbed some of the purpose despite not completely understanding it, I guess. I’ve got a great group for our project, a bunch of people I respect as actors, and I’m super pumped to work with them. We did a couple of different things regarding our final pieces (notably learning about expectations) and it’s helping us find things we can use when we actually start putting together a final product. I want this performance to be really good, so I hope our group pulls everything together.

            I did really love talking about expectations—I love learning about the rules behind storytelling at the way things work. The most important part of theatre to me is story, and I love to learn about it in different ways.

November 8

Oh my gosh, I am so excited for this project, oh my gosh. I have so many ideas they are bursting from my brain. Watching Robin Hood really cemented what we can do to make this performance awesome, and I’m really pumped to see what everyone pulls together. I’m interested to see how this can be used in a serious way, though—I’m going to try to convince our group to take a non-comedic approach just to see if it’s possible, because that would be awesome. Theseus and the Minotaur is one of my favorite myths, and it’s definitely a tragedy from anyone’s perspective but Theseus’s. Let’s see what we can do!

            Augghh I’m so excited.

November 6

I did not connect with the film character assignment at all. Maybe it was who I picked, but working from real people was not nearly as helpful. Michael Cera was the guy I picked because I think he gets similar roles to what I would play, but I don’t know. Imitating him was not exciting or easy for me. I’m bad at impersonating other humans, which sucks, but it’s definitely something I need to work on. Right now it’s just frustrating. I didn’t really like doing it as him and I didn’t feel like I got much out of it (except maybe how I don’t want to do my piece.) Being him took all of my energy out of the equation and I hated that.

November 1

Watched some other pieces today. It was actually really interesting to see the work everyone did for this project, because all of our performances turned out so different. I am pleased with the results, though, and think everyone found cool ways of expressing their monologue without using words. The most interesting thing for me was when you could see the words reflected in what they did—like, you could always tell when people had gone line by line with their physical pieces, and who had used general beats and ideas, like I had. Neither was particularly better than the other, it was just an interesting dichotomy. I love the word “dichotomy.”