The Acting Class

This week was my very first acting class. I mean, I studied Drama at high school, but that's a little different. The kind of high school drama I did involved learning to walk with a book on my head (always an important skill), learning how to speak clearly (actually a good skill to have), and doing scenes either on my own or with one or two others so that we could go in Eisteddfods and try to win shiny medals. But I never really learnt any type of technique.

So a month ago I was accepted into the Atlantic Acting School's Fall Foundation Level One Program. It sounds like an accomplishment. But I didn't have to audition or anything - just do some scene analysis, go to an interview and tell them why I'd be a good student. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy! I was accepted and only had a month to wait until I could start leaning to be the best actress this side of the East River...and then perhaps the other side of the East River, i.e. Manhattan, which probably has more successful actors than the ones living in Queens.

Class would be every Monday for 10 weeks, starting October 3rd, 2011. The big day came...

I missed it.

I was sick.

Double damn!

For a month I was looking forward to finally doing something scary and fun and exciting and important, and a few days before I begin it all, what happens? I get the FLU.

Now, side note, I hate when people say they have the flu when they have a cold. I still remember my husband collapsing on the floor of our bathroom in Australia when he had the flu...it wasn't good. So, while I didn't go to the doctor here to actually find out if what I had was the flu, I don't remember feeling so bad because of a cold in the past. So let's call it the flu. I was so sick. So. Sick. Monday morning, the beginning of my acting career, came around. I dragged myself out of bed, forced myself into the shower, got dressed, packed my bag with a box of tissues, lozenges, handkerchief (in case the tissues ran out), water and cold and flu medication, made toast, felt too sick to eat it, took my temperature to find out I indeed still had a fever, woke up my husband and told him I wasn't going. Poop.

So, that was my first acting class - feverish episodes of old tv shows with buckets of tissues, orange juice and matzo ball soup.

However, Atlantic Acting School take things very seriously. Two absences (no matter the reason!) and you're out...a little frightening. And they give you homework! Like actual school. So that night I got an email from one of the guys from class, sent to the whole class, about setting up a time to meet to discuss. This was very exciting, as I was feverishly dreaming that because of missing my first ever acting class William H. Macy himself would hijack my Oscar's acceptance speech just as I was thanking Atlantic Acting School, stealing my Oscar and yelling 'you'll never work in this town again' and then zip-lining away through the crowd as I was sucked into the mouth of a Dementor. Yippee (about the email)! A few emails later and I had set up an acting date on Friday with a classmate to review Monday's class, and then another acting date with a couple of others the same day to practice something called Repetition...

...Repetition (see what I did? No? I repeated it...see? Yep.) is this crazy acting exercise used to help actors recognize the emotions they see in another person's expressions. The reason this is important is because at this school the technique you learn is all about acting in the moment and being able to recognize and respond to what you see in another person at that specific moment in time. So you don't practice and learn the best way to say a line. You say a line based on what you want out of that other person and on what you're seeing at that exact moment in that other person. It's kind of cool. But it's hard. Which is why Repetition is such a big part of that.

So what is Repetition? It's weird and a little uncomfortable. And at the moment, since it's the Foundation Level One class, it's pretty basic. Two of us stand a few metres apart. One person starts. They say something they observe in the other person, e.g. 'you have blonde hair'. The other person says 'I have blonde hair'. The first person repeats 'you have blonde hair'. It goes back and forth. Quite fast - like you would play ping pong. When one of the pair notices something else they then say it: 'you have dark eyebrows', 'I have dark eyebrows', 'you have dark eyebrows'. It goes on and on, generally until someone says something silly and you both laugh. After a few weeks of class it will progress from purely physical observations to things like 'you're surprised' or 'you're barraging me'. That sounds trickier. But we will see.

So now I'm on a one way trip to acting glory, with only one more absence my only potential downfall. Fingers crossed for no car accidents or power outage alarm resetting incidents. Or sneaky competitive rivals reading this to sabotage my gold filled future. Shit.

And now it's Saturday night, time for our weekly whoever does a lap of the apartment fastest with a book on their head gets to wear the St George Eisteddfod Medal race. Stay tuned for the winner of that.