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September 06, 2005
Sitting Pretty
I am sitting by a waterfall on a pretty little college campus today. I had no idea places this peaceful, idyllic even, could be found in Lewiston, Idaho.
I’m here because a friend of mine teaches here. She’s going to be gone for a couple of days, so I’ll be taking over her classes. Today was meet the students see how she does things day. (Which reminds me. We haven’t talked about money yet. I do get paid for this gig, and we haven’t yet discussed how much.) They seem like a good bunch, and I’m looking forward to the classes. (For two of them, Intro to Theatre classes, I’m basically playing Death of a Salesman – the good one with Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovitch – and chatting with them about the basics of tragedy.) It feels strange, though, to be a “visiting artist.”
She also teaches an acting for non-majors class, and today was about private moments. This is a lovely exercise. You come up with a thing that you loved to do in childhood, something that was really your “thing,” in a place where you felt safe to just play. And then you re-create that on stage, using whatever props you need.
The best part of this exercise is that you can tell when people “click in,” when they get to that place. They stop acting. They are totally in the moment, and everything about them changes. Their breathing, the way they use their bodies, their rhythms in terms of walking, how they move their hands and feet, it all changes. And that’s when we as audience members also get drawn in. You can tell the moment it happens. You know. It’s when you stop evaluating and just start watching.
I love seeing it happen. It’s amazing to watch.
But before we did that, we did a warmup where we went to that place in our heads and we explored how it felt to lie on the floor, to sit up, to make noise, to walk as that child. And then we took risks as that child. It was so much fun. Of course, my child was walking around the stage with her belly sticking out and making all sorts of noises, occasionally poking people.
Nancy usually lets people settle into the sense of it before asking them to take risks. But I was walking around the stage admiring my feet and looked up and realized that I could run all the way across with my arms spread wide and yelling if I chose. I hesitated briefly, I didn’t want to disrupt things, and then I realized my 8 year-old self wouldn’t care about that. She’d just run across the stage yelling, so that’s what I did.
It was very liberating. For me and for everyone else.
Posted by sally at September 6, 2005 02:35 PM
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