tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68263763691034184422024-03-13T04:34:26.575-06:00ALVINA KRAUSEUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger116125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-80440928442898975232014-08-11T11:06:00.001-06:002014-08-11T11:06:29.287-06:00DAVID R. PRESS VISITS EAGLES MERE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JvRshXHJx3I/U-j3-609ogI/AAAAAAAAM_M/OsK5ktp-28g/s1600/010311022.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JvRshXHJx3I/U-j3-609ogI/AAAAAAAAM_M/OsK5ktp-28g/s1600/010311022.jpg" height="206" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; widows: 2;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; widows: 2;">Returning from a visit to the Berkshire Festival in Massachusetts, we happened to choose a new way south and west from Binghamton, NY. Because we actually live on US 220 in Maryland, we chose 220 rather than Interstates. We passed the Eagles Mere sign, turned around and hoped to find the Playhouse. We had the good fortune to stop an elderly woman who turns out to be the local historian. She is most interested in learning and preserving things about AK and the Playhouse. Her family vacationed there when she was young and she married a guy she met there. Her husband's summer vacation job was bellhop at the hotel. One of his responsibilities every Wednesday was to take the hotel guests to the Playhouse!!! He saw all the shows in those years he was a student at Amherst.</span><br /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; widows: 2;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; widows: 2;">They drove us to a field where there is a bronze marker that commemorates AK's Playhouse, long gone. Forest has covered the site. The hotel was also torn down. The stables which were the scene shops evidently remain, but we couldn't see them through the trees. The actors' residence is now a well kept private home. The Sweet Shop is well kept and prospering, and AK's and Lucy's nearby cottage is also well preserved. The whole community looks like an enclave for the wealthy, and the lake was busy with tons of young kids who arrived by bicycle.</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; widows: 2;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; widows: 2;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; widows: 2;">Barbie and Bush James were our guides. I have given Barbie information on your blogs and I am sure she will become an avid reader. They told me that they have the silk screen posters of all of the shows. They have been raising money for the local historical society by selling extra posters for $50 dollars each!</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; widows: 2;" /><br style="font-family: Helvetica; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; widows: 2;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; widows: 2;">In the Berkshires we saw Penny Fuller in A Little Night Music. She was excellent, as was the whole production. We didn't attempt to talk with her.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-65783368235970578042014-06-06T13:12:00.000-06:002014-06-06T13:12:42.096-06:00NOTES FROM THE BLUE BOOKS - 1962 (As edited by Weldon Bleiler)<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: white; background-image: url(http://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
AK -- Bleiler's "Notes from the Blue Book" 1962</h3>
<div class="post-header" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-6013087836467342724" itemprop="description articleBody" style="background-color: white; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FROgUlpVGT4/U4_oF6bYUNI/AAAAAAAALYk/fM5LrLEr49A/s1600/Rubenstein.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FROgUlpVGT4/U4_oF6bYUNI/AAAAAAAALYk/fM5LrLEr49A/s1600/Rubenstein.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">C49-1 NOTES FROM THE BLUE BOOKS October 2, 1962</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Suppose you are attending a piano concert -- by Rubenstein, for instance. He enters with his usual brisk attitude, proceeds with preparatory flourishes, then strikes the first note. You feel vaguely “let down.” It does not “lift” you as it has before. The movement continues, but you remain passive. “He is not in good form tonight,” you think. Your mind wanders; or you listen passively. He does not command your attention. Later you learn that, by some accident, the piano had not been tuned to true concert pitch for that evening. The master had played as usual with all his </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">musicianship</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, but the instrument had not </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">communicated</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> his interpretation.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The actor’s body is his instrument. It must be one that he can rely upon, one that he can be as objectively proud of as a violinist is proud of his Stradivarius. Every time the actors comes on stage, his instrument must be tuned to “concert pitch.” Even though he might be playing the role of a dying man, the audience must feel that the role is in the hands of a vital, competent player. A violinist can draw the softest, most tender notes from his instrument. Yet, those soft notes</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">fill</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> the auditorium with quiet, with silence, for they are being played by a master hand in full control of his instrument.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">An audience must sense, unconsciously, through their muscles</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">(empathic response) </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">that the actor on stage is totally alive.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> In attaining this vitality, do not, however, fall into false energizing habits: do not jump up and down, swinging your arms about and shouting, “I’m alive, I’m alive!” The resultatnt effect will be the acquisition of a pseudo energy. Empathic response by the audience will reject it for its falsity.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The source of vital power is the area of the solar plexis, the center of the body, the area of the vital organs. We have been working (1) on rib support, not only for good vocal production, but for total well-being. Acquire the habit of never going on stage for a performance, rehearsal, or class without taking a deep, deep breath that fills your whole torso, and then holding that breath as long as you comfortably can. This is a simple and effective means of keying up the circulation in every fibre of your being. We have been working on (2) strengthening the abdominal muscles: the strong pelvic girdle, and the pull upward toward the ceiling (the extension from navel to sternum). Good posture, once achieved, projects confidence to an audience, at the same time filling you the actor with confidence.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We are total mechanisms, mind and body; the one affects the other. The Greek philosophy of a healthy mind in a healthy body should also be the actor’s philosophy. If your muscles are completely in tune, you may be exhausted to the point of dropping; but you will radiate vitality, and you will feel alive. We also have emphasized (3) walking with strong thighs and long free steps with a complete follow through. First, the heel touches the ground, the weight then being transferred to the ball of the foot, and the toes pushing off the next step. The movement is a flowing one.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Feel the top of your head touching the sky always. Even when playing a death scene, feel that pull up which provides resistance to the downward pull. Resist the pull of gravity; resist the forces pushing you down. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">This is the core of dramatic action: resistance to forces</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. Oppositions counter the backward pull with a strong forward pull -- head high, thighs strong. Work in group of two as follows: #1 should hold the shoulders of #2 to keep the latter from forward movement. At the same time #2 opposes with an upward pull. Carry all of this not only into your Greek drama, but into the acting of ALL drama. Creon pushes Antigone down (actually do it); he pulls her back; she resists with all that is in her: two opposing forces have met. In your rehearsals, work first on this physical level; the mental and emotional levels will follow naturally of their own accord.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">--Alvina E. Krause (wb)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>(WB means that Weldon edited and -- my guess -- rephrased. He was proud of his piano playing. Once at a variety performance, he came out to the grand piano to play, tried to bring along the microphone for his Victor Borge type intro, discovered the cord on the mike wasn’t long enough, and asked the stage crew to give him more cord. They didn’t seem to be there. So he went around to the other side of the piano and pushed it over to the mike -- proceeded from there. I think this is rather similar. He’s pushing AK to where he wants her. Luckily, a lot of valuable material is preserved.)</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">NOTES FROM THE BLUE BOOKS</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> October 9, 1962</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Levels of Concentration</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Your minds have been occupied only with what your tongues have been saying. Note this: only the dull-witted respond on a single level. When a fool sees food, he says, thinks, and responds solely to “food,” until the next positive stimulus penetrates his consciousness. Minds of people endowed with full capacities race ahead of words; thoughts other than those expressed vocally flow around and past words, reject or accept images which may or may not express themselves in words. In brief: such minds operate on many levels. There is the response to the immediate stimulus -- words heard which must be answered, a look in eyes (anger, love, hate, questions) which demands a reply; or a movement of the body -- overt or covert (threat, affection, approval, disapproval, rejection) which is a stimulus to a response, vocal or physical. Such may be the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">upper level of response</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">However, behind and along with that level is a level still existent from a response to the stimulus just past. (While I write this in response to your need, part of my mind still is occupied with the thought that as I answered the telephone a few moments ago, someone at the other end of the line hung up. That thought is flowing </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">along with</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">this thought which I am writing: a second, or middle level of consciousness. A present moment always comes out of a past one, and moves into a future one, carrying with it a medley of levels.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Besides the two I have mentioned, there is always on the periphery, at least of attention, a multitude of sensory responses to the physical world which cannot be shut out except by sleep, drugs, or death. As I write now, a sparrow is chirping . . . I caught sign of an unopened </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">New Yorker</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> . . . I heard a car pass by, yet I did not stop writing for an instant. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">All such levels must be present in ALL acting</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, the nature depending upon the framework of the drama itself.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You will note that </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">levels</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> are the result of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">response to stimuli.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> You have been having difficulty recently because you have not created stimuli; nor have you heard, seen, or perceived those created by your companion(s) in the scene. In Greek drama there is a total lack of personal properties. All the more important then is the vaster world of tragedy. The sky, the horizon, are ever present in the consciousness of these people. This unspoken level is imperative in the acting of Greek drama. From the very beginning, Antigone is moving toward the grave </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">alone</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. In all the world -- far as the horizon, high as the sky -- there is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">no one</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> to share her tragedy. The final realization is a tremendous one, which is made inevitable because it is an adding-up, a summary of all the smaller realizations of this moment-by-moment drama. </span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fLSoq5ytLOA/U4_pJsLbDkI/AAAAAAAALYs/yBGI8CsjZ8k/s1600/lear.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fLSoq5ytLOA/U4_pJsLbDkI/AAAAAAAALYs/yBGI8CsjZ8k/s1600/lear.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Create this physical world so vividly that you will respond to it as unconsciously as I now hear a plane far overhead, or sense the picture of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">King Lear</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> over my fireplace. As for the other levels, you must learn to hear </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">not cues</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, but </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">spoken words</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> that strike as blows. We are organic wholes -- the mind and body are one: first, the senses perceive the stimulus; second, the body reacts (runs, strikes, contracts, etc.); and third, the brain interprets the stimulus. Change the order of these responses, and the result will be unreal, a faked response. Never respond to words unless they have had an impact that </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">demands</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> a response.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">To help you, use the physical aid of ball-throwing. All drama is conflict; and all physical games are conflict. Play ball as champions do; take aim carefully, deliver the ball exactly (on the final word), and follow through, being ready at the same time to receive the ball from anywhere and return it quickly and accurately to score. Note the impact of a swiftly pitched ball as you catch it; note the second of arrest and the recovery </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">before you can</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> return it. This is the kind of impact that lines must have. To understand more fully the levels operating behind words, try the experiment Carlos used -- speaking in a foreign language. It </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">forced </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">him to find the words necessary for communication.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">--Alvina E. Krause (wb)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<h2 class="date-header" style="color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
THURSDAY, JUNE 05, 2014</h2>
<div class="date-posts" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">
<div class="post-outer">
<div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; margin: 0.3em 0px 25px; padding: 0px 13px;">
<a href="" name="1809041708787435295"></a><div class="post-header">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-1809041708787435295" itemprop="description articleBody" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>NOTES FROM THE BLUE BOOKS -- October 15, 1962</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xb5hlhtgzv4/U5EKp0LXxaI/AAAAAAAALY8/yMxV-DGNLNk/s1600/greekchorus_large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xb5hlhtgzv4/U5EKp0LXxaI/AAAAAAAALY8/yMxV-DGNLNk/s1600/greekchorus_large.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Assignment: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><b>A Chorus</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> (“Numberless are the world’s wonders . . .”) -- Theban elders, Antigone. The group signed up for Friday of this week will begin this assignment. Perform it singly or in groups, either spoken, chanted, or both. If you use accompanying movement, make it say something; if you don’t, then </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">readiness</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> for movement must be visible in posture, stance and vitality.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Before beginning this assignment, review the functions of the chorus: exposition, narration, presentation in a lyric and a dramatic mood, reflection. The audience must see through and with the eyes of the chorus.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">To ascertain the rhythms and cadences, distinguish between long and short sounds; use onomatopoeia. The chorus is several persons’ thinking, speaking, and moving </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">as one.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Learn to breathe together, to articulate together, to move together as in singing and dancing.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Read the article by H.D.F. Kitto entitled “The Greek Chorus” which can be found in the </span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Educational Theatre Journal</i>, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Mar., 1956), pp. 1-8. Apply what you read there to all your work in Greek drama. Copies below are some of the more important statements made by Kitto in the article:</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">1. The first point is that what the Greek audience heard and saw was something that we are not likely to see and hear today: a combination of lyric poetry, dancing and singing, integrated with drama. I use the word “dance” in the Green sense, meaning any ordered physical movement.</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">2. (These movements) covered a big emotional range, and they were not in the ordinary sense pictorially mimetic.</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">3. The choral performance was indeed a combination of the three arts of poetry, dancing and singing.</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">4. Of the three allied arts, the Greeks themselves put the poetry first; and next to the poetry, I suspect, they would put the dance.</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">5. The metres used by the dramatic poets were not speech-rhythms at all, but music-rhythms.</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">6. In certain of Euripides’ later and non-tragic plays, the choral style became distinctly operatic. Roulades, the singing of one syllable to several successive notes, became common; so too did the repetition of words, which becomes so tiresome as a literary device, that ordinary politeness compels one to assume that Euripides was thinking of the musical effect first, and of the poetry second.</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">7. It is quite plain that the Greek dramatists used ‘lyrical relief’ in much the way that Shakespeare used what is innocently called ‘comic relief.’</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">8. About their dance nothing definite can be said; the rhythm is the very common glyconic, which was found suitable to many different moods. But although we cannot form any precise idea of what the chorus did, at least we can appreciate, in a general way, the dramatic effect of music and movement at such a moment: a liberation rather than a relating of tension.</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">9. If the modern producer relies throughout on speech, he is, so to speak, representing in three dimensions a drama that was conceived in four.</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Try the “Antigone” chorus first; then use one of your own choice. This assignment </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">must</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> be finished by October 26</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. Select immediately your characters for your </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">final stage performance</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. Class previews and discussion of them should begin no later than November 2</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>nd</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">.</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">PAPERS ARE DUE TODAY -- Monday, October 15</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">.</span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="color: #232323; font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">--Alvina E. Krause (WB)</span></div>
<div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">C-49-1 <b>NOTES FROM THE BLUE BOOK -- October 16, 1962</b></span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sw2S4MroAYU/U5ELQoTO5mI/AAAAAAAALZE/d1rDMbuNqtk/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sw2S4MroAYU/U5ELQoTO5mI/AAAAAAAALZE/d1rDMbuNqtk/s1600/images.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Characterization</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“My partner is not here. I can’t do anything.” This is equivalent to saying, “I have no one to talk to, and so I am not me; I have no character when I am alone. I am somebody only when I am with someone else.” Hereafter you are to be ready to get on stage </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">any</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">day or </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">every</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">day, with or without a partner, whether or </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">not</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> you are signed up! </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">If you are working, you will ALWAYS be prepared!</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Being a character is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">not</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> speaking words. We are not what we say; we are the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">sum total </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">of our behaviour patterns, and speech is only one of those patterns. All that we think and have thought, and all that we have experienced and are experiencing: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">all</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of this is expressed in behaviour patterns. Our walk, stance, hand and arm movements, shoulders, and </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">particularly the spine</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> (AN ACTOR ACTS WITH AND FROM HIS SPINE!) form the various patterns of our behavior. The eyes reflect or conceal thoughts.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Everyone wears on his body the marks of his era. You are</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">unmistakably today</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: marked by your curved spines, your weak and dangling arms, your uneasy hands (unless they are holding a cigarette!), your empty eyes lacking lustre, your sagging shoulders, etc. etc. And it is with these </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">contemporary</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> behaviour patterns that you have spoken Antigone’s and Creon’s lines. Ridiculous!</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Greeks wore clothing which did not restrict; they wore sandals which permitted their feet to grip the ground. They could move as one unified whole, not in pieces as you have been doing. Further: they were athletes, active athletes, not sitters-on-the-sidelines; and their living ideal was the perfect, healthy, strong, vital body housing an equally healthy and vital mind. Until you have assimilated these characteristics, you cannot truthfully speak a line. We have discussed this for </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">four weeks</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">; and you have been given the necessary exercises to work on in private. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"> LET’S SEE RESULTS!</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For inner motivation for the particular situations of the drama, remember this: the characters reveal only the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">dominant</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> traits, those traits which one shares with all men, the traits crucial to creating a pattern of life in which men could reach their </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">highest stability</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. Man, not an end in himself, is but a part of a whole scheme of life: all equal in a total universe. “I am a man, and nothing in mankind is alien to me.” Tragic suffering comes from a sense of the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">worth of life</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. Electra goes to extremes to make men realize the enormity of the crime that has been committed. Antigone </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">dies</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> for a crime against justice. I have not </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">yet</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> seen this on stage. Your poor weak bodies, shifting feet, weak thigh-gripping hands, little piping, rasping three-note voices make </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">lies</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">of the lines you speak and the dramatist’s themes.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Greek drama has revealed your own </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">impotence</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. Try to move on now to the correlative truth of your own potential greatness. Greek drama does not make the individual helpless or irresponsible; it </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">emphasizes</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">his responsibility, forcing him to face the consequences of his own acts. The world is human and, like men, rational. Use </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">sane reason</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> in connection with forces beyond reason. The human being has the capacity to endure against the forces that destroy. For this quarter, you </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">must</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> incorporate these thoughts, these principles into your thinking and behaviour. You must </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">believe with a passion.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> When you do (IF you have acquired physical and vocal range and flexibility), your bodies will corroborate your thinking and the dramatist’s words as well.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What’s your goal? Mediocrity? If so, you hit it yesterday, and the theatre is no place for you.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<br /><div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">-- Alvina E. Krause (WB)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<h2 class="date-header" style="color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
FRIDAY, JUNE 06, 2014</h2>
<div class="date-posts" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;">
<div class="post-outer">
<div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; margin: 0.3em 0px 25px; padding: 0px 13px;">
<a href="" name="8392870346184641526"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-image: url(https://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
<a href="http://prairiemary.blogspot.com/2014/06/ak.html" style="color: #333333; text-decoration: none;">AK</a></h3>
<div class="post-header">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-8392870346184641526" itemprop="description articleBody" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">C49-1 NOTES FROM THE BLUE BOOKS (WB) Oct.22, 1962</span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5IoQ4IR16XM/U5HbXVMK-xI/AAAAAAAALZU/xVUFzhCCzc4/s1600/pimg_193926_Theater_Berliner-Theatertreffen_Michael-Thalheimer_Peter-Zadek_A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5IoQ4IR16XM/U5HbXVMK-xI/AAAAAAAALZU/xVUFzhCCzc4/s1600/pimg_193926_Theater_Berliner-Theatertreffen_Michael-Thalheimer_Peter-Zadek_A.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Assignment</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Messengers</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> -- to be ready for class presentation on Monday, October 29</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Choose for now from the following:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> “Friends of this house . . .” -- </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Oedipus Rex</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> “Jocasta, our Queen . . .” -- </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Oedipus Rex</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> “Fly, Medea, fly . . .” -- </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Medea</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> “I will tell you plainly all that I have seen.” -- </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Antigone</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The function of the Messenger in Greek drama is to bring news of the final catastrophe to those waiting who are deeply concerned. The character who serves as the Messenger is usually a servant or one closely connected with the household. He is not a principal character; further, he is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">not involved in</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> the tragic action. He </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">has</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> been an immediate </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">witness</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of the fatal act. He is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">compelled</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> to carry the news</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">immediately</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> to those who are concerned with the outcome. He is a messenger only; he has no specific name, indicating that he is not to be individualized as a character.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Messenger’s scene is a climactic one: it brings </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">on stage</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> the horrendous event which has taken place off stage. His tale </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">must</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> be told, even though the details are too hideous to be spoken. What pours out is the ultimate in horror, but back of it is a well of horror so great that it cannot be vocalized.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Images are so vivid that they cannot be erased: like a moving picture, present even when the eyes are closed. Sights, sounds, kinesthetic responses are as vivid as if they were still occurring before him. However, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">he must tell it</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> to those listeners whose very silence </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">demands</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">the entire truth, who are almost overcome with horror.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Capture the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">immediacy</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of the action, the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">compulsion</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> to tell, the</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">vividness</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of the images.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Remember always that lines are memorized </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">to be forgotten</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. Each time we speak words, we must first find them, formulate them and articulate them. If you have no second language at your command, think of the particular </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">sounds</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of another language, and use these to convey your thoughts. Alternatively, revert to the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">origins</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of speech -- grunts, noises, unarticulated sounds -- keeping in mind always that these must be conveyed to the listener in such a manner that he will comprehend, and in a way that will force you both into many levels of concentration. If these methods should fail, then </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">while</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> you are delivering the lines, multiply by 13’s or 17’s, or solve an intricate puzzle. Try any or all of these exercises to discover those levels of concentration that operate</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">behind</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> the actual words of the text.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">_______</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Those term papers assigned first this quarter will not be accepted after Friday of this week. The grade of “F” will be recorded for those who fail to fulfill these written assignments on time.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">ORAL STAGE FINALS</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> begin on Monday, November 26</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. For the weeks of November 5</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> and 12</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, present in class improvisations and episodes from the drama you are using for your stage final. Your objective: development of character with the classic framework.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<br /><div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">--Alvina E. Krause (wb)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">AK 10-23 Objectives</span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-plqKOe1BQ28/U5Hb9Wx-JhI/AAAAAAAALZc/LsG3ZPaHPR0/s1600/antigone2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-plqKOe1BQ28/U5Hb9Wx-JhI/AAAAAAAALZc/LsG3ZPaHPR0/s1600/antigone2.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">OBJECTIVES</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Know the character-objective of each scene, and </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">achieve</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> that objective. Know the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">desire</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of the character within the sequence; then, as the character, fulfill that desire. You are still -- almost all of you --</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">acting in general</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. The Antigone-Creon scene (Love-Winkleman) yesterday was a supreme example of acting in general, with its empty emotionalization signifying nothing. if your minds and bodies are fully occupied, you will be completely engrossed in fulfilling an objective -- not in </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">playing an emotion</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> that you have </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">assumed</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> accompanies the words. Hereafter, before you start a sequence on stage, state briefly and succinctly </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">in action verbs</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> the objectives of the character you play in the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">particular </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">place and for the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">particular</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> reasons the playwright has given.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For instance, Antigone’s objective is to justify her act by (1)</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">acknowledging</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> it publicly, (2) </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">advocating</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> publicly God’s law, (3)</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">convicting</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Creon of folly, (4) </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">approaching</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> directly the minds of others, and (5) </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">choosing</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> death. Another example is the Chorus’ objective: to condemn anarchy by (1) </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">extolling</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> man’s achievements, the highest of which is the creation of law and order (the state), and (2) </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">supporting</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> law and order.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Once you are truly concerned with </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">achieving the specific objective</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, once you concentrate -- in character -- on that achievement, it is certain that a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">particular feeling</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> will be aroused, not the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">general hysteria</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">of yesterday’s Antigone. What should be there is the specific, greater, deeper </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">indignation</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of the true Antigone.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Never again let me see you take up positions downstage right or left -- or anywhere else -- unless a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">specific</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> purpose has brought you there at a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">specific </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">moment for a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">specific </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">reason. You saw how dynamic the action became, and how alive the whole stage became when Niki and Carlos played with purpose. If the actor is</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"> fully engrossed</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> in achieving the objective of the character by the means the playwright gives, then the action becomes credible and vital. Achieve this intensity of attention on real objectives, and the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">inevitable</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> emotional response will also be true.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you want to continue working on Creon-Antigone-Ismene scenes in class, present </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">new </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">sequences. In four weeks we have reached a stalemate in class discussion of these opening scenes. If you want to submit the old scenes for discussion, they must be done for me privately during office hours listed on my door.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">_________</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">NOTE: Early this quarter, I reserved the stage for your use on all Tuesdays at 1 PM. since then, I have observed that it is not being used by you. Shall I then assume you do not want or need the use of it and release it for the use by other students who do need rehearsal space? If you can and </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">will</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> use this space at the time I have indicated, notify me to that effect at once.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">ADD TO YOUR FINAL EXAM PAPERS: A statement, in active verbs, of the character objectives in the scenes you will present for your final stage performance.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">--Alvina E. Krause (wb)</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<!-- Blogger automated replacement: "https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5IoQ4IR16XM/U5HbXVMK-xI/AAAAAAAALZU/xVUFzhCCzc4/s1600/pimg_193926_Theater_Berliner-Theatertreffen_Michael-Thalheimer_Peter-Zadek_A.jpg" with "https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5IoQ4IR16XM/U5HbXVMK-xI/AAAAAAAALZU/xVUFzhCCzc4/s1600/pimg_193926_Theater_Berliner-Theatertreffen_Michael-Thalheimer_Peter-Zadek_A.jpg" --><!-- Blogger automated replacement: "https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5IoQ4IR16XM/U5HbXVMK-xI/AAAAAAAALZU/xVUFzhCCzc4/s1600/pimg_193926_Theater_Berliner-Theatertreffen_Michael-Thalheimer_Peter-Zadek_A.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*" with "https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5IoQ4IR16XM/U5HbXVMK-xI/AAAAAAAALZU/xVUFzhCCzc4/s1600/pimg_193926_Theater_Berliner-Theatertreffen_Michael-Thalheimer_Peter-Zadek_A.jpg" --><!-- Blogger automated replacement: "https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-plqKOe1BQ28/U5Hb9Wx-JhI/AAAAAAAALZc/LsG3ZPaHPR0/s1600/antigone2.jpg" with "https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-plqKOe1BQ28/U5Hb9Wx-JhI/AAAAAAAALZc/LsG3ZPaHPR0/s1600/antigone2.jpg" --><!-- Blogger automated replacement: "https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-plqKOe1BQ28/U5Hb9Wx-JhI/AAAAAAAALZc/LsG3ZPaHPR0/s1600/antigone2.jpg&container=blogger&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image/*" with "https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-plqKOe1BQ28/U5Hb9Wx-JhI/AAAAAAAALZc/LsG3ZPaHPR0/s1600/antigone2.jpg" -->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-39211029590956218112014-05-29T07:15:00.001-06:002014-05-29T07:15:22.363-06:00AK BASIC ACTING COURSE, INCLUDING COMEDY<h2 class="date-header" style="color: #335577; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 2014</h2>
<div class="date-posts">
<div class="post-outer">
<div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; margin: 0.3em 0px 25px; padding: 0px 13px;">
<a href="" name="8192788385999679842"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-image: url(http://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
AK OUTLINE OF BASIC ACTING COURSE, SPRING QUARTER ('60-'61)</h3>
<div class="post-header">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-8192788385999679842" itemprop="description articleBody" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: medium; letter-spacing: 0px;">OUTLINE OF BASIC ACTING COURSE -- </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: medium; letter-spacing: 0px;">SPRING QUARTER (1960-1961)</span></div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">MAJOR OBJECTIVES:</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">1. To give students the experience of developing a characterization for a play and presenting its component parts onstage so as to communicate to spectators what the author wanted them to know about that character; to follow through on the actor’s Creative Process in connection with one role.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">2. To acquaint students with the concepts which underlie the acting of comedy and to develop some techniques used in acting Comedy.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">ADDITIONAL OBJECTIVES:</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> 1. To continue development of everything else the student has been working on during the year. See outlines of previous quarters.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">SOME CONCEPTS TO EMERGE FROM CLASSWORK:</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">1. Comedy of character results from opposite elements (incongruities) in a person’s makeup coming into evidence; the actor must dramatize the opposites, throw focus onto them, play them off against each other so as to evoke laughter.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">2. Sample opposites would include: Prossy’s primness, efficiency, capability being upset by Marchbank’s reference to “love”, so that we see the real woman underneath; Prossy after a glass of champagne lets us see her two selves; a person who has a relaxed body and voice, but who uses “intense” language, is manifesting an opposite; a person wanting to help out in some way, but making a mess of things, etc.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">3. Drama is the one thing coming in conflict with another; you can have comedy that is very close to pathos -- and this is the finest kind.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">4. In comedy things are often in excess: there is too much excitement, too much intensity, too much eagerness, too much casualness, or something in relation to what is doing on, in relation to the other stimuli. (<b>Athene Seyler</b>’s idea that comedy depends upon the audience recognizing a “norm” of behavior from which the character in some way deviates.)</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">5. Actors must avoid doing too many different things, adding little extra wiggles and embellishments and the like, which distract the audience from seeing and hearing what is significant.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">6. When comedy results from the situation, you are in the realm of farce; comedy of character is something else.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">7. Opposites can be played simultaneously, or alternatingly; one can come in and cut off the other; actors: use arrests, realization!</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">8. In verbal comedy, lines have to be “landed”, to be made to </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">hit</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> out front and connect with the spectator.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">9. Comedy acting -- or any acting -- will lack freshness if you just do a sequence of planned things without responding to the stimuli which touch off responses and actions. Avoid breaking lines up too much, or speaking too slowly.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">10. Play reactions of surprise to the hilt.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">11. Everything you wear and do must have a purpose, must make a statement to the audience; you must not offend us, for when we are offended, we will not laugh.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">12. Before studying a role, the actor must study the play itself; ask: what is the author’s purpose in writing the play; since it is theatre, it is to entertain -- through laughter, through the exaltation of tragedy, or through enlightenment and making people think; a few dramatists want the audience to </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">do</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> something, like fight for the brotherhood of man. State in a word or phrase the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">subject matter</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of the play. Then state the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">theme</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of the play, which is always a comment on the subject. Theme must determine everything you do.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">13. Too often actors deliver a line and then stop as if they wanted the other actor to go on. This looks false. Hence, the need for something else to concentrate on, something for the mind to be occuped with, for a divided focus, something else to go on reacting to.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">14. Comedy of character is based on real character traits and does not make fun of people, does not caricature.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">15. The dominant drive of a character can be summarized in a “psychological action”. Watch the eyes of people to see what their goals are; if they tend to put on a complete mask, watch their mouths.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">16. You can’t just create a character; the character has to be part of an organic whole.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">17. You illuminate a theme by finding your position in relation to it; then the audience adds it all up.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">18. Be careful you don’t work to create the mood you think exists; do what the characters do for the reasons they do them and let the audience create the mood from this.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">19. Voice and movement are an outer manifestation of something: curiosity, wonder, etc.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">20. Improvisation has as its goal (or as one of them) creating the inner life of a character -- the many-leveled thinking that goes on; if words come out, they are only part of it.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">21. In acting, start with essences, don’t act the “buts,” at least at first.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">22. Remember that drama takes up near crises, moves towards crises; don’t key things too low, or you won’t get to the crises; intensify the conflicts; intensification is an imaginative process; make distances bigger.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">23. Drama lies in the moments of transition.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">24. Creation is creation of stimuli.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">25. To stimulate imagination in connection with characterization, find the metaphor for your character and present it in fantasy form.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">26. Bodies must reveal what is going on inside the person; you are faking if your bodies don’t reveal anything; start with a character’s spine.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">27. The discovery that comes from analysis must lead into kinesthetic responses in your body.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">________________</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>There are two strong memories I have of the work along these lines. One was a character AK loved to play -- a runt of a belligerent Irishman, three sheets to the wind with his dukes up ready to punch out some offender. But wait, it’s necessary to find someone to hold his coat. Wouldn’t want to dirty his coat. The woman would be angry. “Now I’m going to knock your block off and you’ll rue the day . . . but first I’m that thirsty, I’ve got to have another beer!” She’d dance in and out, feinting at the shoulder of her victim and then backpedaling away, stopping to roll her sleeves up a little farther, thumbing "his" nose to look fierce, never really doing more than shadow boxing, the little banty rooster of a man’s intentions of aggression entirely undercut by his actual ineffectuality.</i></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>The other was a little game that Paula Ragusa/Prentiss used to play as an improv. She had invited the local parson to tea. She herself was an ever-so-proper but rather mischievous old lady who fully intended to put a spider into Rev. Applebaum’s tea. What a delightful thought! But one must not give away one’s intentions, so “Lemon in your tea, Reverend?” Maybe the spider could just be slipped in under . . .</i></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>This list looks less like a course outline than a compendium of remarks made in class. I suspect Weldon.</i></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-34832666941804918482014-05-29T07:13:00.003-06:002014-05-29T07:13:56.326-06:00AK BASIC ACTING COURSE OUTLINE<h2 class="date-header" style="background-color: white; color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
TUESDAY, MAY 27, 2014</h2>
<div class="date-posts" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<div class="post-outer">
<div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; margin: 0.3em 0px 25px; padding: 0px 13px;">
<a href="" name="5678958859540311067"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-image: url(http://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
AK BASIC ACTING COURSE OUTLINE</h3>
<div class="post-header">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-5678958859540311067" itemprop="description articleBody" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">OUTLINE OF BASIC ACTING COURSE</span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">WINTER QUARTER (1960-1961)</span></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">MAJOR OBJECTIVES</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">1. To acquaint students with the nature of Imagination; to show them how Imagination may be stimulated and developed and used in Acting; to begin mastery of the use of Imagination. Principle teaching device: the Fantasy Exercise based on three words, to be found in </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Modern Acting: A Manual.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">2. To acquaint students with concepts of Thought Between Lines (Sub-text); Multi-level Awareness and Response; Interplay; Transfer of Thought and Emotion; Playing from Moment to Moment; Recognizing Climaxes (the exact moment of transfer or change) in Scenes; Realizations; the Use of Metaphors in Acting. To develop skill in the use of this knowledge.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">3. To acquaint students with the nature of the Vicarious Experience; to show them how vicarious experiences derived from reading and observation may be utilized in acting. Principal teaching device: The semester-long study by each student of a character from a good novel of character, and the presentation by the students of a series of improvisations and situations from the novel. The students’ objectives in this work are (1) to make the audience believe he is the character and (2) to love </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">himself </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">in the role. The written Journal and weekly laboratory exercises continue to supplement the classwork.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">ADDITIONAL OBJECTIVES:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">1. To continue the work of the first quarter, the comprehension and use of Concentration, Observation, the Visual Sense, the Auditory Sense, the Taste and Gustatory Senses, the Kinesthetic Sense; of Sense Memory; of Memory for Experience; on insight into the reasons for human behavior; of insight into the nature of what is “dramatic” and “theatrical;” the use of body and voice in acting; of improvisational techniques; of the discipline and ethics required of theatre workers; of insight into play construction; of Truth in Acting; of the influence of environment on people; of how to show Reality onstage; of how to communicate with audiences and control one’s work; on allowing analysis to move into the realm of action; of theatre and acting terminology.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">SOME CONCEPTS TO EMERGE FROM THE CLASSWORK:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">1. Imagination is the actor’s creative faculty; it involves using what the actor has observed, knows of himself and others, and has experienced -- is the faculty which selects, recombines, intensifies what we have in us to work with.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">2. Belief in whatever is created by the actor as </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">truth </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">also stems from the imagination.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">3. The ability to visualize completely the appearance of a character comes from the use of the imagination.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">4. Fantasy exercises get the imagination going; fantasy takes up where experience leaves off.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">5. There must be continuity in acting, as there is in life; bad theatrical performances have “gaps” in them.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">6. It is possible to analyze inanimate objects (like the lectern in the auditorium, or a brace of pistols, or a Greek column) to see what qualities these objects possess -- qualities which could be carried over into a person if that person were “like” the object; this is how metaphors are used in acting. The kinesthetic observation of objects can be done without even having to think.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">7. An audience must never be in the dark about what you are doing onstage; give one positive cue after another that will add up to</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">meaning</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">8. You establish an environment (in a fantasy, say) by doing single things; there has to be an </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">arrest</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">focus</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, on the first significant thing you do; when you sense that the audience begins to “see,” you add the new cue on top of the old one; the first thing you do onstage is especially important; acting is a process of supplying details that will “add up” for the audience -- it is a process of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">funding.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">9. There must be no vagueness onstage; in performing a fantasy, tell your audience when the “curtain” is going up; every movement must have a beginning, middle, end.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">10. If, in a fantasy, you are going to twinkle like a star, first you must find the way to establish the idea of your being a star in space before you twinkle; if the star is to “turn human,” the audience has to be able to watch the evolution from object to being. Never assume that an audience can read your mind; give them what they need to know to comprehend.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">11. Along with doing things one at a time, each detail must be sustained long enough for the audience to focus on it; often an actor can create suspense: we may not know at first what he is or what he is doing, but it will be done with such intensity that it will compel our attention and make us watch intently for the cue that</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"> will </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">tell us.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">12. When an audience becomes aware of an incongruity (say between an intense body position of a performer and his wide-open, innocent eyes) it may laugh. Comedy depends upon the dramatization of such “opposites.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">13. To help carry off a Transfer, the players must concentrate on their characters’ purposes, must have </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">goals</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> to play toward. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">14. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Playing together</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> results in a scene which seems natural, true, inevitable in its development; too many actors try to </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">manipulate</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">situations, scenes. Response to one another, to what you see and hear, makes for interplay.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">15. Onstage, the flow of thought continues all the time; when it comes up against a problem, words may stop for a moment, but not the drama of the situation.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">16. In rehearsal, use the most real props you can; the handling of them has something to do with the truthfulness of responses.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>[THERE’S A MISSING PAGE HERE. I’LL SEE IF I CAN TRACE IT. I'm not entirely sure whether this is from the Van Meter notes or the Bleiler notes or even possibly something that AK composed for the administration. But it rings true.]</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">31. Sample questions asked of students working on characters from novels, questions designed to steer their thinking and to touch off visualizations, the use of their imagination, etc.; What kind of tables are going to be in her (Emma Bovary) life? What does she want? Where do we want things? Why does the author call her </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Emma</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Bovary? . . . Anna Karenina sits on a “settee.” We should begin to sense the road she will travel the moment we see her . . . “Emma!” What does she hear when her husband calls her? . . . Kathy is outside? Think of the title: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Wuthering Heights</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">; What kind of heights? What’s the word? Shout it! Name should tear her in the vitals. What’s the wind like? Show us! Too much face; how do you walk against the wind? Heights: it’s on top; barren; stark; covered with mist; you can see valleys below; a particular place for her is a crag; get the joy of conquering; etc.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">32. Surround your character with the little things that make up his world; it’s our responses to our environment which makes us what we are.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">33. Test for how well performer may be doing with his improvisation of a character from a novel: do you begin to see the character, rather than the actor? An hour from now will you remember the character? Have people onstage begun to change? To what extent have they changed? Has your thinking changed? Have you done something different physically? Everything around you -- objects, noises, aromas, etc. -- part of your new subtext.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">34. “If --” is a good starting point . . . “If my father is --,” “If I lived in --”, etc.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">35. To get at characters: do the things they do -- their work; go for their walks; develop their attitudes toward everything in their lives; </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">do</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">something.</span></div>
<br /><div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">36. A goal of acting: to show three-dimensional people emerging from a background.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-77737861914765804292014-05-29T07:12:00.001-06:002014-05-29T07:12:25.226-06:00AK CONTINUES COMMENTARY ON STUDENT EXERCISES<h2 class="date-header" style="background-color: white; color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
MONDAY, MAY 26, 2014</h2>
<div class="date-posts" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<div class="post-outer">
<div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; margin: 0.3em 0px 25px; padding: 0px 13px;">
<a href="" name="8942891335778654716"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-image: url(http://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
AK CONTINUES COMMENTARY ON STUDENT EXERCISES</h3>
<div class="post-header">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-8942891335778654716" itemprop="description articleBody" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>As I type this material I am 75 and fairly widely read, so naturally much more strikes me than did when I was 18 and only read novels. One thing I note (maybe I read it somewhere) is how much AK comes back and back to the Elizabethans and the Greeks as epitomizing what it is to be free and alive. Other writers have noted this. In the Sixties, just before the cultural renaissance called New Age (if you accept that characterization), American culture was celebratory. We had won WWII, we all owned cars and houses -- but it was unseemly to show off our conviction that we were a “peak culture,” so we implied it by associating ourselves with two other periods that were grand and cultured.</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Now, of course, we are looking at the end of things, diminishment, confusion, and want to think about neanderthals and the end of the Roman Empire as well as the end of the English empire. It’s a playwright’s problem, but also one for the actors. Perhaps AK is so fond of Ibsen and Chekov because they are critical and see “modern” as not so fail-safe. But my high school teachers in the Fifties also held up Elizabethans and Greeks as exemplars. Were the Sixties and Seventies an attempt to return to those periods in some way?</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>The point for an acting teacher is that a sound knowledge of culture and history is vital. How did AK come by her opinions of how people did things long ago?</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">______________________</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">V. GUSTATORY AND OLFACTORY SENSES</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Can be put together but are separate. Gustatory is in tastebuds in tip and sides of tongue, but there is also a response in the stomach. Other sense is in the nose. These are two senses that have become dull -- very. <i> [Sometime I wonder how much of what AK thinks is true of the society is in fact her own self projected. She is aging, thus her senses become more dull.]</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Begin acting by asking why is this character in the play, why is this scene in the play. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">One Foot in America </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">(opening U.T. show of this season) is filled with eating scenes. How you eat, your response to food, is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">you</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">One Foot</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> is folk drama -- delineates a folk through their love-making, hatreds, etc., exists to </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">reveal a people</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. We saw a group of people onstage </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">acting</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> -- sitting around a table and doing what? Why does your mouth water at the thought of food? . . . Once there was a reason for a prayer before a meal; when our attitude toward food changed, the prayer went. AK recollects a man who smiled at food, another man who thought a baked potato was “beautiful.” Comments on how long a novelist takes to describe about food, eating, etc. which we can show in an instant onstage. She refers to other eating scenes in Studio Theatre plays class has seen: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Sicilian Limes,</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Demi-Monde</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">; recollects her first French breakfast: “Ze butter is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">in </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">ze roll!” an article in the New Yorker about a restauranteur who goes around tasting food, asks class to distinguish between a gourmet and a gourmand. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Eating reveals national characteristics. In the last scene of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">R.U.R</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. there are people in tails after dinner drinking brandy -- have reached the highest level of sophistication, but only one man onstage recalls how to handle a brandy glass. If you have a drink to handle onstage, know what it must tell. You say you can’t eat and talk? People do it. The way you size up your plate (or don’t), put in the first fork-ful, etc. all reveal something about us. Think of your favorite food; what happens? Your mouth begins to water. Think of Falstaff. He tastes beer before he’s got it. Where does he want food? Elizabethans were very open about it. You can’t fake these things onstage, can’t “play an attitude.” What do you get in an animal? It’s a necessity to have food. When he has enough he quits. Eating scenes provide dramatists with one of the best ways to show family and social relationships. Noel Coward went to the cocktail set for his material; a whole era was caught and on top of it are the clever, brittle lines. Do you know the mark of your own eating? What epitomizes you? What food? </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One girl says German beer is her favorite. Not just beer, but German beer -- she’s gone up in the scale of discrimination; the girl explains why and comes alive as she talks about drinking the beer in particular surroundings with particular friends under particular circumstances; she describes the taste, color, richness, glass it is served in, where you go for it, etc. and almost makes a stein of it materialize. The stein itself is an expression of part of the German temperament -- German word for “friendship” mentioned, for love they can be very sentimental -- can weep, sing, be warm, you belong, you are welcome in their little places. . . </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Do you know spices? The names of them perhaps, but do you really known the essentials of them? Acting is illusion; that’s why we’re training your senses -- so that you can turn stage oatmeal into -- ?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of a student’s efforts to reproduce someone’s drinking:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Give me a character sketch of him? What do you know about him? A professional gambler? (He was throwing dice and drinking.) Why do you use the label “professional”? It looked kind of amateurish. Was it whisky? How do you know it was whisky? You mean you didn’t know what he was drinking? Was he rich, poor, in between? What sort of place was he in? Was he a heavy drinker? A light drinker? We ought to know a great deal about him by the end. What size glass was it? What are his eyes like? What makes him sit there for a long time between drinks? </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">WHY? </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">HOW DO YOU KNOW?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> AK says, “I’m still asking </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">why.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critiques of other eating scenes</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: Class are giving situations rather than character responses to food. . . AK wants to know what a character’s attitude toward food is . . . What role you would identify the character with -- Juliet? Hedda? Clytemnestra? it should be possible to take the character into some other situation once his or her eating habits have been established. . . One student seems to be acting </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">any</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">young girl, to be acting attitudes; each person is a unique being in a specific situation: look at her head, feet, eyes, etc. From the cigarette exercise onward you’ve been looking for the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">why</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of behavior.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of an exercise in which a boy attempts to create an Elizabethan</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: you’re faking. The listening was inadequate, the voice was wrong. Now you’re really listening (to the critique!) Before you didn’t hear. No, you’re going through planned sequences. You were a little modern man rather than an Elizabethan with curiosity, wonder, love of life. If you wore tights all the time you would be </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">free</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, and you would show your legs to advantage. We see something prissy. Where’s your weapon? How do you </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">know</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> you’re not going to be attacked? Murders occurred in broad daylight as well as at night . . . Create an Elizabethan who might be in Shakespeare’s plays. Before you weren’t alert; you’re a little alert now; London must be full of smells, etc. He talks about there being “garbage” around; is that all there is in the room? He is “attacked” by another student who has been hiding in the shadows. There’s always something going on around you. Student look up several details on Elizabethan life, but made the mistake of stopping there. Put into action the child’s principle: “</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">IF</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> I wore tights -- <i>IF</i> I lived in dangerous times --<i> IF</i> I were a man and wore a necklace -- <i>IF </i>I wore a ruff.” Pictures? What did you see in the pictures? Hands must be ready to draw weapon, but must not touch weapon unless someone else draws. Protect the vital parts of the body -- where the organs are. In this era of Elizabeth you </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">do</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">need to to be prepared. No “buts!” something has to transform you or else it does no good to read dozens of books. I’m giving you what is typical. . .</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critiques of other Elizabethans</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: Did she have a quality of open-eyed wonder? Why did she walk sideways, crab-like? Only crab-like people walk sideways. Where’s your big skirt? Twirl it, kick it out of the way. Arms being out away from body at the beginning was good, but don’t let them get stuck there. Don’t get so close to a chair as you approach in your voluminous skirt; some women wore farthingales, but not all. How much do skirts weigh? Feel resistance against them with pleasure.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">To a boy acting the death of Christopher Marlowe</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: You are giving us an elaborate “plot.” You must achieve a much stronger walk; sitting needs more room; never let yourself get squeezed up against furniture regardless of what the play is. Handle the cloak easily; experiment with possible ways to dispose cape around you. Now feel the weight of the cape and enjoy the movement of swinging it; these people have</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">energy.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Don’t swing your weight from side to side. Keep a pull upward; work on stopping the middle of a strong step. Let all parts of body “follow through” on a movement. Exercises tried to get strength and suppleness and follow-thru.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Girl dressing herself before a mirror:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> her happiness was excessive to the motivation; no reason for being so happy. What was she, anyway? I’m going to say she was a high school girl doing her first costume show. Were you an Elizabethan? assignment was to get an Elizabethan body responding. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"> To another girl: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> You’d be carried out of court for a little bow like that. The bow goes down and under, with nothing sticking out. Circle around rather than pivot; the skirt must follow you. Feel the skirts; where’s the pull felt? What about her step? What’s inconsistent? It’s little and tiny. Women, too, must take long steps to get somewhere. Do exercises; enjoy them. Everything (parts of body) needs to be in alignment; bodies “resent” an off-balance position . . . </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">To students attempting to be Romeo and Mercutio: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> you aren’t </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">holding our attention</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">; if you can’t hold attention something is very wrong. Mercutio should be the best swordsman in Verona. He is not an animal but an element: quicksilver! Moves quickly, all in a piece.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">To another girl</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: leap, leap for the joy of it; walk; leap; reach for something -- a star, a man, anything! Elizabethans have so much to reach for they can’t choose. The Queen is coming! The Earl of Leicester! A musician! Strange animals! Strange people! . . .</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">To another girl:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Nothing really Elizabethan in her portrayal of a Catholic woman at a shrine. Her religious feeling would be </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">very intense</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, because she’s had to take sides, or evade the state’s decree. The worship business restrains you; try being at a theatre with a mask on, in a world of intrigue; skirt must have weight, a concealing cape; enjoy it! What play is it? Why are you there? . . .</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">To another girl:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Movement actually suggests a dainty delicate person! Be Juliet running to meet the Nurse, with the “why” of Nurse bringing Romeo’s first message. Running on tiptoe </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">to life</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. What </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">is</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> life to a young girl in love for the very first time -- and with a Romeo! What does the sky look like? The grounds? The trees? She wants to take it all in! Don’t </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">think</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> about it -- feel and sense it all. Make one good run across the stage and stop; good because it had </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">suspense</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> in it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Side comment to girl who “doesn’t feel like it” when it comes to doing a scene: What do you do if the curtain is going up in five minutes and you’re scheduled to play Juliet? What do you do? Never let an audience down: never, never, never. The rule of the theatre is: the show must go on. If you aren’t there, that’s the end.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Other Elizabethan</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: You’re acting attitudes. There was no reason for picking up that skirt. It is stupid to walk in straight lines; your clothes wouldn’t follow you; you must go in circles. How many petticoats do you have? Many. Don’t tell me, feel them. It is nothing to intellectualize: you must be kinesthetic, not mental.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Actor showing Krapp’s response</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> to banana -- and other stimuli. Everything was “more than clear.” What dimension did performer add? Delight. A man who knows how to get what he wants out of a watch, a banana, etc. who has the delightful recognition that everything is “working as it should,” that the watch is running, that the banana tastes as it should, etc. His joints had to be manipulated as a result of extreme age. Everything he did was beautiful. What did you learn? -- that what the author gives him has to be motivated.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of actress setting table</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: Class is asked to give a biography of the character they have just seen. Why does she do it </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">this way</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">? She did each thing one at a time. Finished one thing absolutely, then took up the next. Tiredness without martyrdom was clear. She realistically checked everything. Woman seemed older than student actress because she had a “settled” quality of middle age.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Same student as Kate the Shrew</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: Let’s see her express joy in living. You have so much energy it has to be expended somehow -- in climbing to the sun, in choking a man, etc. Cry out; leap; run. Now pick up that little lute, used to sing insipid songs to Bianca. (Movement is too inhibited.) Get on a horse. Swing up! Get on a bike. Two men go onstage to “tame” her -- real men, not Bianca men. (Now actress feels “just great.”) Her society is is trying to make her conform to being a Bianca -- she replies by being the opposite. Then she meets Petruchio and falls in love with him. Recognize first that he</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">dares</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, then respond. . .</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of boy presenting a character study observed from life</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: Everything onstage tells a story: tell me a story here. You saw a timid little man absorbed in his paper and less in his food? If you were writing a play, how would you use him? This is character study. I’m not interested in plot. One person eats at a particular time -- so, when it gets to be that time, he eats; is this the man you saw? He felt he had to read the paper? What page did he read? Was that the actor or was that the man observed? “He reads the comic section first?" </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">How</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">does he read the comic section; </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">why</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> does he read it first? Does he laugh inside? Does so because it doesn’t take any concentration? Because he doesn’t feel like plunging into world affairs or high finance? Because comics provide a certain positive thing that comes up day after day -- provide a kind of safety, certainty, security. What did the eating tell? College student? Businessman? Does he taste his food? What’s he eating? An egg? Oatmeal? Does he enjoy it? If it is not so good as usual, would he know it? Is he in his own home? Go on doing it, and while you do, tell us what you’ve discovered about him. Give us a “hand study” again. Does he smoke? Is there anything you notice particularly about his hands? Does he use his fingers separately, or the hand as a whole? If the former, it says that this is a man who has time and/or taste to know what his fingers are doing. Next time you do anything, take your opposite, somebody as different from you as possible.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of a boy doing an Elizabethan</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: We don’t like the laugh; it’s a self-conscious snigger. Show us you can laugh like an Elizabethan. Movement excellent -- had pull-up, follow-through, balance, ease.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><u>Critique of boy eating</u>: A laborer? An Italian -- or some excitable nationality? A person who hasn’t had much education, but who gets through life well enough? A college student showing off? Go up onstage again. Something needs clarification. Study him more. Enjoyment of food, showing off, etc. coming through better . . .</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of girl impersonating an old woman eating</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: A very old woman. Some good observation of character. She did walk in between counter and stools. Why didn’t she take napkin to begin with? Why was coffee put where it was? It is an actor’s job to give the audience cues to understanding. Did spectators believe in it? </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Was</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> it caricature? You tend to say this whenever you see something extreme; Evanston is full of extreme people. Scene still needs “the reasons why,” although some of these were there. AK asks actress if she is satisfied? Actress feels she hasn’t got inside woman yet. AK says audience wanted to know why she became old in this particular way.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of boy who impersonates a literary-minded college student</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> who does nothing but talk, talk, talk at table. Next time choose an opposite kind of person. When class laughs, AK points out they are laughing at a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">comic irony.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of a girl’s exercise.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> What did you get from this? Did you believe her? What kind of person is she? What is her personal drama? How does she look at life? I’d say that she rejects practically everything. What we’re searching for is the reason why -- otherwise you will act stereotypes.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-72966461106981477312014-05-29T07:11:00.000-06:002014-05-29T07:11:07.024-06:00AK STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND MOVEMENT<h2 class="date-header" style="background-color: white; color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
SUNDAY, MAY 25, 2014</h2>
<div class="date-posts" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<div class="post-outer">
<div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; margin: 0.3em 0px 25px; padding: 0px 13px;">
<a href="" name="5488116813407812443"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-image: url(http://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
AK STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND MOVEMENT</h3>
<div class="post-header">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-5488116813407812443" itemprop="description articleBody" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side Issue: Stream of Consciousness</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Term is introduced when two students are having trouble with an exercise they are presenting. “Let’s hear your stream of consciousness,” says AK, meaning let’s hear you vocalize what you are thinking, noting as the scene progresses. If you look at the floor (a response) it has to be because there is something on it (to stimulate your thinking.) Girls are trying to create an imaginary room, to respond to it. Do this responding with your senses, says AK, not your mind; do it with your muscles. When you see that real table, what does it make you want to do. (i.e.: what empathic response does it set up in you, which of the table’s characteristics or your muscles tend to copy?) Find something you like to look at and surrender to it. What are you? A person? Really an organism, a total physical being -- which responds to physical things around it. Why are you different from somebody else in class. You are all the same age, all speech students. But one’s makeup is different from another’s because his past experience is different from another’s. One is “a bunch of conditioned responses.” We are “products of our environment.” What were the actual tangible forces which led you to this room in this building? (Answer lies in the whole past lives of the students: parents, family attitudes, choices made, etc.) </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><u>Reference to a recent Bergman film with scenes in a train compartment.</u> Three people in a specific environment; what did they</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">do</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> -- shut up in four feet of space in a railway carriage? What was there in the compartment to use? A book, a window, a cigarette; consider what each of these objects was like in relationship to the possible variations on the same objects. Why does the author-director give him or her these books? (To reveal who and what the people are by their attitudes toward relationships to these objects.) Where do one’s conditioned responses come from. We all do the same acts differently because we have our own conditioned responses to living, to life. (What we do and how we do it constitutes our behavior patterns; characterization is reproducing the behavior patterns of other people -- together with their motivations.)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of an exercise in which a girl crosses a room onstage:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> An acting job you can praise to the skies. What she gives is something that has scarcely been seen in class: response to stimuli! Whom did she see in the street? To whom did she bow? She looked at someone for a long time that eyes that almost devoured him.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Another critique:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Actor attempting Macbeth’s dagger speech goes into “false emotion” after seeing the dagger. His difficulty is the common one of not making </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">transitions</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> -- of going from this to that. Transitions are the most important part of acting: fill them in. Boy dismisses servant and then has a transition into seeing the dagger -- and is better as a result.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Student impersonates a bird </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">he has seen at the zoo. AK points out that Voltore in Volpone is a character who is like a bird, is a vulture. But the vulture observed at the zoo did not move, did not respond. Well, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">if</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> this vulture moved, how would it move. Go back at feeding time.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><u>Girl reproduces behavior of a cat-like animal</u>, even parries taunts from a class member with an umbrella, in a way that animals in cages who are used to people doing things like this to them would. Girl got the lurching of the shoulders, power of the paw blows, the line that goes through the whole body when the animal lunges. AK has her slowly turn into a person who has these qualities: a person who “pulls from the spine” when walking, when coming down on an enemy. Animals are bundles of energy; you can sense in an second what they are like.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">New Idea: a girl imitates some sort of prancing animal</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> and the class laughs. Why do we laugh? Analyze what makes comedy. It is</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">incongruity</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of things -- here the growls of aggression vs. the abrupt backing up. Animal is a hyena. AK has girl buy a dress, wear it at a party, laugh, listen to election returns coming in -- all in the manner of the hyena. Animals don’t think; they react with their senses. There are contradictory impulses in animals just as in people. These</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">opposites</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> make for humorousness.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><u>Students imitate monkeys</u>. AK asks what they learned -- about monkeys and about their own kinesthetic senses, asks for the monkeys’ motivation, for a state of why they did what they did. Student says they are motivated by curiosity. AK says actors did not show one scrap of curiosity. Another actor says that male monkey “didn’t want to be bothered” by anything else that was going on. AK says that fact was not given to the audience. Also that why the monkeys came out in the first place was not made clear. The scene was diverting and amusing but not believable. If a creature is curious, how do we know this? How does he observe. Is there anybody in class who has curiosity? She helps them identify three or four people who have curiosity and whose eyes reveal the fact by the way they light up with “eternal wonder.” She admonishes the class not to talk or think in generalities, saying they will never be actors until they get over this. (Someone has answered the question, who is curious, with the statement, “everybody.”) As students continue to do other monkeys, AK adds first monkeys to their scenes, then a man with peanuts, etc., so that students have to respond to new stimuli spur of the moment as their animals would. AK points out that of two monkeys onstage, the lady one will get any food that is available because she’s more alert -- her senses are. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">AK has one of the monkeys begin to “turn human.” A gradual process: when she begins to lose her monkey spine, AK has her go back to being more monkey again. Then she starts a business of selling candy, feeling animals, still trying to give a sense of swinging along branches; she dances a while, a Charleston, goes out for basketball, goes to a sorority after-the-game party -- all in the monkey manner.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><u>Discussion of “curiosity.</u>” The word is a label we put on some act. Curiosity comes from: “I’ve never seen that before; what is it?” It is an open attitude. Curiosity is necessary to acting itself. What was an Elizabethan curiosity like? Some people in class with imagination can develop a whole sequence of things that come into Elizabethan England on ships from India or elsewhere -- things never before seen: amber, jade, ivory, spices, slaves, lace, animals, stories about far places. Along with curiosity, Elizabethans have pride and independence, too. You can create an Elizabethan by developing these traits with specific details. This opens up an area of creating characters through a kinesthetic approach -- looking at pictures, clothing, statues, furniture, etc. and letting them carry you into an experience of the past.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of another animal study</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: Why did you walk across? You have to have a motive. Animals seldom go crazy but yours would turn into a neurotic. What did you observe about its spine? (Observations must start with a study of the spine.) Where are you going? Where are you? Create your environment and respond to it. Your shoulders are still not being manipulated by your spine; your neck is still not part of you. To test actor’s kinesthetic resources: telegraph to me that you want to climb; that you don’t want to climb, that you’d like to be up in that airplane flying overhead, that you want to swing on those chandeliers. A really kinesthetic person does things </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">before</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> he touches the actual objects involved -- he sizes up the shape and weight and location of things with his muscles, eyes, etc. Muscles lift objects, kick balls, etc. before we take the time to think. What is a kinesthetic person? Have you been watching for one? Is there a kinesthetic person in this class? A kinesthetic person is kinesthetic every moment of his life; they size everything up with their muscles; their muscles feel chairs, the floor, everything -- and won’t get stuck in an awkward position. This isn’t an intellectual thing, it’s muscular. We enjoy watching highly kinesthetic people onstage because our muscles more readily copy what theirs are doing. Kinesthetic people don’t waste movement. The whole body anticipates a step they plan to take. The whole body is behind a movement. The muscles </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">enjoy</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> what they do. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When an actor does something wrong onstage, out front our muscles reject, refuse to accept. (Much of what we call enjoyment at the theatre is the result of acting empathetically along with the actors.) There aren’t many kinesthetic people left. However, if football players weren’t kinesthetic, they’d get killed.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Sense memory</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> means that one’s senses are responding more vitally than other people’s and that one is capable of storing up sense images. Without a sense memory, one will never be an actor. The class as a group did not continue its search for people who were visual or auditory people so that you could study them. There isn’t time to search out and study someone of the current type once you get into a play. It is through kinesthetic responses that we </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">understand</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, and understanding is being in somebody’s body for a moment. I don’t have to tell you so-and-so was a dancer and one of our best actors; his body telegraphs this.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Elizabethan improvisations:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> People onstage and put in motion, walking with some objective to secure food, shelter, clothing, etc. They are told that now it’s 1600 and there’s a ship in from the Orient and they’ve money in their pockets and there’s a new play opening at the Globe . . .</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"> Hamlet </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. . . </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">More animal imitations</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: One girl tries a penguin. The “whys” of its behavior, its motivation discussed. She then changed into a human like a penguin. The question is raised, is a penguin as dumb as this? Why did Anatole France write a satire on penguins? They have no legs and so can’t move rapidly, otherwise they’d be thrown off balance, but are a graceful bird. . .</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Monkeys are so alarming because they are so close to being human that we see ourselves. Even if these animals take a stationary position for a long time, they have a latent possibility for quick and ready movement . . . How do you know when a cat that it still has latent power? It begins with the eyes. What’s back of the eyes? Cat opens and closes lids, but its eyes are already in focus when they open, as if it has been alert all the time the lids were closed. They are awake often when they appear to be asleep. . . Five animals are put onstage as if in their natural setting and allowed to respond to one another, thunder, lightning, wind, a falling tree, fire. Then they turn human and are at a cocktail party. Back to animals. Back to party. All are advised to “preserve your instincts” as they go back and forth between animal and human states. Self-preservation! Ladies, you’ve got to have a man! Dance! What do you do at cocktail parties. Drink! Talk about plays! Make it realistic! Snub her. Etc.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Old age studied through kinesthetic sense. Nerves in lower spine usually control movements: in old people they are not responsive and the mind has to consciously direct the raising and lowering of an arm, a leg. Fatigue hits the lower spine and causes us to droop. Actors act with their spines. Watch people’s spines. Even animals in a cage have a sense of self-preservation; watch their eyes. Movement should start in the spine, travel into the shoulders, out arm . . .</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Boy does snake.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Excellent; all spine. Turn human now. What are “snake” qualities? It attacks; it is often a slow thing; its protective device is its fangs -- but as a last resort; quick movement is another; camouflage; could easily get lost among a group of people; frightens us because we don’t see him until there is a movement; are a part of the landscape; are close to ground and the same color; can slip among things; you meet a snake often in drama.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-92225117720878870442014-05-29T07:10:00.000-06:002014-05-29T07:10:05.541-06:00AK CRITIQUES STUDENT ATTEMPTS<h2 class="date-header" style="background-color: white; color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
FRIDAY, MAY 23, 2014</h2>
<div class="date-posts" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<div class="post-outer">
<div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; margin: 0.3em 0px 25px; padding: 0px 13px;">
<a href="" name="8267092104801459604"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-image: url(http://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
AK CRITIQUES STUDENT ATTEMPTS</h3>
<div class="post-header">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-8267092104801459604" itemprop="description articleBody" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><br /></i></span><i>Hard core. No pics. Inside stuff. </i><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These pages are more clearly written out by <b>Van Meter </b>watching the class and taking notes, rather than <b>AK</b> talking. This is a longer section. I’m up to page ten of seventeen.</i></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>_______________</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Exercises reproducing behavior of a blind person</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: (Part of the work on the visual sense, since this is the inability to respond to visual stimuli.) A real blind person has such keenly developed senses that he can always tell where he is. What does each specific blind person you study </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">hear?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> How does he identify objects, places, people? What associations follow upon more identification? We have sequences of responses. What happens to a blind person’s voice? Often they talk softly so as not to interfere with the intake of other stimuli. Why do some blind people carry their heads so high? There is no reason to look down and it’s easier to hear, to feel sounds, makes one more open and perceptive; you can </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">feel light</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> on your face. </span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">To give a student a sense of being deaf, AK has other students around her mouth words but make no sound; often they ignore her. She begins to feel “out” of things, that she must strain awfully hard to keep up with others; that she needs to watch every second. Student has an experience of what the world of deafness must be like and begins to make some of the adjustments a deaf person must . . . There are deaf people who can dance because they feel the music’s vibration on the floor or on their skin. When there are silences around you, how do you know what is going on? From vibrations in the air? . . . </span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">AK sends someone onstage to be a blind man standing on the edge of a cliff (i.e.: </span><span style="font-family: Arial; letter-spacing: 0px;">Gloucester</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> in </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Lear)</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">; There isn’t any cliff, only level ground; someone goes with him, his objective being to make the blind man think he’s climbing, going up -- to make him believe </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">absolutely</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">; this is a</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"> transfer.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Find the thing that will make him believe: tell him how high he is; what do you see? Create a visual image for him -- a valley -- people -- how big are the people? -- Is there a river in the valley -- what does one see from the height? -- what is this power of suggestion that makes a blind man believe? She is applying what the class have been working on to an actual play . . . </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">New exercises involve creating the stimuli around Lady Macbeth or Macbeth on the eve of murder. She is concerned about Macbeth, wants to be with him, near him, but something keeps her here in this room. What does she respond to in it? What stimuli come to her? Create the thing that halts her, keeps her here, causes her to jump owl [? sic], and ends with “My husband!” How do you keep “Is this a dagger --?" from being a histrionic speech? How do you create a dagger in the air? Have you had any personal experience? Have you ever seen anything materialize? Why does it? You’ve been thinking about it so hard it does. When he comes from the murder, what has he seen that won’t ever leave him? The images will never be lost from this great man’s life. Movies would take us into the room; Shakespeare brings the murder onstage through Macbeths. Have you stored up any images in the last three weeks that you can build to the sleep-walking scene with? Sleep-walkers use senses better than when awake, are in danger only when someone wakes them up unexpectedly.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>[There was a story going around at the time that the students who lived in rented rooms upstairs in AK’s house heard night noises, came out on the landing, and found AK balanced on the railing in her nightgown! Probably apocryphal, but then -- what does it stand for? What was she doing in her sleep? They were afraid to waken her.] </i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Her eyes are open -- seeing -- but seeing more. She sees with her subconscious. Lady Macbeth sees the blood there, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">smells</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> it. Juliet accepts the potion, then</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"> realizes</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> she is going to be put in the tomb. What do actresses do? Run around the stage screaming? Can you see the rows of people in the tomb? Tybalt, newly dead? Images must materialize before you -- out there. Lady Macbeth </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">relives </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">the moment when she smeared the grooms with blood. Have you ever had human blood on your hands? For a lifetime she has to conceal this. It’s pushed down in her subconscious but comes out in sleep. Don’t dare act emotions: they will</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"> come</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> if you create the stimuli. “The Thane of Fife" -- where does that come from? A message which said -- “The Thane of Fife’s wife has been murdered.” </span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>There isn’t one moment in drama that you can act without an image behind it.</b> The Greek drama class (second year acting) is having trouble because they didn’t learn to create a stimulus last year. You’ve somehow got to see (if you’re doing Antigone) the brother’s corpse, smell the stench, sense the hot sun, see the vultures, etc. The words that Sophocles gives come in response to these stimuli, which you must create for yourselves.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side comment on stagefright:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> AK has a student who confesses to being afraid come off the stage and study the setting which has been put up for a forthcoming production. What kind of play would you act in this setting? <b> Ibsen? Tennessee Williams?</b> What does it do to you? Does it make you fight? Is it frustrating? Does it lift you up? Does it warm you? If the curtain went up and there were no actors onstage for 60 seconds, what would the set do? After actress has forgotten herself by concentrating on something hard (here, the setting) AK sends her back up to present her scene.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Lear</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;"> scene again: Two actors have been working on it. AK asks if actor playing </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Gloucester was “psychologically on a cliff.” Tells both of them that they have to get some of the “why” into it, especially at the beginning, to show the compulsion in it. Says it has to be more kinesthetic than they are making it, must seem to be really climbing, although on the flat surface.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of actresses pretending to stop to admire baby in carriage</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: there seemed to be “blank spaces” in it -- too many did not believe there was a baby there -- you couldn’t describe the baby even now -- you were acting in a plot -- you didn’t hear the baby cry -- you didn’t ask yourself questions: is it big or little, etc.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of actress doing Lady Macbeth reading letter and trying to motivate what she says and does: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Walk tells nothing, with which scene was begun -- and Shakespeare begins in the middle of the scene and the letter reading. If there was to be a messenger to bring the letter, what became of him? You’ve been standing all day, perhaps days, waiting for a messenger to bring a letter from Macbeth. Plays don’t begin when you come onstage -- they begin offstage. If there are other people present when the letter arrives she </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">must</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> get to a room alone. What does the letter look like? What kind of paper is it on? What is she learning? What does she </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">do?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> The scene leads to: “Glamis thou art, etc.” and a tragedy is underway. On a later try at the scene: Work until you can sustain a horizon there (at the back of the audience) as long as you want. What is on it? What color is the sky? Are you listening for the sounds of the battle? Don’t stay on one stimulus longer than you need to.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If an object materializes for you, or a sound, we out in front will see it or hear it, too. Use your senses, not your minds. You see, hear, with your senses.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of actor doing Macbeth and imaginary danger</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: He did see something, but then began emotionalizing; he was aware himself that he was faking part of the time. AK adds an “if.” "If you are a general, strong, brave, courageous -- now go on with the situation.” Posture of actor has changed: “You are a leader, you have just won a battle. . .” You create Macbeth or Lady Macbeth one step at a time.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of actress doing sleepwalking scene</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: What should be your first question? What is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">blood</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">? It is an image which runs throughout the play. The blood is where? You’ve got to get it there (on your hands) first. And if you’re squeamish about blood, you look anywhere else but at it. If you have no response to the image of blood, to smearing blood, you are no actor. If the idea hit you, it would show in your stomach. You have to sense it now, every time you do it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Bad method acting is: getting lost in yourself.</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What does your dramatist tell you about Lady Macbeth? That she is revolted by blood. She is driven to suicide by it. Actress must be able to get to this ultimate point of the role. Lady Macbeth’s subconscious mind will not tolerate it. Again: she cannot look at it ; she is sleep-walking; she even has nightmaries when awake; the things she sees are out here. Work for images that will come instantly.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of girl doing potion scene as Juliet</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: I’m going to question the position of that chair. For four weeks we’ve seen people placing chairs center stage. Chairs are placed in relation to something. Chairs center stage cause me to question the truth. What is now in relation to the chair (which has been moved)? A bed? Walk around it. Where is the head? If a piece of furniture is not in relation to something else, you’re acting in a vacuum. Tell me what the dramatist gives you; he is always very specific. A holy man has told a young girl: here is a potion, take it, and you will fall asleep and seem dead. It begins with</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">trust</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. If she hadn’t trusted, she wouldn’t have accepted it or wouldn’t take it. How big is the potion? In a tall glass !! Who put it there? Why didn’t family see it? You violate something when you make it big. I had you create a room so that you would know what it is to be alone alone. Start with one reality and build from this -- </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">justify.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> You’re in a room that has suddenly become empty. You’d love to hear voices in the passage . . .</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of girl doing sleep-walking scene</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: She wasn’t sleepwalking, was awake and using her “thinking mind,” which should be shut off -- it’s just the subconscious that is going. Have you ever come up out of ether? What happens? You hear sounds, buzzings, drumming; then you see colors -- blue, green, etc. Doctor and Nurse seem to be miles away. In sleepwalking you do not think, you re-experience more vividly than you have before. What tells me on Monday morning you’ve had a wild weekend? Your eyes don’t focus. Well, her eyes don’t focus. Then images begin to come. </span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What is her </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">objective?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Sleepwalkers always have a very strong objective. How does she enter? Slowly? Nooo! If there is something she has to do (wash her hands), she comes with terrifying directness. She is reliving that moment of “Come, come, a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">little water</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> --” (irony!)” -- cleans us of this deed.” It is horribly ironic. It is the moment of leading of Macbeth and washing his hands for him and her own and being at the gate to meet people -- which moment lives in her memory forever? Voice? Something is cut out of it, as it is out of her mind. The vocal tone is direct, but something alive is missing. they both physically get the blood off, but neither really do. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now you hear voices. “The Thane of Fife has lost a wife.” The stimulus comes in and then another on top of that. Shakespeare gives the whole scenario. How do you get at sleepwalking if you’ve never done it? One does things clearly, positively, decisively (like you do when you turn off the alarm and then get back in bed and pull up the covers and go to sleep.) She can’t touch her garments and doesn’t. Associate sleep-walking with hypnotism -- you are fully aware, but “looking through the wrong end of the telescope.” Doctor says: “Her eyes are open, but their sense is shut.” Don’t get too involved, but get at producing the stimuli. We are trying to get you to discover what acting is and where emotions derive from. You’ve got to store up sensory images, sensory memories, so vividly that they come to you, bang; you can’t wait ten minutes. And all the time you’re doing this, you’re asking yourself -- not me -- am I an actor? A good director give you images to build on; a director has to have an actor’s approach when working with actors.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Actress playing waiting scene from <i>Macbeth</i> must not say to herself, “Lady Macbeth is tense.” Find instead the verb that states what she is doing. She is listening for a sound which will say, “Duncan is dead,” after she has left people she has drugged, hoping they won’t wake up. Offstage the man she loves is killing the king who is a guest in their house and she knows her husband well enough to knows her husband well enough to know that at the last minute he may turn “milk-livered.” You must walk silently down the hall, but part of you trails behind, and she must be close to something, like a wall. Shakespeare does a brilliant thing: he brings the murder onstage when it is off. Actress who tries scene is criticized: “You come onstage anxiously, as if thinking, I wonder if the refreshments have come? Or, is that the children stirring in the nursery? Not enough. You have to recall an experience of your own, observe someone, or else read something hoping for a vicarious experience.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Side issue: A class in body movement is announced; it will meet at an hour convenient for enrollees, maybe limited to upper class students.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial; min-height: 14px;">
<br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of girl attempting Juliet’s potion scene</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: What was your working objective? “To show why Juliet has to drink this potion. Why carry a candle? (Poor reading of scene when studying it.) What does Shakespeare give you? What is the correct actress’ objective? Actress has to find what will get her to: “Stay, Tybalt, stay; Romeo, I come!” Why does she take two or three minutes first? If she has doubts, why? </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"> You</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> must find the inner motivation for the lines the playwright has given. She has made up her mind to take it, but she hesitates; why? What happens during the hesitation? The hesitation has something to do with the appearance of Tybalt’s ghost, with the quality of an imagination that conceives of things as hers does. </span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This scene is full of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">realizations,</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> one after another. She realizes the room is empty, there is nobody in it. Tell me what you see that says to you the room is empty. What does she see as she turns around? Her shadow? She’s been alone in this room before but now sees a shadow of some sort. Potion is where? (If it is at her breast, your hands will go to this spot when you sense it.) Bed is where? How does she look at dagger? What does the dagger symbolize? Death is what a dagger </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">always</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> says. Maybe you can’t play through a whole scene, from moment to moment, realization to realization, stimulus to stimulus; but it is your job as learning actors to find out what a sensory response is and bring it off onstage.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-36056138325989794312014-05-29T07:08:00.002-06:002014-05-29T07:08:56.362-06:00DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?<h2 class="date-header" style="background-color: white; color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
THURSDAY, MAY 22, 2014</h2>
<div class="date-posts" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<div class="post-outer">
<div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; margin: 0.3em 0px 25px; padding: 0px 13px;">
<a href="" name="3094860154127309516"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-image: url(http://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?</h3>
<div class="post-header">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-3094860154127309516" itemprop="description articleBody" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xaDRU9653Dg/U36SkGy04hI/AAAAAAAALLY/UGqnXpDo418/s1600/11-05-attentive_listening.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xaDRU9653Dg/U36SkGy04hI/AAAAAAAALLY/UGqnXpDo418/s1600/11-05-attentive_listening.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>This section starts out dealing with listening and soon drifts over to the kernel of AK's message: watch people closely and try to understand why they respond to their environment as they do. None of AK’s work that I can remember is very “psychological” in terms of inner patterns like id, ego, libido. Nor is much of it about relationships like intimacy or domination. The questions are always specific and her examples often reveal HER! Hedda in particular, wrestling with her boredom and gender confinement. And yet AK suggests Hedda doesn’t smoke cigars because they are ugly! So much for a cherished male symbol! Just a cigar -- maybe not.</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Watching AK write material like the following was always interesting, though I didn’t think much about it at the time. She used those half-size bluebooks without a clipboard. (My high school teacher used a clipboard for notes and often used it dramatically, slamming it to the floor when her adolescents were out of control.) She usually used a pencil, but didn’t erase -- more likely to cross out. She underlined a</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>lot.</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i> An English teacher would discourage all those three dot pauses, those dashes, those semicolons that are everywhere. It’s not that she’s punctuating in an old-fashioned or ignorant way, but that she’s trying to record the spoken words she’s hearing in her head as she writes.</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>I wish I had a painting of her and Lucy in a rowboat out on the water at Eagles Mere on a Sunday afternoon, an umbrella shading AK while she scribbled, and Lucy alternating between rowing and just basking. A public and idyllic intimacy, entirely blameless.</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>It’s interesting to ask why AK’s life was confined to the small world of academic theatre on one campus. She was not competitive or ambitious in any obvious way, though she clearly threatened those who were like that in her small world. She didn’t try to go to Broadway and always spoke against the star system, even as she served it. She didn’t produce books. It was almost as though she were creating family with students for children, cherishing and punishing them, sometimes controlling a little too much, very occasionally driving one out.</i></span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-73wSUxy8lGI/U36S58pISxI/AAAAAAAALMU/QWtMOfpcvhw/s1600/LISTENING.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-73wSUxy8lGI/U36S58pISxI/AAAAAAAALMU/QWtMOfpcvhw/s1600/LISTENING.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="300" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">MOSTLY AUDITORY</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side Activity:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Nobody has talked about voice work in journals. You begin with breathing. Correct breathing is based on rib support. Place hands on side of waist to find correct position for ribs. Or lie on floor with book on diaphragm. Get feeling of movement. Actors must keep ribs expanded and out all the time. Take supplementary breaths with ribs expanded. Work at this fifteen minutes a day.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-G-y__m1tr9Q/U36SsgdEgaI/AAAAAAAALL0/cN_NbJpYkcI/s1600/canaries-listening.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="153" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-G-y__m1tr9Q/U36SsgdEgaI/AAAAAAAALL0/cN_NbJpYkcI/s1600/canaries-listening.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Behavior Patterns, Basic Drives and Observation:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> AK: “What makes me the individual I am?” She ruffles hair of one of the students. “Why did I do that?” So-and-so, another teacher, would never do that in class. This is part of her behavior. Through observing what people do, through speculating on why they do it, we begin to understand human personality, human motivation, human character. This is where characterization begins for the actor -- through insight coupled with the skill to reproduce meaningful behavior. To grasp why people do what they do or do not do what they they don’t, you have to find out what</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">drive</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> motivates their lives. Drives are basic; they are modified by environment. Self-preservation is one drive. They become elevated, sublimated, degraded, turned into other things through living. It is miraculous how you can turn yourself into someone else by simply doing what they do. When you feel low, you might ask yourself who you have been seeing, who you have been with; we tend to take on the qualities of people we are with. There is nothing mysterious about reading people’s characters through their behavior. What we are is written all over us -- what we think, believe, feel, etc. Most people are so concerned with selves that they simply don’t notice what others are going through.</span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XzyctN71QjU/U36SqJ3qb2I/AAAAAAAALLs/HXYMp2ezMrE/s1600/221110084223Non_effective_listening.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XzyctN71QjU/U36SqJ3qb2I/AAAAAAAALLs/HXYMp2ezMrE/s1600/221110084223Non_effective_listening.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">III. AUDITORY SENSE</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Study your own auditory pattern. What constitutes sound? Vibrations. Is a voice you hear nasal, denasal? What is its pitch, its timbre? What rate does the person speak at. No two people hear the same thing, hear the same way. Note how differently two people describe the same experience -- a musical composition, say. Two-thirds are satisfied when they hear the theme; others go farther. Sharpen your own hearing. The fog horn in Anna Christie: sound crew produces a sound that is O.K. out front; but onstage it may be a distortion. Act I of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Seagull:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> A song comes from across the lake. For each person onstage it has different connotations. As actors you have to create imaginary sounds and respond to them, have to create people who have keener auditory senses than you may have. Marchbanks has a keen auditory sense but is not what we call neurotic. What does Lady Macbeth hear? Macbeth? Watch people listening. What can you learn about them as people from the way they listen? Put a person in a situation where he </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">has</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> to listen and individual differences begin to come out. Listen to someone speak a foreign language; what do you hear? Out of several listeners, one may be caught up completely in a sound or series of sounds. If you completely use a sense, you lose yourself. Some people listen only for the sense of an utterance. Others hear and can reproduce vocal tones that go along with the utterance. Actors onstage must not only hear words spoken onstage but overtones and undertones that creep into voices onstage -- or that are missing and which tell so much more than the words. Actors must play to voice quality just as they play to eyes.</span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MNZOYpoX2P4/U36SwmxQ0bI/AAAAAAAALME/H4-mTpEe3Gw/s1600/images-9.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MNZOYpoX2P4/U36SwmxQ0bI/AAAAAAAALME/H4-mTpEe3Gw/s1600/images-9.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Side comment: Remember that whatever you do onstage by previous plan may have to be changed when you come to rehearsal; there may be other actors onstage to stimulate you . . . On writing: Good writers don’t state how a character feels, in a story or novel; they record what the character does and the reader draws the correct conclusion. How do we know who and what people are? By the small things they do. If I ask you about Hedda, you will say she is bored. She is. But how do you act boredom of that size? [AK demonstrates by having responses to the ugly brown cover on the piano which is also locked in the classroom.] Things </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">add up</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> into boredom. You have to find something tangible to begin with. You are bored in response to something. Hedda’s boredom is going to </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">lead to</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> destruction. Actors are lucky; in plays the playwright tells you what the character does -- now and later. But the actor has to fill in between the moments the playwright gives. These are the five-finger exercises of acting we have been working on. It is basic that lines must follow from a stimulus; every time an audience </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">knows</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> whether a response is real or faked. Your -- the actor’s -- little empathic response to the stimulus (which an audience never analyzes) tells the truth . . . There is much made of a light bulb in </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Streetcar.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Three people respond to it. Blanche says she can’t stand that naked bulb (it shows up her age). First you must feel its heat, then wince, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">then</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> speak. It should be a hanging bulb, too, that can be set to swinging, be made to dance; it </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">must</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> be there -- to reveal character. . . . </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MQiHl15X_gw/U36Suoe6gPI/AAAAAAAALL8/rcOfk2gUaf0/s1600/images-8.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MQiHl15X_gw/U36Suoe6gPI/AAAAAAAALL8/rcOfk2gUaf0/s1600/images-8.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /><div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Onstage </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">inner lives</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> are being revealed . . . Special project: observe spines of people for a while -- and nothing but! . . . Why does Hedda smoke? It’s just come into vogue; not many women do it in her circle. Would not smoke a cigar -- she loves beauty too much. Hedda would take her feelings out on a cigarette. Take her out of the world of women and put her into the world of men, where she wants to be . . . A student imitates a smoker who he thinks is like a young Biff Loman. He has observed the person’s traits, but in his reproduction of them they are still exterior. Actors must be good mimics, but acting is not a representation of exterior qualities. It always has to illuminate the why of behavior. You can ask a person, “Why do you do that?” and they will say, “Oh, do I?” . . . Drama lies in seeing a stimulated by something. . .</span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-itouv2w8t54/U36S15HPS5I/AAAAAAAALMM/UvnTmluqtjI/s1600/listen-cartoon.png" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-itouv2w8t54/U36S15HPS5I/AAAAAAAALMM/UvnTmluqtjI/s1600/listen-cartoon.png" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="320" /></a></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-49959102915620348002014-05-29T07:07:00.001-06:002014-05-29T07:07:58.342-06:00"TOUCHING OFF" THE SENSES WHEN ACTING<h2 class="date-header" style="background-color: white; color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, 2014</h2>
<div class="date-posts" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<div class="post-outer">
<div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; margin: 0.3em 0px 25px; padding: 0px 13px;">
<a href="" name="5790712333583834122"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-image: url(http://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
"TOUCHING OFF" THE SENSES WHEN ACTING</h3>
<div class="post-header">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-5790712333583834122" itemprop="description articleBody" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GcN2KG0Gfr4/U3zOFHwVC-I/AAAAAAAALJ4/cHg5TAt3rsU/s1600/images-6.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GcN2KG0Gfr4/U3zOFHwVC-I/AAAAAAAALJ4/cHg5TAt3rsU/s1600/images-6.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“TOUCHING OFF” THE SENSES</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“Method acting” was very exciting to actors and observers. It seemed mysterious but everyone felt it. Quite simply, it was the “touching off” (to use the phrase often used by <b>Alvina Krause</b>, acting coach) of empathy by using sense memories of your own to “make it real” to you and transmit that to an observer. We do it all the time, but not on purpose. It is an ability evidently supported by specialized cells in the prefrontal cerebral cortex in the area behind the forehead and is mostly sight-related, part of the phenomenon of “The Gaze.” If you have been close to someone with damage to these cells (most often because of trauma), you will have felt their coldness, their distance, their out-of-sync-ness. The lack of empathy and thus community can lead to criminal behavior. </i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">II. VISUAL SENSE</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some people go through life seeing. Some are blind (like Tiresias) but see. In a class this size (20 people, say) 2 or 3 people see clearly. The rest see only generalities. Can you see color keenly? Can you go downtown and match a color from memory? Do you know how much yellow or blue is present in a given shade of red? Can you remember an exact color hours later? Ten years? Can you remember color, form, mass, background, perspective of a scene? Should not be a memory exercise, but an effort to </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">experience</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> color, to make a particular grey, say, a part of your total experience. Some people touch colors to make them more completely their own than before. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z2KH77CzTYs/U3zOd5dLh0I/AAAAAAAALJ8/nnpas6bxzew/s1600/images-7.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z2KH77CzTYs/U3zOd5dLh0I/AAAAAAAALJ8/nnpas6bxzew/s1600/images-7.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Store up color as a total organic response. “Now I’m in a play. I want to tell you about a man I know. Oh, yes! He wore very decorative sweaters . . . I looked into space and saw the sweater again before I spoke.” (This would be a visual image.) Watch a person today so that you really see him -- maybe start with just his hands. Store up your observations, because you can’t experience everything yourself. You must known how to look outside yourself for materials to use in acting.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YDHcz9BZ6A4/U3zPG2ImLrI/AAAAAAAALKI/lq5hVnDkxRs/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YDHcz9BZ6A4/U3zPG2ImLrI/AAAAAAAALKI/lq5hVnDkxRs/s1600/images.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Watch two people study a painting. What does each see, how does each sit, how does each study a picture? Find a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">dominant characteristic</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> in each person, in each act, in each object you study to which you can later add others. You fix this dominant trait in your memory and recall it when you run across a character in a play who is like the person.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side comment</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: Concentration on the right thing is a great secret of acting. Losing the sense of the great hole of the proscenium and the fact that the audience is looking at you results from concentration. With such awarenesses there are tensions which should not be there and which cause you to use muscles you don’t need, to overwork. When one of the people really looked at the picture, when the total body looking at it, we felt an ease. Hence, an attitude of “I’m going to make this scene go” can, in acting, lead to bad tensions.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side comment:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Always have a purpose for being onstage. audience should always be able to sense why you are there, should be able to believe that there is no audience of which you are too keenly aware, that what you do is inevitable, that what you are doing has a motivation.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ucGp8zB9VUo/U3zPPJe3nZI/AAAAAAAALKQ/8JJ7ASPuOeQ/s1600/images-4.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ucGp8zB9VUo/U3zPPJe3nZI/AAAAAAAALKQ/8JJ7ASPuOeQ/s1600/images-4.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Our organic, physical bodies follow our thoughts. Speaking the playwright’s lines is nothing if they don’t come from a whole chain of inner thoughts and responses. . . Try the device of turning an actual object onstage (a patch of light on the floor, say) into something in an imaginary situation you want to create; let it be a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">beginning stimulus:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">imagine other sights, sounds, smells and respond to them. Whatever is or is not onstage, actors have to see the things their characters would see and respond to them as their characters would; he may have to create the stimuli out of nothing. The stimuli and the responses can’t be faked -- otherwise the body will not respond to what the senses and the mind and the emotions do. Responses happen first inside us, then travel outward in various manifestations. Real drama occurs inside people. </span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Onstage with another actor, play into his eyes, respond to what you see in his eyes. . . Make a first entrance of some character in some play: respond to those things in the environment that the particular character would -- and in that character’s manner; create the visual world around the character even though you are on a bare stage. Avoid “remembered responses” -- they must be fresh adjustments to current stimuli; you can act “only in the present” . . . Don’t skip the little initial moment of deci</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: center;">sion, of uncertainty, before doing something; the little moment of decision is always the dramatic thing, not the big crisis; the little things take you to the big moments. . . </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XN9_ETAjFO0/U3zPZaV0HnI/AAAAAAAALKc/l9BVl0fMYok/s1600/images-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XN9_ETAjFO0/U3zPZaV0HnI/AAAAAAAALKc/l9BVl0fMYok/s1600/images-2.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: center;">Goal of early exercises: to create a stimulus with your imagination and then give us the response to it -- which, often, is what we call emotion. Always start with something specific: give a specific response to a specific stimulus, not generalized responses to generalized things like “night” and “desert’ and “aloneness”. . . The best actor is the one who asks the right questions to start with -- (of where he is supposed to be, of who he is, of why he is there, of what he wants, of what may happen, of what could happen, of what stimuli might be present, of what his conditioning would cause him to do by way of response, etc.) Say: IFIFIF I were running in sand, what would it feel like?” (To touch off imagination.) “Is it still warm from the sun, or cold? Gritty? Soft? Slippery? Wet? Dry? Am I barefoot?” (If senses are responding, the body picks up the responses and telegraphs them to observers. A spectator </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: center; text-decoration: underline;">sees</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: center;"> the decisions a mind in a body is making . . . When you begin right, it will be easy . . . </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Lrn1BgOSXzQ/U3zPhvmKCZI/AAAAAAAALKk/aCuuzZXoRKw/s1600/images-5.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Lrn1BgOSXzQ/U3zPhvmKCZI/AAAAAAAALKk/aCuuzZXoRKw/s1600/images-5.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Another device: vocalize what you see; let someone ask you specific questions about colors, sizes, dimensions, textures, etc. of what you see to help you further crystallize, concretize images that are to be stimuli . . . One must be able to keep responses coming, flowing from one to another. . . Not everyone must feel the same, behave the same; our conditioning and the circumstances of the moment cause each of us to respond to stimuli in our own ways . . . everyone needs to find ways to “get themselves going” when responses to stimuli are needed. . . Do not try to create too much for people out front in first “scenes” (first class exercises) and take plenty of time. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K07nOT_eZNw/U3zPpzSSWWI/AAAAAAAALKw/ryEzd2O5F9g/s1600/images-3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K07nOT_eZNw/U3zPpzSSWWI/AAAAAAAALKw/ryEzd2O5F9g/s1600/images-3.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">To further test your ability to see, recall, observe, Observe smoking habits of people in general and then of one person in particular; not yourself. Observe someone else in the same situation who does not smoke to see what behavior they substitute for smoking. See if you can reproduce those actions without smoking actually. Let us hope you continue this type of observation and recreating of it forever. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In responding to imaginary stimuli, it isn’t necessary to stare and stare, or to stop and think. Just look at an object you imagine as being there and see it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side activity</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: Walk around edge of stage. First thing to be a walk: get your balance, so that you aren’t bent over; body should be erect with head up.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-umKayjqL2bc/U3zP0rmzkpI/AAAAAAAALK8/c1rlmOhuOo4/s1600/Unknown.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-umKayjqL2bc/U3zP0rmzkpI/AAAAAAAALK8/c1rlmOhuOo4/s1600/Unknown.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A smoking exercise: Performer and audience should be able to answer the question: why does this person smoke? AK notes that the smoker’s focus was really on a letter she was reading; much of cigarette was being allowed to burn away; cigarette and holder were just part of hand, accustomed to be there. Another question to ask: what character in drama might smoke this way? Women look for someone who smokes like Hedda Gabler; someone like Candida who doesn’t smoke but does other things in place of it. Men look for smokers like Stanley Kowalski or Biff from </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Salesman</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. This is the beginning of characterization, which must start with observation, or else you end up with something false which people won’t recognize as being true. When you observe people, always get at the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">why </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">of behavior. They take refuge in objects -- use them to reveal or conceal.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5nkCFX2Tuh4/U3zP6n-eZxI/AAAAAAAALLE/K7GPiKW27-E/s1600/Unknown-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5nkCFX2Tuh4/U3zP6n-eZxI/AAAAAAAALLE/K7GPiKW27-E/s1600/Unknown-2.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">Why does Hedda smoke? Sadie Thompson? They’re not types. Look for specific people. Kowalski’s no type, even if Brando tried to make him one. In Kowalski’s case you’re looking for someone with strong animal responses; stalking a prey, peacock-like, etc. Stanley erotic? What’s left for Blanche? Dramatists never put two similar people together in a play.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-13620546496110821622014-05-26T16:10:00.002-06:002014-06-09T08:18:39.445-06:00NOTES FOR B43 (BEGINNING ACTING) TAKEN BY JOHN VAN METER<div style="color: #323333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>AN OUTLINE OF BASIC ACTING CLASS AS TAUGHT BY ALVINA KRAUSE</b></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i></i></b></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i>David Press</i></b><i> has sent two documents from the bibliography at the end of his doctoral thesis about </i><b><i>Alvina Krause</i></b><i>’s teaching methods. </i><i>This is the course as I took it in 1958-59 and is evidently an account written out by AK for the use of </i><b><i>John Van Meter </i></b><i>who was taking on the teaching of the course. </i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>People who have taken the course will recognize her “Socratic method” of asking questions, then answering them herself! She’d get into a kind of soft-voice rhythm that was almost hypnotic -- then stop, pace, turn sharply, and demand attention -- sometimes by doing something unexpected, like striking something -- or someone. “Now why did I do that?”</i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<i>In the version printed in sections at www.prairiemary.blogspot.com there are some illustrations, which I've removed here. I debated whether to include comments but decided to keep them. </i></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">OUTLINE OF YEAR-LONG BASIC ACTING COURSE AS TAUGHT BY ALVINA KRAUSE AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY IN THE 1960-61 ACADEMIC YEAR.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">FALL QUARTER:</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Includes orientation to Acting and Theatre, the training of the actor’s senses, a study of the nature of Responses in human beings; training in observation, training in concentration, training in improvisation. The class work is offered in conjunction with lab periods in which students work on voices and movement, discuss plays they have read outside of class. All of the work of the course is intended to supplement reading on and about the theatre which students have previously done or are currently doing or will do. Discussion with other students in the lounge and over coffee is expeced to further develop ideas which are brought forth in class. The student keeps a journal, the daily entries of which record his awareness and give him a means of holding conferences with his instructor.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>I. ORIENTATION</b></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Beginning acting is devoted to a study of the actor and his instrument, which is himself -- his senses, intellect, emotions, talent and its development, and a consideration of whether they should be used in the theatre. There are two subsequent courses: Analysis and Performance, which centers on the written play, and Styles, which concerns the actor and style in acting.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Actors must develop objectivity about his work, must know why he is good or bad, must be able to repeat night after night what he does, so as to give the audience its money’s worth. Acting is an art; it is not an accident.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is sad at 18, 19, 20 to discover you are not what you want to be -- an actor. It’s tragic at 40, 45, 50 to wake up to the realization that you’re in a profession you never belonged in; then you may not go back. But it’s not tragic to find out now. Nothing you learn now will be harmful or wasted. It can be used in any profession or in life.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">People say acting cannot be taught. I agree. I merely set forth principles. I criticize. I lead you. In the last analysis you must be self-teachers.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Theatre is not one art: it is a conglomerate art that turns what the playwright has said on the page into something more meaningful than life itself, whether it makes the audience laugh, cry, or think. Your goal is to illuminate the life, not to show off or get rich. It is to create art. All of the intuition in the world is not enough; what you know, do, must be put into meaningful </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">form </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">which illuminates, communicates, says something. It isn’t enough for theatre to be exciting, it has to mean something.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Theatre is a great profession, a great art; it requires greatness of the people in it. Everyone can read; but can you make a word say something else besides, say, “dirty”? Acting isn’t speaking a line or moving as directed. It is much more.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The difficulty in acting is that the actor is his own instrument; he acts with all he is. You have to look into your souls. You act with all that you are: all you have experienced, sensed, read, come to know up to this instant. When Antigone says: “I am the last of my line” on her final exit, what do you have in you that will illuminate this line? When Lady Macbeth says: “Will these hands ne’er be clean?” what is in you to show us a woman who can never look at her hands again? Look for what you have in you that indicates you have or will have the capacity to play Macbeth. Theatre involves a development of all you are. What you are can be added to that you can interpret life. Participate in the world: don’t shut your senses up too much.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is no one single method of acting or teaching acting, as far as I can see. We have all been seeking THE Method; some think they have found it. I hope we keep seeking. What you learn here you will adapt to your own uses; challenge these ideas until you can accept them or discard them. It isn’t enough to talk about acting, to know it -- you must be able to do it.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A performance onstage is not life. It is an insult to an audience to ask it to believe this. A performance is scenery, lights, illusion which are intended to make an audience laugh, think cry. You don’t live a part, you give an audience an illusion of life. Our job is to make the illusion believable. A performance is never complete until it is before an audience. The audience reaction is a part of the performance. Acting is a communicative experience. Acting is not done for the joy of the actor, but is done for the audience. We believe or reject what we see onstage according to the degree that the illusion approaches a likeness to life. Actors must learn to be lifelike.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Drama lies not in words but in the pauses between words when something is happening to you; it lies in what we do to each other. What is drama? It is what makes you smile when you don’t mean to. Acting is responding, is reacting to a stimulus or stimuli. Part of a response maybe be words, but how much can words say? Some experiences are too deep for words, or too sudden. Melodrama is words and actions without motivation; motivation lies in the responses to stimuli which, in turn, touch off words. We response to a smell, a sound; the stimulus has to come first and then echoes our particular response. Responses onstage are not memorized things, but are freshly experienced each time the stimulus comes.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Acting is creating the behavior patterns of an individual in given situations -- the playwright’s situations. Behavior patterns come out in response to stimuli about you. Behavior patterns are total things. No two people respond to stimuli in the same way; how you respond is you. Has everyone felt jealousy? Well, have you felt Othello’s jealousy? Let’s hope not; he killed his dear wife. Many good actors and actresses draw from stored-up memories, impressions. The words on the page touch off something in hearing, tasting, smelling. You create out of what you have seen, heard, imagined, tasted, known. To create Lady Macbeth’s bloody hands, start with something you know. Shakespeare will give you more things to build on. The process of using memories, if well done, is unconscious. Directors can’t give you the truth great acting must have. Aspire to be great.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If the stimulus is real (i.e. if you respond to the right things in the stage situation with your senses and make the appropriate associations out of what you know about your character and about life) the emotion you want will follow automatically. You don’t create emotion -- it follows by itself on the heels of the stimulus.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">First quarter is devoted to training senses, storing up impressions. Cleopatra’s jewel box is a tawdry thing supplied by props. But you have to touch it as it it were the real thing. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>“TOUCHING OFF” THE SENSES</i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>“Method acting” was very exciting to actors and observers. It seemed mysterious but everyone felt it. Quite simply, it was the “touching off” (to use the phrase often used by </i><b><i>Alvina Krause</i></b><i>, acting coach) of empathy by using sense memories of your own to “make it real” to you and transmit that to an observer. We do it all the time, but not on purpose. It is an ability evidently supported by specialized cells in the prefrontal cerebral cortex in the area behind the forehead and is mostly sight-related, part of the phenomenon of “The Gaze.” If you have been close to someone with damage to these cells (most often because of trauma), you will have felt their coldness, their distance, their out-of-sync-ness. The lack of empathy and thus community can lead to criminal behavior. </i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">II. VISUAL SENSE</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some people go through life seeing. Some are blind (like Tiresias) but see. In a class this size (20 people, say) 2 or 3 people see clearly. The rest see only generalities. Can you see color keenly? Can you go downtown and match a color from memory? Do you know how much yellow or blue is present in a given shade of red? Can you remember an exact color hours later? Ten years? Can you remember color, form, mass, background, perspective of a scene? Should not be a memory exercise, but an effort to </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">experience</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> color, to make a particular grey, say, a part of your total experience. Some people touch colors to make them more completely their own than before. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Store up color as a total organic response. “Now I’m in a play. I want to tell you about a man I know. Oh, yes! He wore very decorative sweaters . . . I looked into space and saw the sweater again before I spoke.” (This would be a visual image.) Watch a person today so that you really see him -- maybe start with just his hands. Store up your observations, because you can’t experience everything yourself. You must known how to look outside yourself for materials to use in acting.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Watch two people study a painting. What does each see, how does each sit, how does each study a picture? Find a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">dominant characteristic</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> in each person, in each act, in each object you study to which you can later add others. You fix this dominant trait in your memory and recall it when you run across a character in a play who is like the person.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side comment</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: Concentration on the right thing is a great secret of acting. Losing the sense of the great hole of the proscenium and the fact that the audience is looking at you results from concentration. With such awarenesses there are tensions which should not be there and which cause you to use muscles you don’t need, to overwork. When one of the people really looked at the picture, when the total body looking at it, we felt an ease. Hence, an attitude of “I’m going to make this scene go” can, in acting, lead to bad tensions.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side comment:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Always have a purpose for being onstage. audience should always be able to sense why you are there, should be able to believe that there is no audience of which you are too keenly aware, that what you do is inevitable, that what you are doing has a motivation.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Our organic, physical bodies follow our thoughts. Speaking the playwright’s lines is nothing if they don’t come from a whole chain of inner thoughts and responses. . . Try the device of turning an actual object onstage (a patch of light on the floor, say) into something in an imaginary situation you want to create; let it be a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">beginning stimulus:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> imagine other sights, sounds, smells and respond to them. Whatever is or is not onstage, actors have to see the things their characters would see and respond to them as their characters would; he may have to create the stimuli out of nothing. The stimuli and the responses can’t be faked -- otherwise the body will not respond to what the senses and the mind and the emotions do. Responses happen first inside us, then travel outward in various manifestations. Real drama occurs inside people. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Onstage with another actor, play into his eyes, respond to what you see in his eyes. . . Make a first entrance of some character in some play: respond to those things in the environment that the particular character would -- and in that character’s manner; create the visual world around the character even though you are on a bare stage. Avoid “remembered responses” -- they must be fresh adjustments to current stimuli; you can act “only in the present” . . . Don’t skip the little initial moment of decision, of uncertainty, before doing something; the little moment of decision is always the dramatic thing, not the big crisis; the little things take you to the big moments. . . </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Goal of early exercises: to create a stimulus with your imagination and then give us the response to it -- which, often, is what we call emotion. Always start with something specific: give a specific response to a specific stimulus, not generalized responses to generalized things like “night” and “desert’ and “aloneness”. . . The best actor is the one who asks the right questions to start with -- (of where he is supposed to be, of who he is, of why he is there, of what he wants, of what may happen, of what could happen, of what stimuli might be present, of what his conditioning would cause him to do by way of response, etc.) Say: IFIFIF I were running in sand, what would it feel like?” (To touch off imagination.) “Is it still warm from the sun, or cold? Gritty? Soft? Slippery? Wet? Dry? Am I barefoot?” (If senses are responding, the body picks up the responses and telegraphs them to observers. A spectator </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">sees</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> the decisions a mind in a body is making . . . When you begin right, it will be easy . . . </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Another device: vocalize what you see; let someone ask you specific questions about colors, sizes, dimensions, textures, etc. of what you see to help you further crystallize, concretize images that are to be stimuli . . . One must be able to keep responses coming, flowing from one to another. . . Not everyone must feel the same, behave the same; our conditioning and the circumstances of the moment cause each of us to respond to stimuli in our own ways . . . everyone needs to find ways to “get themselves going” when responses to stimuli are needed. . . Do not try to create too much for people out front in first “scenes” (first class exercises) and take plenty of time. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To further test your ability to see, recall, observe, Observe smoking habits of people in general and then of one person in particular; not yourself. Observe someone else in the same situation who does not smoke to see what behavior they substitute for smoking. See if you can reproduce those actions without smoking actually. Let us hope you continue this type of observation and recreating of it forever. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In responding to imaginary stimuli, it isn’t necessary to stare and stare, or to stop and think. Just look at an object you imagine as being there and see it.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side activity</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: Walk around edge of stage. First thing to be a walk: get your balance, so that you aren’t bent over; body should be erect with head up.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A smoking exercise: Performer and audience should be able to answer the question: why does this person smoke? AK notes that the smoker’s focus was really on a letter she was reading; much of cigarette was being allowed to burn away; cigarette and holder were just part of hand, accustomed to be there. Another question to ask: what character in drama might smoke this way? Women look for someone who smokes like Hedda Gabler; someone like Candida who doesn’t smoke but does other things in place of it. Men look for smokers like Stanley Kowalski or Biff from </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Salesman</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. This is the beginning of characterization, which must start with observation, or else you end up with something false which people won’t recognize as being true. When you observe people, always get at the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">why </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">of behavior. They take refuge in objects -- use them to reveal or conceal.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Why does Hedda smoke? Sadie Thompson? They’re not types. Look for specific people. Kowalski’s no type, even if Brando tried to make him one. In Kowalski’s case you’re looking for someone with strong animal responses; stalking a prey, peacock-like, etc. Stanley erotic? What’s left for Blanche? Dramatists never put two similar people together in a play.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>This section starts out dealing with listening and soon drifts over to the kernel of AK's message: watch people closely and try to understand why they respond to their environment as they do. None of AK’s work that I can remember is very “psychological” in terms of inner patterns like id, ego, libido. Nor is much of it about relationships like intimacy or domination. The questions are always specific and her examples often reveal HER! Hedda in particular, wrestling with her boredom and gender confinement. And yet AK suggests Hedda doesn’t smoke cigars because they are ugly! So much for a cherished male symbol! Just a cigar -- maybe not.</i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Watching AK write material like the following was always interesting, though I didn’t think much about it at the time. She used those half-size bluebooks without a clipboard. (My high school teacher used a clipboard for notes and often used it dramatically, slamming it to the floor when her adolescents were out of control.) She usually used a pencil, but didn’t erase -- more likely to cross out. She underlined a lot. An English teacher would discourage all those three dot pauses, those dashes, those semicolons that are everywhere. It’s not that she’s punctuating in an old-fashioned or ignorant way, but that she’s trying to record the spoken words she’s hearing in her head as she writes.</i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>I wish I had a painting of her and Lucy in a rowboat out on the water at Eagles Mere on a Sunday afternoon, an umbrella shading AK while she scribbled, and Lucy alternating between rowing and just basking. A public and idyllic intimacy, entirely blameless.</i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>It’s interesting to ask why AK’s life was confined to the small world of academic theatre on one campus. She was not competitive or ambitious in any obvious way, though she clearly threatened those who were like that in her small world. She didn’t try to go to Broadway and always spoke against the star system, even as she served it. She didn’t produce books. It was almost as though she were creating family with students for children, cherishing and punishing them, sometimes controlling a little too much, very occasionally driving one out.</i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">MOSTLY AUDITORY</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side Activity:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Nobody has talked about voice work in journals. You begin with breathing. Correct breathing is based on rib support. Place hands on side of waist to find correct position for ribs. Or lie on floor with book on diaphragm. Get feeling of movement. Actors must keep ribs expanded and out all the time. Take supplementary breaths with ribs expanded. Work at this fifteen minutes a day.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Behavior Patterns, Basic Drives and Observation:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> AK: “What makes me the individual I am?” She ruffles hair of one of the students. “Why did I do that?” So-and-so, another teacher, would never do that in class. This is part of her behavior. Through observing what people do, through speculating on why they do it, we begin to understand human personality, human motivation, human character. This is where characterization begins for the actor -- through insight coupled with the skill to reproduce meaningful behavior. To grasp why people do what they do or do not do what they they don’t, you have to find out what </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">drive</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> motivates their lives. Drives are basic; they are modified by environment. Self-preservation is one drive. They become elevated, sublimated, degraded, turned into other things through living. It is miraculous how you can turn yourself into someone else by simply doing what they do. When you feel low, you might ask yourself who you have been seeing, who you have been with; we tend to take on the qualities of people we are with. There is nothing mysterious about reading people’s characters through their behavior. What we are is written all over us -- what we think, believe, feel, etc. Most people are so concerned with selves that they simply don’t notice what others are going through.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">III. AUDITORY SENSE</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Study your own auditory pattern. What constitutes sound? Vibrations. Is a voice you hear nasal, denasal? What is its pitch, its timbre? What rate does the person speak at. No two people hear the same thing, hear the same way. Note how differently two people describe the same experience -- a musical composition, say. Two-thirds are satisfied when they hear the theme; others go farther. Sharpen your own hearing. The fog horn in Anna Christie: sound crew produces a sound that is O.K. out front; but onstage it may be a distortion. Act I of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Seagull:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> A song comes from across the lake. For each person onstage it has different connotations. As actors you have to create imaginary sounds and respond to them, have to create people who have keener auditory senses than you may have. Marchbanks has a keen auditory sense but is not what we call neurotic. What does Lady Macbeth hear? Macbeth? Watch people listening. What can you learn about them as people from the way they listen? Put a person in a situation where he </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">has</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> to listen and individual differences begin to come out. Listen to someone speak a foreign language; what do you hear? Out of several listeners, one may be caught up completely in a sound or series of sounds. If you completely use a sense, you lose yourself. Some people listen only for the sense of an utterance. Others hear and can reproduce vocal tones that go along with the utterance. Actors onstage must not only hear words spoken onstage but overtones and undertones that creep into voices onstage -- or that are missing and which tell so much more than the words. Actors must play to voice quality just as they play to eyes.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Side comment: Remember that whatever you do onstage by previous plan may have to be changed when you come to rehearsal; there may be other actors onstage to stimulate you . . . On writing: Good writers don’t state how a character feels, in a story or novel; they record what the character does and the reader draws the correct conclusion. How do we know who and what people are? By the small things they do. If I ask you about Hedda, you will say she is bored. She is. But how do you act boredom of that size? [AK demonstrates by having responses to the ugly brown cover on the piano which is also locked in the classroom.] Things </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">add up</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> into boredom. You have to find something tangible to begin with. You are bored in response to something. Hedda’s boredom is going to </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">lead to</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> destruction. Actors are lucky; in plays the playwright tells you what the character does -- now and later. But the actor has to fill in between the moments the playwright gives. These are the five-finger exercises of acting we have been working on. It is basic that lines must follow from a stimulus; every time an audience </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">knows</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> whether a response is real or faked. Your -- the actor’s -- little empathic response to the stimulus (which an audience never analyzes) tells the truth . . . There is much made of a light bulb in </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Streetcar.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Three people respond to it. Blanche says she can’t stand that naked bulb (it shows up her age). First you must feel its heat, then wince, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">then</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> speak. It should be a hanging bulb, too, that can be set to swinging, be made to dance; it </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">must</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> be there -- to reveal character. . . . </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Onstage </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">inner lives</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> are being revealed . . . Special project: observe spines of people for a while -- and nothing but! . . . Why does Hedda smoke? It’s just come into vogue; not many women do it in her circle. Would not smoke a cigar -- she loves beauty too much. Hedda would take her feelings out on a cigarette. Take her out of the world of women and put her into the world of men, where she wants to be . . . A student imitates a smoker who he thinks is like a young Biff Loman. He has observed the person’s traits, but in his reproduction of them they are still exterior. Actors must be good mimics, but acting is not a representation of exterior qualities. It always has to illuminate the why of behavior. You can ask a person, “Why do you do that?” and they will say, “Oh, do I?” . . . Drama lies in seeing a stimulated by something. . .</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px; text-align: center;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 11px; margin-left: 43px; min-height: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 2.0px;"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>AK CRITIQUES STUDENT ATTEMPTS</b></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Exercises reproducing behavior of a blind person</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: (Part of the work on the visual sense, since this is the inability to respond to visual stimuli.) A real blind person has such keenly developed senses that he can always tell where he is. What does each specific blind person you study </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">hear?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> How does he identify objects, places, people? What associations follow upon more identification? We have sequences of responses. What happens to a blind person’s voice? Often they talk softly so as not to interfere with the intake of other stimuli. Why do some blind people carry their heads so high? There is no reason to look down and it’s easier to hear, to feel sounds, makes one more open and perceptive; you can </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">feel light</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> on your face. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To give a student a sense of being deaf, AK has other students around her mouth words but make no sound; often they ignore her. She begins to feel “out” of things, that she must strain awfully hard to keep up with others; that she needs to watch every second. Student has an experience of what the world of deafness must be like and begins to make some of the adjustments a deaf person must . . . There are deaf people who can dance because they feel the music’s vibration on the floor or on their skin. When there are silences around you, how do you know what is going on? From vibrations in the air? . . . </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">AK sends someone onstage to be a blind man standing on the edge of a cliff (i.e.: </span><span style="font-family: Arial; letter-spacing: 0px;">Gloucester</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> in </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Lear)</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">; There isn’t any cliff, only level ground; someone goes with him, his objective being to make the blind man think he’s climbing, going up -- to make him believe </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">absolutely</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">; this is a</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"> transfer.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Find the thing that will make him believe: tell him how high he is; what do you see? Create a visual image for him -- a valley -- people -- how big are the people? -- Is there a river in the valley -- what does one see from the height? -- what is this power of suggestion that makes a blind man believe? She is applying what the class have been working on to an actual play . . . </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">New exercises involve creating the stimuli around Lady Macbeth or Macbeth on the eve of murder. She is concerned about Macbeth, wants to be with him, near him, but something keeps her here in this room. What does she respond to in it? What stimuli come to her? Create the thing that halts her, keeps her here, causes her to jump owl [? sic], and ends with “My husband!” How do you keep “Is this a dagger --?" from being a histrionic speech? How do you create a dagger in the air? Have you had any personal experience? Have you ever seen anything materialize? Why does it? You’ve been thinking about it so hard it does. When he comes from the murder, what has he seen that won’t ever leave him? The images will never be lost from this great man’s life. Movies would take us into the room; Shakespeare brings the murder onstage through Macbeths. Have you stored up any images in the last three weeks that you can build to the sleep-walking scene with? Sleep-walkers use senses better than when awake, are in danger only when someone wakes them up unexpectedly.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>[There was a story going around at the time that the students who lived in rented rooms upstairs in AK’s house heard night noises, came out on the landing, and found AK balanced on the railing in her nightgown! Probably apocryphal, but then -- what does it stand for? What was she doing in her sleep? They were afraid to waken her.] </i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Her eyes are open -- seeing -- but seeing more. She sees with her subconscious. Lady Macbeth sees the blood there, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">smells</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> it. Juliet accepts the potion, then</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"> realizes</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> she is going to be put in the tomb. What do actresses do? Run around the stage screaming? Can you see the rows of people in the tomb? Tybalt, newly dead? Images must materialize before you -- out there. Lady Macbeth </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">relives </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">the moment when she smeared the grooms with blood. Have you ever had human blood on your hands? For a lifetime she has to conceal this. It’s pushed down in her subconscious but comes out in sleep. Don’t dare act emotions: they will</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"> come</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> if you create the stimuli. “The Thane of Fife" -- where does that come from? A message which said -- “The Thane of Fife’s wife has been murdered.” </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>There isn’t one moment in drama that you can act without an image behind it.</b> The Greek drama class (second year acting) is having trouble because they didn’t learn to create a stimulus last year. You’ve somehow got to see (if you’re doing Antigone) the brother’s corpse, smell the stench, sense the hot sun, see the vultures, etc. The words that Sophocles gives come in response to these stimuli, which you must create for yourselves.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side comment on stagefright:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> AK has a student who confesses to being afraid come off the stage and study the setting which has been put up for a forthcoming production. What kind of play would you act in this setting? <b> Ibsen? Tennessee Williams?</b> What does it do to you? Does it make you fight? Is it frustrating? Does it lift you up? Does it warm you? If the curtain went up and there were no actors onstage for 60 seconds, what would the set do? After actress has forgotten herself by concentrating on something hard (here, the setting) AK sends her back up to present her scene.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Lear</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;"> scene again: Two actors have been working on it. AK asks if actor playing </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Gloucester was “psychologically on a cliff.” Tells both of them that they have to get some of the “why” into it, especially at the beginning, to show the compulsion in it. Says it has to be more kinesthetic than they are making it, must seem to be really climbing, although on the flat surface.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of actresses pretending to stop to admire baby in carriage</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: there seemed to be “blank spaces” in it -- too many did not believe there was a baby there -- you couldn’t describe the baby even now -- you were acting in a plot -- you didn’t hear the baby cry -- you didn’t ask yourself questions: is it big or little, etc.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of actress doing Lady Macbeth reading letter and trying to motivate what she says and does: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Walk tells nothing, with which scene was begun -- and Shakespeare begins in the middle of the scene and the letter reading. If there was to be a messenger to bring the letter, what became of him? You’ve been standing all day, perhaps days, waiting for a messenger to bring a letter from Macbeth. Plays don’t begin when you come onstage -- they begin offstage. If there are other people present when the letter arrives she </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">must</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> get to a room alone. What does the letter look like? What kind of paper is it on? What is she learning? What does she </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">do?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> The scene leads to: “Glamis thou art, etc.” and a tragedy is underway. On a later try at the scene: Work until you can sustain a horizon there (at the back of the audience) as long as you want. What is on it? What color is the sky? Are you listening for the sounds of the battle? Don’t stay on one stimulus longer than you need to.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If an object materializes for you, or a sound, we out in front will see it or hear it, too. Use your senses, not your minds. You see, hear, with your senses.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of actor doing Macbeth and imaginary danger</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: He did see something, but then began emotionalizing; he was aware himself that he was faking part of the time. AK adds an “if.” "If you are a general, strong, brave, courageous -- now go on with the situation.” Posture of actor has changed: “You are a leader, you have just won a battle. . .” You create Macbeth or Lady Macbeth one step at a time.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of actress doing sleepwalking scene</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: What should be your first question? What is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">blood</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">? It is an image which runs throughout the play. The blood is where? You’ve got to get it there (on your hands) first. And if you’re squeamish about blood, you look anywhere else but at it. If you have no response to the image of blood, to smearing blood, you are no actor. If the idea hit you, it would show in your stomach. You have to sense it now, every time you do it.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>Bad method acting is: getting lost in yourself.</b></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What does your dramatist tell you about Lady Macbeth? That she is revolted by blood. She is driven to suicide by it. Actress must be able to get to this ultimate point of the role. Lady Macbeth’s subconscious mind will not tolerate it. Again: she cannot look at it ; she is sleep-walking; she even has nightmaries when awake; the things she sees are out here. Work for images that will come instantly.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of girl doing potion scene as Juliet</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: I’m going to question the position of that chair. For four weeks we’ve seen people placing chairs center stage. Chairs are placed in relation to something. Chairs center stage cause me to question the truth. What is now in relation to the chair (which has been moved)? A bed? Walk around it. Where is the head? If a piece of furniture is not in relation to something else, you’re acting in a vacuum. Tell me what the dramatist gives you; he is always very specific. A holy man has told a young girl: here is a potion, take it, and you will fall asleep and seem dead. It begins with </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">trust</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. If she hadn’t trusted, she wouldn’t have accepted it or wouldn’t take it. How big is the potion? In a tall glass !! Who put it there? Why didn’t family see it? You violate something when you make it big. I had you create a room so that you would know what it is to be alone alone. Start with one reality and build from this -- </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">justify.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> You’re in a room that has suddenly become empty. You’d love to hear voices in the passage . . .</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of girl doing sleep-walking scene</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: She wasn’t sleepwalking, was awake and using her “thinking mind,” which should be shut off -- it’s just the subconscious that is going. Have you ever come up out of ether? What happens? You hear sounds, buzzings, drumming; then you see colors -- blue, green, etc. Doctor and Nurse seem to be miles away. In sleepwalking you do not think, you re-experience more vividly than you have before. What tells me on Monday morning you’ve had a wild weekend? Your eyes don’t focus. Well, her eyes don’t focus. Then images begin to come. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What is her </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">objective?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Sleepwalkers always have a very strong objective. How does she enter? Slowly? Nooo! If there is something she has to do (wash her hands), she comes with terrifying directness. She is reliving that moment of “Come, come, a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">little water</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> --” (irony!)” -- cleans us of this deed.” It is horribly ironic. It is the moment of leading of Macbeth and washing his hands for him and her own and being at the gate to meet people -- which moment lives in her memory forever? Voice? Something is cut out of it, as it is out of her mind. The vocal tone is direct, but something alive is missing. they both physically get the blood off, but neither really do. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now you hear voices. “The Thane of Fife has lost a wife.” The stimulus comes in and then another on top of that. Shakespeare gives the whole scenario. How do you get at sleepwalking if you’ve never done it? One does things clearly, positively, decisively (like you do when you turn off the alarm and then get back in bed and pull up the covers and go to sleep.) She can’t touch her garments and doesn’t. Associate sleep-walking with hypnotism -- you are fully aware, but “looking through the wrong end of the telescope.” Doctor says: “Her eyes are open, but their sense is shut.” Don’t get too involved, but get at producing the stimuli. We are trying to get you to discover what acting is and where emotions derive from. You’ve got to store up sensory images, sensory memories, so vividly that they come to you, bang; you can’t wait ten minutes. And all the time you’re doing this, you’re asking yourself -- not me -- am I an actor? A good director give you images to build on; a director has to have an actor’s approach when working with actors.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Actress playing waiting scene from <i>Macbeth</i> must not say to herself, “Lady Macbeth is tense.” Find instead the verb that states what she is doing. She is listening for a sound which will say, “Duncan is dead,” after she has left people she has drugged, hoping they won’t wake up. Offstage the man she loves is killing the king who is a guest in their house and she knows her husband well enough to knows her husband well enough to know that at the last minute he may turn “milk-livered.” You must walk silently down the hall, but part of you trails behind, and she must be close to something, like a wall. Shakespeare does a brilliant thing: he brings the murder onstage when it is off. Actress who tries scene is criticized: “You come onstage anxiously, as if thinking, I wonder if the refreshments have come? Or, is that the children stirring in the nursery? Not enough. You have to recall an experience of your own, observe someone, or else read something hoping for a vicarious experience.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side issue</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: A class in body movement is announced; it will meet at an hour convenient for enrollees, maybe limited to upper class students.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of girl attempting Juliet’s potion scene</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: What was your working objective? “To show why Juliet has to drink this potion. Why carry a candle? (Poor reading of scene when studying it.) What does Shakespeare give you? What is the correct actress’ objective? Actress has to find what will get her to: “Stay, Tybalt, stay; Romeo, I come!” Why does she take two or three minutes first? If she has doubts, why? </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"> You</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> must find the inner motivation for the lines the playwright has given. She has made up her mind to take it, but she hesitates; why? What happens during the hesitation? The hesitation has something to do with the appearance of Tybalt’s ghost, with the quality of an imagination that conceives of things as hers does. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This scene is full of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">realizations,</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> one after another. She realizes the room is empty, there is nobody in it. Tell me what you see that says to you the room is empty. What does she see as she turns around? Her shadow? She’s been alone in this room before but now sees a shadow of some sort. Potion is where? (If it is at her breast, your hands will go to this spot when you sense it.) Bed is where? How does she look at dagger? What does the dagger symbolize? Death is what a dagger </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">always</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> says. Maybe you can’t play through a whole scene, from moment to moment, realization to realization, stimulus to stimulus; but it is your job as learning actors to find out what a sensory response is and bring it off onstage.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND MOVEMENT</b></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Side Issue: Stream of Consciousness</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Term is introduced when two students are having trouble with an exercise they are presenting. “Let’s hear your stream of consciousness,” says AK, meaning let’s hear you vocalize what you are thinking, noting as the scene progresses. If you look at the floor (a response) it has to be because there is something on it (to stimulate your thinking.) Girls are trying to create an imaginary room, to respond to it. Do this responding with your senses, says AK, not your mind; do it with your muscles. When you see that real table, what does it make you want to do. (i.e.: what empathic response does it set up in you, which of the table’s characteristics or your muscles tend to copy?) Find something you like to look at and surrender to it. What are you? A person? Really an organism, a total physical being -- which responds to physical things around it. Why are you different from somebody else in class. You are all the same age, all speech students. But one’s makeup is different from another’s because his past experience is different from another’s. One is “a bunch of conditioned responses.” We are “products of our environment.” What were the actual tangible forces which led you to this room in this building? (Answer lies in the whole past lives of the students: parents, family attitudes, choices made, etc.) </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Reference to a recent Bergman film with scenes in a train compartment.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Three people in a specific environment; what did they </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">do</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> -- shut up in four feet of space in a railway carriage? What was there in the compartment to use? A book, a window, a cigarette; consider what each of these objects was like in relationship to the possible variations on the same objects. Why does the author-director give him or her these books? (To reveal who and what the people are by their attitudes toward relationships to these objects.) Where do one’s conditioned responses come from. We all do the same acts differently because we have our own conditioned responses to living, to life. (What we do and how we do it constitutes our behavior patterns; characterization is reproducing the behavior patterns of other people -- together with their motivations.)</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of an exercise in which a girl crosses a room onstage:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> An acting job you can praise to the skies. What she gives is something that has scarcely been seen in class: response to stimuli! Whom did she see in the street? To whom did she bow? She looked at someone for a long time that eyes that almost devoured him.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Another critique:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Actor attempting Macbeth’s dagger speech goes into “false emotion” after seeing the dagger. His difficulty is the common one of not making </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">transitions</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> -- of going from this to that. Transitions are the most important part of acting: fill them in. Boy dismisses servant and then has a transition into seeing the dagger -- and is better as a result.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Student impersonates a bird </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">he has seen at the zoo. AK points out that Voltore in Volpone is a character who is like a bird, is a vulture. But the vulture observed at the zoo did not move, did not respond. Well, </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">if</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> this vulture moved, how would it move. Go back at feeding time.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Girl reproduces behavior of a cat-like animal</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">, even parries taunts from a class member with an umbrella, in a way that animals in cages who are used to people doing things like this to them would. Girl got the lurching of the shoulders, power of the paw blows, the line that goes through the whole body when the animal lunges. AK has her slowly turn into a person who has these qualities: a person who “pulls from the spine” when walking, when coming down on an enemy. Animals are bundles of energy; you can sense in an second what they are like.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">New Idea: a girl imitates some sort of prancing animal</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> and the class laughs. Why do we laugh? Analyze what makes comedy. It is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">incongruity</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> of things -- here the growls of aggression vs. the abrupt backing up. Animal is a hyena. AK has girl buy a dress, wear it at a party, laugh, listen to election returns coming in -- all in the manner of the hyena. Animals don’t think; they react with their senses. There are contradictory impulses in animals just as in people. These </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">opposites</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> make for humorousness.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Students imitate monkeys</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. AK asks what they learned -- about monkeys and about their own kinesthetic senses, asks for the monkeys’ motivation, for a state of why they did what they did. Student says they are motivated by curiosity. AK says actors did not show one scrap of curiosity. Another actor says that male monkey “didn’t want to be bothered” by anything else that was going on. AK says that fact was not given to the audience. Also that why the monkeys came out in the first place was not made clear. The scene was diverting and amusing but not believable. If a creature is curious, how do we know this? How does he observe. Is there anybody in class who has curiosity? She helps them identify three or four people who have curiosity and whose eyes reveal the fact by the way they light up with “eternal wonder.” She admonishes the class not to talk or think in generalities, saying they will never be actors until they get over this. (Someone has answered the question, who is curious, with the statement, “everybody.”) As students continue to do other monkeys, AK adds first monkeys to their scenes, then a man with peanuts, etc., so that students have to respond to new stimuli spur of the moment as their animals would. AK points out that of two monkeys onstage, the lady one will get any food that is available because she’s more alert -- her senses are. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">AK has one of the monkeys begin to “turn human.” A gradual process: when she begins to lose her monkey spine, AK has her go back to being more monkey again. Then she starts a business of selling candy, feeling animals, still trying to give a sense of swinging along branches; she dances a while, a Charleston, goes out for basketball, goes to a sorority after-the-game party -- all in the monkey manner.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Discussion of “curiosity.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">” The word is a label we put on some act. Curiosity comes from: “I’ve never seen that before; what is it?” It is an open attitude. Curiosity is necessary to acting itself. What was an Elizabethan curiosity like? Some people in class with imagination can develop a whole sequence of things that come into Elizabethan England on ships from India or elsewhere -- things never before seen: amber, jade, ivory, spices, slaves, lace, animals, stories about far places. Along with curiosity, Elizabethans have pride and independence, too. You can create an Elizabethan by developing these traits with specific details. This opens up an area of creating characters through a kinesthetic approach -- looking at pictures, clothing, statues, furniture, etc. and letting them carry you into an experience of the past.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of another animal study</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: Why did you walk across? You have to have a motive. Animals seldom go crazy but yours would turn into a neurotic. What did you observe about its spine? (Observations must start with a study of the spine.) Where are you going? Where are you? Create your environment and respond to it. Your shoulders are still not being manipulated by your spine; your neck is still not part of you. To test actor’s kinesthetic resources: telegraph to me that you want to climb; that you don’t want to climb, that you’d like to be up in that airplane flying overhead, that you want to swing on those chandeliers. A really kinesthetic person does things </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">before</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> he touches the actual objects involved -- he sizes up the shape and weight and location of things with his muscles, eyes, etc. Muscles lift objects, kick balls, etc. before we take the time to think. What is a kinesthetic person? Have you been watching for one? Is there a kinesthetic person in this class? A kinesthetic person is kinesthetic every moment of his life; they size everything up with their muscles; their muscles feel chairs, the floor, everything -- and won’t get stuck in an awkward position. This isn’t an intellectual thing, it’s muscular. We enjoy watching highly kinesthetic people onstage because our muscles more readily copy what theirs are doing. Kinesthetic people don’t waste movement. The whole body anticipates a step they plan to take. The whole body is behind a movement. The muscles </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">enjoy</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> what they do. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When an actor does something wrong onstage, out front our muscles reject, refuse to accept. (Much of what we call enjoyment at the theatre is the result of acting empathetically along with the actors.) There aren’t many kinesthetic people left. However, if football players weren’t kinesthetic, they’d get killed.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Sense memory</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> means that one’s senses are responding more vitally than other people’s and that one is capable of storing up sense images. Without a sense memory, one will never be an actor. The class as a group did not continue its search for people who were visual or auditory people so that you could study them. There isn’t time to search out and study someone of the current type once you get into a play. It is through kinesthetic responses that we </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">understand</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">, and understanding is being in somebody’s body for a moment. I don’t have to tell you so-and-so was a dancer and one of our best actors; his body telegraphs this.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Elizabethan improvisations:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> People onstage and put in motion, walking with some objective to secure food, shelter, clothing, etc. They are told that now it’s 1600 and there’s a ship in from the Orient and they’ve money in their pockets and there’s a new play opening at the Globe . . .</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"> Hamlet </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. . . </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">More animal imitations</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: One girl tries a penguin. The “whys” of its behavior, its motivation discussed. She then changed into a human like a penguin. The question is raised, is a penguin as dumb as this? Why did Anatole France write a satire on penguins? They have no legs and so can’t move rapidly, otherwise they’d be thrown off balance, but are a graceful bird. . .</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Monkeys are so alarming because they are so close to being human that we see ourselves. Even if these animals take a stationary position for a long time, they have a latent possibility for quick and ready movement . . . How do you know when a cat that it still has latent power? It begins with the eyes. What’s back of the eyes? Cat opens and closes lids, but its eyes are already in focus when they open, as if it has been alert all the time the lids were closed. They are awake often when they appear to be asleep. . . Five animals are put onstage as if in their natural setting and allowed to respond to one another, thunder, lightning, wind, a falling tree, fire. Then they turn human and are at a cocktail party. Back to animals. Back to party. All are advised to “preserve your instincts” as they go back and forth between animal and human states. Self-preservation! Ladies, you’ve got to have a man! Dance! What do you do at cocktail parties. Drink! Talk about plays! Make it realistic! Snub her. Etc.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Old age studied through kinesthetic sense. Nerves in lower spine usually control movements: in old people they are not responsive and the mind has to consciously direct the raising and lowering of an arm, a leg. Fatigue hits the lower spine and causes us to droop. Actors act with their spines. Watch people’s spines. Even animals in a cage have a sense of self-preservation; watch their eyes. Movement should start in the spine, travel into the shoulders, out arm . . .</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Boy does snake.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Excellent; all spine. Turn human now. What are “snake” qualities? It attacks; it is often a slow thing; its protective device is its fangs -- but as a last resort; quick movement is another; camouflage; could easily get lost among a group of people; frightens us because we don’t see him until there is a movement; are a part of the landscape; are close to ground and the same color; can slip among things; you meet a snake often in drama.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 17px; min-height: 20px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 17px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>ELIZABETHANS</b></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 13px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>As I type this material I am 75 and fairly widely read, so naturally much more strikes me than did when I was 18 and only read novels. One thing I note (maybe I read it somewhere) is how much AK comes back and back to the Elizabethans and the Greeks as epitomizing what it is to be free and alive. Other writers have noted this. In the Sixties, just before the cultural renaissance called New Age (if you accept that characterization), American culture was celebratory. We had won WWII, we all owned cars and houses -- but it was unseemly to show off our conviction that we were a “peak culture,” so we implied it by associating ourselves with two other periods that were grand and cultured.</i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Now, of course, we are looking at the end of things, diminishment, confusion, and want to think about neanderthals and the end of the Roman Empire as well as the end of the English empire. It’s a playwright’s problem, but also one for the actors. Perhaps AK is so fond of Ibsen and Chekov because they are critical and see “modern” as not so fail-safe. But my high school teachers in the Fifties also held up Elizabethans and Greeks as exemplars. Was the Sixties and Seventies an attempt to return to those periods in some way?</i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>The point for an acting teacher is that a sound knowledge of culture and history is vital. How did AK come by her opinions of how people did things long ago?</i></span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">V. GUSTATORY AND OLFACTORY SENSES</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Can be put together but are separate. Gustatory is in tastebuds in tip and sides of tongue, but there is also a response in the stomach. Other sense is in the nose. These are two senses that have become dull -- very. <i> [Sometime I wonder how much of what AK thinks is true of the society is in fact her own self projected. She is aging, thus her senses become more dull.]</i></span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Begin acting by asking why is this character in the play, why is this scene in the play. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">One Foot in America </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">(opening U.T. show of this season) is filled with eating scenes. How you eat, your response to food, is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">you</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">One Foot</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> is folk drama -- delineates a folk through their love-making, hatreds, etc., exists to </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">reveal a people</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. We saw a group of people onstage </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">acting</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> -- sitting around a table and doing what? Why does your mouth water at the thought of food? . . . Once there was a reason for a prayer before a meal; when our attitude toward food changed, the prayer went. AK recollects a man who smiled at food, another man who thought a baked potato was “beautiful.” Comments on how long a novelist takes to describe about food, eating, etc. which we can show in an instant onstage. She refers to other eating scenes in Studio Theatre plays class has seen: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Sicilian Limes, Demi-Monde</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">; recollects her first French breakfast: “Ze butter is </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">in </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">ze roll!” an article in the New Yorker about a restauranteur who goes around tasting food, asks class to distinguish between a gourmet and a gourmand. </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Eating reveals national characteristics. In the last scene of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">R.U.R</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. there are people in tails after dinner drinking brandy -- have reached the highest level of sophistication, but only one man onstage recalls how to handle a brandy glass. If you have a drink to handle onstage, know what it must tell. You say you can’t eat and talk? People do it. The way you size up your plate (or don’t), put in the first fork-ful, etc. all reveal something about us. think of your favorite food; what happens? Your mouth begins to water. Think of Falstaff. He tastes beer before he’s got it. Where does he want food? Elizabethans were very open about it. You can’t fake these things onstage, can’t “play an attitude.” What do you get in an animal? It’s a necessity to have food. When he has enough he quits. Eating scenes provide dramatists with one of the best ways to show family and social relationships. Noel Coward went to the cocktail set for his material; a whole era was caught and on top of it are the clever, brittle lines. Do you know the mark of your own eating? What epitomizes you? What food? </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One girl says German beer is her favorite. Not just beer, but German beer -- she’s gone up in the scale of discrimination; the girl explains why and comes alive as she talks about drinking the beer in particular surroundings with particular friends under particular circumstances; she describes the taste, color, richness, glass it is served in, where you go for it, etc. and almost makes a stein of it materialize. The stein itself is an expression of part of the German temperament -- German word for “friendship” mentioned, for love they can be very sentimental -- can weep, sing, be warm, you belong, you are welcome in their little places. . . </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Do you know spices? The names of them perhaps, but do you really known the essentials of them? Acting is illusion; that’s why we’re training your senses -- so that you can turn stage oatmeal into -- ?</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of a student’s efforts to reproduce someone’s drinking:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Give me a character sketch of him? What do you know about him? A professional gambler? (He was throwing dice and drinking.) Why do you use the label “professional”? It looked kind of amateurish. Was it whisky? How do you know it was whisky? You mean you didn’t know what he was drinking? Was he rich, poor, in between? What sort of place was he in? Was he a heavy drinker? A light drinker? We ought to know a great deal about him by the end. What size glass was it? What are his eyes like? What makes him sit there for a long time between drinks? </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">WHY? </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">HOW DO YOU KNOW?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> AK says, “I’m still asking </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">why.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">”</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critiques of other eating scenes</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: Class are giving situations rather than character responses to food. . . AK wants to know what a character’s attitude toward food is . . . What role you would identify the character with -- Juliet? Hedda? Clytemnestra? it should be possible to take the character into some other situation once his or her eating habits have been established. . . One student seems to be acting </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">any</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> young girl, to be acting attitudes; each person is a unique being in a specific situation: look at her head, feet, eyes, etc. From the cigarette exercise onward you’ve been looking for the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">why</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> of behavior.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of an exercise in which a boy attempts to create an Elizabethan</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: you’re faking. The listening was inadequate, the voice was wrong. Now you’re really listening (to the critique!) Before you did didn’t hear. No, you’re going through planned sequences. You were a little modern man rather than an Elizabethan with curiosity, wonder, love of life. If you wore tights all the time you would be </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">free</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">, and you would show your legs to advantage. We see something prissy. Where’s your weapon? How do you </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">know</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> you’re not going to be attacked? Murders occurred in broad daylight as well as at night . . . Create an Elizabethan who might be in Shakespeare’s plays. Before you weren’t alert; you’re a little alert now; London must be full of smells, etc. He talks about there being “garbage” around; is that all there is in the room? he is “attacked” by another student who has been hiding in the shadows. There’s always something going on around you. Student look up several details on Elizabethan life, but made the mistake of stopping there. Put into action the child’s principle: “</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">IF</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> I wore tights -- <i>IF</i> I lived in dangerous times --<i> IF</i> I were a man and wore a necklace -- <i>IF </i>I wore a ruff.” Pictures? What did you see in the pictures? Hands must be ready to draw weapon, but must not touch weapon unless someone else draws. Protect the vital parts of the body -- where the organs are. In this era of Elizabeth you </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">do</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> need to to be prepared. No “buts!” something has to transform you or else it does no good to read dozens of books. I’m giving you what is typical. . .</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critiques of other Elizabethans</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: Did she have a quality of open-eyed wonder? Why did she walk sideways, crab-like? Only crab-like people walk sideways. Where’s your big skirt? Twirl it, kick it out of the way. Arms being out away from body at the beginning was good, but don’t let them get stuck there. don’t get so close to a chair as you approach in your voluminous skirt; some women wore farthingales, but not all. How much do skirts weigh? Feel resistance against them with pleasure.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">To a boy acting the death of Christopher Marlowe</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: You are giving us an elaborate “plot.” You must achieve a much stronger walk; sitting needs more room; never let yourself get squeezed up against furniture regardless of what the play is. Handle the cloak easily; experiment with possible ways to dispose cape around you. Now feel the weight of the cape and enjoy the movement of swinging it; these people have </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">energy.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Don’t swing your weight from side to side. Keep a pull upward; work on stopping the middle of a strong step. Let all parts of body “follow through” on a movement. Exercises tried to get strength and suppleness and follow-thru.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Girl dressing herself before a mirror:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> her happiness was excessive to the motivation; no reason for being so happy. What was she, anyway? I’m going to say she was a high school girl doing her first costume show. Were you an Elizabethan? assignment was to get an Elizabethan body responding. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"> To another girl: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> You’d be carried out of court for a little bow like that. The bow goes down and under, with nothing sticking out. Circle around rather than pivot; the skirt must follow you. Feel the skirts; where’s the pull felt? What about her step? What’s inconsistent? It’s little and tiny. Women, too, must take long steps to get somewhere. Do exercises; enjoy them. Everything (parts of body) needs to be in alignment; bodies “resent” an off-balance position . . . </span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">To students attempting to be Romeo and Mercutio: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> you aren’t </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">holding out attention</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">; if you can’t hold attention something is very wrong. Mercutio should be the best swordsman in Verona. He is not an animal but an element: quicksilver! Moves quickly, all in a piece.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">To another girl</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: leap, leap for the joy of it; walk; leap; reach for something -- a star, a man, anything! Elizabethans have so much to reach for they can’t choose. The Queen is coming! The Earl of Leicester! A musician! Strange animals! Strange people! . . .</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">To another girl:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Nothing really Elizabethan in her portrayal of a Catholic woman at a shrine. Her religious feeling would be </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">very intense</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">, because she’s had to take sides, or evade the state’s decree. The worship business restrains you; try being at a theatre with a mask on, in a world of intrigue; skirt must have weight, a concealing cape; enjoy it! What play is it? Why are you there? . . .</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">To another girl:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Movement actually suggests a dainty delicate person! Be Juliet running to meet the Nurse, with the “why” of Nurse bringing Romeo’s first message. Running on tiptoe </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">to life</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. What </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">is</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> life to a young girl in love for the very first time -- and with a Romeo! What does the sky look like? The grounds? The trees? she wants to take it all in! Don’t </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">think</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> about it -- feel and sense it all. Make one good run across the stage and stop; good because it had </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">suspense</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> in it.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Side comment to girl who “doesn’t feel like it” when it comes to doing a scene: What do you do if the curtain is going up in five minutes and you’re scheduled to play Juliet? What do you do? Never let an audience down: never, never, never. The rule of the theatre is: the show must go on. If you aren’t there, that’s the end.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Other Elizabethan</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: You’re acting attitudes. There was no reason for picking up that skirt. It is stupid to walk in straight lines; your clothes wouldn’t follow you; you must go in circles. How many petticoats do you have? Many. don’t tell me, feel them. It is nothing to intellectualize: you must be kinesthetic, not mental.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Actor showing Krapp’s response</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> to banana -- and other stimuli. Everything was “more than clear.” What dimension did performer add? Delight. A man who knows how to get what he wants out of a watch, a banana, etc. who has the delightful recognition that everything is “working as it should,” that the watch is running, that the banana tastes as it should, etc. His joints had to be manipulated as a result of extreme age. Everything he did was beautiful. What did you learn? -- that what the author gives him has to be motivated.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of actress setting table</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: Class is asked to give a biography of the character they have just seen. Why does she do it </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">this way</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">? She did each thing one at a time. Finished one thing absolutely, then took up the next. Tiredness without martyrdom was clear. She realistically checked everything. Woman seemed older than student actress because she had a “settled” quality of middle age.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Same student as Kate the Shrew</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: Let’s see her express joy in living. You have so much energy it has to be expended somehow -- in climbing to the sun, in choking a man, etc. Cry out; leap; run. Now pick up that little lute, used to sing insipid songs to Bianca. (Movement is too inhibited.) Get on a horse. Swing up! Get on a bike. Two men go onstage to “tame” her -- real men, not Bianca men. (Now actress feels “just great.”) Her society is is trying to make her conform to being a Bianca -- she replies by being the opposite. Then she meets Petruchio and falls in love with him: Recognize first that he </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">dares</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">, then respond. . .</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of boy presenting a character study observed from life</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: Everything onstage tells a story: tell me a story here. You saw a timid little man absorbed in his paper and less in his food? If you were writing a play, how would you use him? This is character study. I’m not interested in plot. One person east at a particular time -- so, when it gets to be that time, he eats; is this the man you saw? He felt he had to read the paper? What page did he read? Was that the actor or was that the man observed? “He reads the comic section first? </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">How</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> does he read the comic section; </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">why</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> does he read it first? Does he laugh inside? Does so because it doesn’t take any concentration? Because he doesn’t feel like plunging into world affairs or high finance? Because comics provide a certain positive thing that comes up day after day -- provide a kind of safety, certainty, security. What did the eating tell? College student? Businessman? Does he taste his food? What’s he eating? An egg? Oatmeal? Does he enjoy it? If it is not so good as usual, would he know it? Is he in his own home? Go on doing it, and while you do, tell us what you’ve discovered about him. Give us a “hand study” again. Does he smoke? Is there anything you notice particularly about his hands? Does he use his fingers separately, or the hand as a whole? If the former, it says that this is a man who has time and/or taste to know what his fingers are doing. Next time you do anything, take your opposite, somebody as different from you as possible.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of a boy doing an Elizabethan</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: We don’t like the laugh; it’s a self-conscious snigger. Show us you can laugh like an Elizabethan. Movement excellent -- had pull-up, follow-through, balance, ease.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Critique of boy eating: A laborer? An Italian -- or some excitable nationality? A person who hasn’t had much education, but who gets through life well enough? A college student showing off? Go up onstage again. Something needs clarification. Study him more. Enjoyment of food, showing off, etc. coming through better . . .</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of girl impersonating an old woman eating</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">: A very old woman. Some good observation of character. She did walk in between counter and stools. Why didn’t she take napkin to begin with? Why was coffee put where it was? it is an actor’s job to give the audience cues to understanding. Did spectators believe in it? </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Was</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> it caricature? You tend to say this whenever you see something extreme; Evanston is full of extreme people. Scene still needs “the reasons why,” although some of these were there. AK asks actress if she is satisfied? Actress feels she hasn’t got inside woman yet. AK says audience wanted to know why she became old in this particular way.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of boy who impersonates a literary-minded college student</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> who does nothing but talk, talk, talk at table. Next time choose an opposite kind of person. When class laughs, AK points out they are laughing at a </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">comic irony.</span></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; min-height: 16px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #323333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;">Critique of a girl’s exercise.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> What did you get from this? Did you believe her? What kind of person is she? What is her personal drama? How does she look at life? I’d say that she rejects practically everything. What we’re searching for is the reason why -- otherwise you will act stereotypes.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-13554137409818179342014-05-19T20:24:00.001-06:002014-05-19T20:24:12.104-06:00AK FILMS from SD in 1968<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 34.6px; text-indent: -34.7px;">
The AK films from the SD workshops on 1968 are uploaded on Vimeo. The DVD that BTE distributed some years ago is in 4 parts; then there is the Antigone workshop that was found after the DVD was put together. Also the 2 KUSD radio interviews. I have attached the brochure copy from the original release of the films. (Couldn't make that jump from email to this post. Alas.)</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
I think anyone who studied with AK will find the footage of interest, though I don't think it captures her at her best because the students were (or appear to be) new to her, and its a one-off workshop. Nevertheless, this is about all the footage of her there is, so.....</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
Thanks, Jim Goode</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
</div>
<div class="page" title="Page 1">
https://vimeo.com/search?q=Alvina+Krause</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-42268290800527210312014-05-16T21:54:00.001-06:002014-05-17T08:56:22.347-06:00AK'S LAST DAYS AT NU<h2 class="date-header" style="background-color: white; color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
FRIDAY, MAY 16, 2014</h2>
<div class="date-posts" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<div class="post-outer">
<div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; margin: 0.3em 0px 25px; padding: 0px 13px;">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6826376369103418442" name="7381729473212949766"></a><br />
<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-image: url(http://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; font-size: 17px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
LAST DAYS AT NU FOR AK</h3>
<div class="post-header">
<div class="post-header-line-1">
</div>
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7381729473212949766" itemprop="description articleBody" style="border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(187, 187, 187) rgb(255, 255, 255); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em; padding: 10px 14px 1px 29px;">
<div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NCC8USkVxuM/U3aeP_2_XII/AAAAAAAALDE/3qDLj7PAJGQ/s1600/AKTOM529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NCC8USkVxuM/U3aeP_2_XII/AAAAAAAALDE/3qDLj7PAJGQ/s1600/AKTOM529.jpg" height="320" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="162" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;">Alvina Krause (Photo by Tom Foral)</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My four four-drawer filing cabinets have to go out to the attached garage because their weight is making my flimsy house sink in the middle. Since the only way I can wrestle them out there is to take everything out of the drawers, stack the files separately, move the frame out, then replace the files, I’m sorting as I go and some things just float out as single sheets. These were sent to me by <b>Tom Foral</b>.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Here are two bits written by <b>Alvina Krause -</b>- I have xeroxes of the original paragraphs in her hand-writing. There’s other material with it, but I’ll just post these two bits. Some is about students: a few get high praise and one gets the equivalent of a hit from a baseball bat. I left that out.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CVwHObXCXtk/U3Y1K26OCmI/AAAAAAAALCo/itDOrtSNuZM/s1600/ss+1307.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CVwHObXCXtk/U3Y1K26OCmI/AAAAAAAALCo/itDOrtSNuZM/s1600/ss+1307.jpg" height="203" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Annie May Swift Auditorium</span></div>
<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The first paragraph is about her last day of teaching in the Annie May Swift auditorium, so familiar to many of us. A small space with double doors at the back and sides -- the side doors often standing open in hot weather because there was no air conditioning. A cramped stage which often meant sets of great ingenuity. Theatre-style seats, a bit worn, with the class clustered at the front and observers at the back, separated from each other. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3vPfgDLN_sY/U3aej-5D1oI/AAAAAAAALDM/DRy1JVxxcS8/s1600/images-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3vPfgDLN_sY/U3aej-5D1oI/AAAAAAAALDM/DRy1JVxxcS8/s1600/images-2.jpeg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Like an empress forced to abdicate, true to her Brit/German heritage, she wishes to play Elizabeth 2, wearing her purple dress with her silver comb in the roll of hair meant to make her subtly taller. Sensible shoes. She will always be on her feet as much as possible. <i> “MOVE!”</i> she urges, and strides back and forth. How else to handle the bittersweetness of bringing alive a culture now gone in actors who haven’t lost anything yet because they haven’t lived long enough. These people are intensely privileged and know they must earn it.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YJ-oAYFg2Zg/U3Y6-z6RJtI/AAAAAAAALC4/opnjbVblrAI/s1600/ss+1317.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YJ-oAYFg2Zg/U3Y6-z6RJtI/AAAAAAAALC4/opnjbVblrAI/s1600/ss+1317.jpg" height="200" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;">Chekhov -- "The Cherry Orchard"</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">AK says:<i> “Speaking of Chekhov -- He is so true, so terribly true, too damn true. Today and my last class ever in the auditorium I have lived in for 32 years. And I look at the names of people scheduled! Good people, good workers: I’ll be able to end it all with dignity, humor, savoir faire, gemutlichkeit, chin high. etc. And what happens? What irony of all ironies? I couldn’t do it better if I were writing a play. The next to the last number comes up and all the bells start ringing and the balloons are floating straight up: a girl whom I was crossing off as hardworking but one of my failures did Lubov of the ballroom scene -- and suddenly she was an actress and Lubov was real and Chekhov was up there on that stage!”</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">___________________</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But there lingers a mystery worthy of BBC Sunday night plots. Some claim they’ve heard confessions about what went missing and they are believable. Suspects include competing faculty or ambitious grad students documenting what they hope will be a major book or actors looking for the secret of success. No one really knows. Some suspects are dead.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“. . .These days . . . were made more dark by a curious, selective theft that was made during the holidays. Between the dates of Dec. 14 and Jan. 2, when virtually </i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>all</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i> students had already left campus, and had not yet returned -- and I can account for practically all of them -- the cabinet in my office at school was </i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>emptied</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i> of all my lecture notes for</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>every</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i> class I have </i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>ever</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i> taught here, including Creative Oral which I have not taught for five years or more, and B43 which I have not taught for two years. Everything that bore notes in my own handwriting -- including a paperback of “Hamlet” whose margins were filled with notes -- and my lecture notes on all courses which I am not teaching: Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw, Ibsen, some “Styles” outlines (Thank God I had the last quarter of “Styles” outlines at home!) A most careful job of selection: it must have been at least an hour, for the cabinet was jam-packed. Everything not in my </i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>form</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i> was left and was meticulously sorted and stacked: mimeographing, newspaper clippings, pictures: all such material is carefully shelved. And my </i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>Lear Blue Books</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i> -- </i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>Gone!</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i> I had kept most of them in their original blue book form. And a few “Long Days J” blue books. Someone has acquired a pretty complete record of my work here for thirty years, for most of the notebooks -- B43, for instance -- were cumulative. It isn’t the loss I mind so much, although it is going to be inconvenient each quarter to jot down course outlines. The disturbing element is suspicions that I cannot shut out, much as I try. Questions: Who? Why? For what purpose? Isn’t it a beautiful mystery?”</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Blue books were meant to be for writing exams. They had pale blue covers and were half-size, a legal sheet folded and stapled along the crease. AK liked them for notes because they were easy to hold and write in without a clipboard, resistant to the wind blowing them around, more the size of a book than a script. Her writing was usually in pencil but clear enough to read easily. She often posted notes about a play in rehearsal by thumbtacking the book to the bulletin board and then we’d take them down to copy, sometimes wearing off the pencil lead until the writing was faint. We thought that everything she said was a word from on high, a clue to the nature of the universe.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She didn’t always think that herself. One quote that I’m not recording here is about a poor actor who is “in a haze” about the “line” of his character and her own struggle to find where the difficulty was so as to dispel the confusion. In the end she did it. So much of creativity is withstanding the ambiguity and doubt that can invade anyone, no matter how experienced. In some ways this is almost worse than “getting it wrong”. As she says in the guidelines for Eaglesmere, <i> “Not knowing one’s lines is grounds for dismissal.”</i> But the real crime is not WORKING. Working was the key to the universe. But not a guarantee of quality.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O6uKIawf9oI/U3afK1EzXAI/AAAAAAAALDU/7zdZzZzunnw/s1600/NU+charlton206.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O6uKIawf9oI/U3afK1EzXAI/AAAAAAAALDU/7zdZzZzunnw/s1600/NU+charlton206.jpg" height="320" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" width="207" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;">Ibsen "The Doll's House"</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is no way in the world for someone to steal AK’s brilliance by physically stealing all her notes. Sure, they were a record of her thinking at the time, but part of her insecurity when people tried to write about her -- and the source of her inability to make big pronouncements about “how to do it,” as the Manhattan “Method” teachers did -- was that the only real text was the person standing in front of her. Written or recorded advice is all very well, and often helpful, but acting is a time-art, the management of consciousness, and vulnerable to everything from the weather to international politics. Empathy is the only instrument for an acting teacher or a stage director.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Western culture has been dominated by the idea of written material, even sacralizing it. But whoever stole the class notes of AK and whatever they did with them (burned? hidden? handed off to someone else? sold?) and whether or not they ever surface, her “Method” will be preserved in the living memories and performances of those who enact it, like ballerinas keeping the “Ballet Russe” in their heads and feet. Still, it is essentially written on water, to be rediscovered only by immersion.</span></div>
<div style="min-height: 14px;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: Helvetica; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--v-APRzr3XQ/U3afY3Oi_WI/AAAAAAAALDc/1nfMl6lvMTM/s1600/Art+of+Floating.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #666666; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--v-APRzr3XQ/U3afY3Oi_WI/AAAAAAAALDc/1nfMl6lvMTM/s1600/Art+of+Floating.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(187, 187, 187); margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 4px;" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;">"The Art of Floating" promotional image for a benefit </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;">at Alvina Krause Theatre in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Still, these two fragments of significant events carry evocative mental pictures that we can add to our own consciousness -- even if we weren’t there.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-22061704740536907612013-07-25T15:29:00.001-06:002013-07-25T15:29:57.383-06:00NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Kevin Leonard, prompted by David Downs, and fully supported by myself, is collecting and ordering the archive for Alvina Krause, the legendary acting professor at Northwestern University. This is the University introduction:</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">___________________</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This service was launched in July 2011 to capture and preserve historically significant web content generated by and relating to Northwestern University. Your archived web site will be accessible via the NUA web site and will be searchable. Additional information on this initiative may be found at <a href="http://www.library.northwestern.edu/webarchives"><span style="color: #0433ff; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">http://www.library.northwestern.edu/webarchives</span></a>.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11px; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">NUA will only capture and preserve publicly available materials and will never copy content that is password protected or requires registration or data entry. In addition, all preserved content will be embargoed for at least 30 days before being made public and will then be prominently labeled as an “archived copy for study and research” to avoid confusion with your live website. This process involves no special preparation of the website and is designed to have no negative effects on your web server’s performance. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11px; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Please contact Benn Joseph or Kevin Leonard by phone (847-491-3136) or email (<a href="mailto:b-joseph@northwestern.edu"><span style="color: #0433ff; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">b-joseph@northwestern.edu</span></a> or <a href="mailto:kbl767@northwestern.edu"><span style="color: #0433ff; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">kbl767@northwestern.edu</span></a>) should you have any questions or concerns about the Northwestern University Web Archives. For more information about donating materials to the University Archives, please see <a href="http://www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-collections/evanston-campus/university-archives/donating-materials"><span style="color: #0433ff; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">http://www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-collections/evanston-campus/university-archives/donating-materials</span></a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11px; min-height: 13px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is an excellent first step toward translating the mission of your University Archives into the digital age. Thank you for your time and consideration.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-size: 11px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">_________________</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In case you are following this blog in order to study AK’s life or are actually on the campus in Evanston, there are materials at Deering Library that include paper and other real world materials. Leonard and Downs want to collect as many as possible of the class notebooks in which AK replied to students’ account of their work. These two blogs, <a href="http://www.krausenotes.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">www.krausenotes.blogspot.com</span></a> and <a href="http://www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com</span></a> will be archived.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Which raises the question of who deposits what where. Many AK students are famous and courted by major institutions. Marshall Mason’s papers will go to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Other are academics with close affiliations where they teach. My cohort is crossing into our seventies, so we are actually having OUR students archive materials about US. My own work is split among quite different fields so will be scattered. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some people or their executors don’t realize what importance some seemingly trivial materials might have for researchers. Leonard tells me they often get inquiries by people writing histories of performance arts, crucial in the 20</span><span style="font-size: 8px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> century when camera acting was just coming to fruition and experimental theatre was taking hold even out on the street. If there’s any question in your mind about it, contact Leonard for advice. Not me!</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-77587136714988174662013-04-09T15:53:00.002-06:002013-04-21T04:27:41.897-06:00"ACTING: A STUDY OF LIFE" DVD's<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“ACTING -- A STUDY OF LIFE”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These six films feature Alvina Krause, Professor Emeritus of Northwestern University, and students from Yankton College and the University of South Dakota. Each half-hour film includes an introduction and close by Charlton Heston, one of her former pupils. His remarks are a great tribute to a great teacher, who, in the process of teaching the creative art of acting, has constantly explored the “why” of things, life’s astonishment and wonder, and what it means to be a total human being. Such searching goes into the study of his role, and makes for fascinating enrichment for the interested viewer as well as the serious student of the arts.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In applying for a grant, Vera Ward, producer, wrote to Charlotte Carver, executive secretary of the South Dakota Fine Arts Council saying, “I wish every young person might be privileged to watch every tape of Miss Krause. She speaks to the eternal questions of life -- loneliness, alienation, despair as well as astonishment, discovery and joy. All these conditions of living in this “now” world have been explored by great playwrights, and must be probed by the sensitive actor to communicate with his fellow man.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These videotapes were produced by Forward Productions, Vera War, producer, in cooperation with the drama departments of Yankton College and the University of South Dakota. They were taped in the studios of KUSD-TV, and are now available on 16mm sound film (black and white) from the USD media Center. The South Dakota Fine Arts Council made a matching grant available for this project. Dr. E. Phelps directed the pilot tape, and Tom Engeman directed the remaining five.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Also available are two 1/2 hour interviews of Alvina Krause by Marjorie Weeks, special interviewer for KUSD Radio. These Audio tapes are on 7” reels and are an excellent in-depth profile of Alvina Krause. Used on KUSD Radio, these interviews would be an excellent introduction to Alvina Krause as a warm human being and concerned talented teacher -- an excellent preparation for the viewing of the 6 visual films.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Following is a brief idea of the contents of each film, using direct quotes from Miss Krause during her workshop sessions.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I. <b>“CREATING A CHARACTER” -- cuts from Shakespearean plays</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Character is all that you are from the day you were born up to this moment.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Don’t you <b>dare</b> try to create a character without knowing what is the past of that <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> person!”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“You can be wicked and good at the same time.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Theatre, if it’s real, stretches as far as the far horizons, and goes as deep as the <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> human heart.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Emotion is cheap. Acting is a creative art; the actor is a creative agent.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>II. SHAKESPEARE</b> -- <b>students from Yankton College and the University of South Dakota gathered around this great teacher.</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Shakespeare . . .An age of astonishment”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“The Elizabethans -- they ran forth to meet life.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“This was an age of total man . . . universal man.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Miss Krause recreates the feeling of the Age: the anticipation of the senses, the <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> robust joy of living.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>III. CONTEMPORARY DRAMA Part I</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“The actor responds to his environment.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“The actor must say, “I am a man and as a man, nothing in man is alien to me.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“The actor must create the world in which people live and respond to it.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Miss Krause works with scenes from <i>“Desire Under the Elms”</i> and <i>“The Subject <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> Was Roses.</i>”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>IV. CONTEMPORARY DRAMA Part II “Drama of the Absurd”</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b>“Acting begins with an “if.” If I believe God is dead, how would I act?”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Dead silence -- <b>that’s</b> your Modern Drama !”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Scenes are used from <i>“Waiting for Godot.”</i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i></i></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>V. OUTER TECHNIQUES OF COMMUNICATION: Techniques of voice and diction, articulation, projection, pointing, timing, topping.</b></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b>“Acting is life intensified.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Any drama is a game -- sometimes ping-pong, volley ball, chess. . .”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Technique should be worked on daily and you must master the outer techniques <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> before you go into a play.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Talent is the ability to work endlessly, tirelessly, until one has mastered the craft.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>VI. ANTIGONE</b> Miss Krause directs, cajoles, even taunts the two students playing Antigone and Creon in a scene from Jean Anouilh’s <i>“Antigone</i>.” She helps them fully understand the setting and the drama of this confrontation between the powerless Antigone and the powerful Creon who threatens death to the young girl.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These recordings are available on DVD from Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-85284981380706969442013-02-19T14:39:00.001-07:002013-02-19T18:24:29.328-07:00ANNIE MAY SWIFT HALL AUDITORIUM<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vs57XKEf0C0/USPvewLLPhI/AAAAAAAAEJQ/rXImSOwptWg/s1600/larry+smith370.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="402" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vs57XKEf0C0/USPvewLLPhI/AAAAAAAAEJQ/rXImSOwptWg/s640/larry+smith370.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Larry Smith in the center, doing the teaching grad assistant work for AK. Schneideman lurking in the back. Maria Moriates on the aisle. Bill Pogue onstage at left.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
I'm leaning on the back of a seat just past the people on the right.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
. . . . . . . </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large; text-align: -webkit-auto;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Suzanne Lehmann, I think, in front of Maria M., and isn't that Bud Beyer being directed by Larry Smith?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large; text-align: -webkit-auto;">
</div>
<div style="clear: both; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: large; text-align: -webkit-auto;">
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, Serif; font-size: medium;"><strong>Tom Foral</strong></span></div>
<div>
</div>
</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-90816271271408790222013-02-19T14:30:00.003-07:002013-02-19T16:44:48.798-07:00CAESAR & CLEOPATRA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mzE6m-Rm-Fg/USPuYqyFddI/AAAAAAAAEJA/9JDZDxtdztw/s1600/cleo380.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mzE6m-Rm-Fg/USPuYqyFddI/AAAAAAAAEJA/9JDZDxtdztw/s640/cleo380.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
These huddled masses and staunch soldiers turned out to be famous people -- some of them anyway.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3w7SE1--hVU/USPueQyPQuI/AAAAAAAAEJI/K4QnUPsArRQ/s1600/cleo382.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="393" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3w7SE1--hVU/USPueQyPQuI/AAAAAAAAEJI/K4QnUPsArRQ/s640/cleo382.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Paula Ragusa (Prentiss) extends an invitation to Rob Thirkield. Who could resist? Not Caesar!!</div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-81450339434783417032013-02-19T14:25:00.002-07:002013-03-22T09:52:34.133-06:00Richard Benjamin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aK4bBFs4OwU/USPtdvVCM-I/AAAAAAAAEI4/ftgDvzjTJsA/s1600/benjamin377.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aK4bBFs4OwU/USPtdvVCM-I/AAAAAAAAEI4/ftgDvzjTJsA/s320/benjamin377.jpg" width="231" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Richard Benjamin NU Shakespeare -- Richard?</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Don't remember the other actor's name.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From Faye Prince (nee Johnson) This is a photo of Dick Benjamin as Hotspur. Sarajane [Levy] was stage manager for “Henry IV, Part I” I was her assistant and both of us were run ragged on that show. Wasn’t Gary Vitale “Daddy Henry” and Paul Hardy “Son Hal Henry”? Weldon Bleiler was Falstaff. T</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The show was characterized by high good humor. At one point Paula [Ragusa] got furious with Dick [Benjamin] who played Hotspur. she stormed up to him downstairs and stomped the fire out of his foot. With great pain, Dick choked out, “Oh, Paula, thou hast robbed me of my youth. . .” And some wag nearly derailed Benjamin’s brain by muttering to him backstage, “A crone, a crone, a rhop-ear, is it not?” before the entrance when Hotspur had to cry about his horse, “A roan, a roan, a crop-ear, is it not?’</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-19128865343168240282013-02-19T14:23:00.001-07:002013-02-19T14:23:18.955-07:00TWELFTH NIGHT: Ron Willoughby<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KffpxKdx0RM/USPs49veISI/AAAAAAAAEIw/Y0pQmJIa7_8/s1600/willoughby373.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KffpxKdx0RM/USPs49veISI/AAAAAAAAEIw/Y0pQmJIa7_8/s400/willoughby373.jpg" width="312" /></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
The Fool (Ron Willoughby) in <i>"Twelfth Night"</i></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>Eagles Mere, 1960</i></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-53168235294927152262013-02-19T14:19:00.000-07:002013-02-19T14:19:29.084-07:00W. B. Nickerson PhotographyW. B. Nickerson Photography is the official source of the NU production photos I have. They are out of business, but their photos are archived.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h1 style="background-color: white; color: #6e197c; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 1.2em; line-height: 1em; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.4em; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">
Guide to the W. B. Nickerson Photo Company</h1>
<table style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; color: #414141; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9"><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Collection Title</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">W. B. Nickerson Photo Company</span></td></tr>
<tr xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9"><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Dates</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">1940-1979</span></td></tr>
<tr xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9"><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Identification</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">75/55/3</span></td></tr>
<tr xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9"><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Creator</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">W. B. Nickerson Photo Company</span></td></tr>
<tr xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9"><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Extent</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">5 Boxes</span></td></tr>
<tr xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9"><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Language of Materials</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">English</span></td></tr>
<tr xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9"><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Abstract</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">Photographs of Northwestern University related events and individuals made by Evanston's W. B. Nickerson Photo Company are arranged in five boxes. The photographs consist largely of black and white negatives along with a small number of color slides. The dates of these materials range from the 1940s to the 1970s.</span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Acquisition Information</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">The University Archives acquired the Nickerson Co. photographs from Hope Nickerson Maxon on September 16, 1986 (Accession #86-287).</span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Processing Information</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">Processed by Timothy J. Waltz; October 1, 1990.</span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Conditions Governing Access</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">None.</span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="alignright" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 189px;"><span class="ead_summary_item_label" style="font-weight: bold;">Repository</span>:</span></td><td style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0.2em;"><span class="did_element" style="display: block; width: 532px;">Northwestern University Archives<br xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9" />Deering Library, Room 110<br xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9" />1970 Campus Dr.<br xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9" />Evanston, IL, 60208-2300<br xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9" />URL: <a href="http://www.library.northwestern.edu/archives" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; color: #5a1c64; text-decoration: none;" xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9">http://www.library.northwestern.edu/archives</a><br xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9" />Email: archives@northwestern.edu<br xmlns:ead="urn:isbn:1-931666-22-9" />Phone: 847-491-3354</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6826376369103418442" id="bio" name="bio" style="background-color: white; color: #5a1c64; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: left;"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6826376369103418442" id="scope" name="scope" style="background-color: white; color: #5a1c64; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-align: left; width: auto;"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-73288633978898701142013-02-19T10:12:00.001-07:002013-02-19T10:12:23.074-07:00CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HaEhU2649OA/USOxzvBVLlI/AAAAAAAAEIU/-wIOK3bDXuY/s1600/panto378.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HaEhU2649OA/USOxzvBVLlI/AAAAAAAAEIU/-wIOK3bDXuY/s400/panto378.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SDiNkh3RZZ0/USOx9XnEINI/AAAAAAAAEIc/6EhUKnE9ynE/s1600/panto379.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="163" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SDiNkh3RZZ0/USOx9XnEINI/AAAAAAAAEIc/6EhUKnE9ynE/s400/panto379.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
An unremarkable pantomime. I recognize myself as grannie with a fichu and Bill Striglos who was supposed to be a little boy. NU Workshop Theatre.</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-12091852524809009872013-02-19T10:08:00.000-07:002013-02-19T16:47:53.892-07:00TROJAN WOMEN<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i-qisI0HXLc/USOwt6kVS3I/AAAAAAAAEIE/aSzo7VNGVSA/s1600/troj+women383.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i-qisI0HXLc/USOwt6kVS3I/AAAAAAAAEIE/aSzo7VNGVSA/s400/troj+women383.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Workshop Theatre production of "Trojan Women" about 1960.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Directed by Marshall W. Mason.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
I'm at the far left but the only other name I can remember is Marge McCarron seated front left. Marshall sent me a note: Ellen Tucker is playing Cassandra, holding up her torch in the middle.</div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-75399954463016683442013-02-19T09:57:00.006-07:002013-02-19T16:45:43.377-07:00SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LlcTXg-Veco/USOt_gta07I/AAAAAAAAEHY/yBYY3RBytpA/s1600/suddenly384.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LlcTXg-Veco/USOt_gta07I/AAAAAAAAEHY/yBYY3RBytpA/s400/suddenly384.jpg" width="311" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Lisa Cosman, Mary Strachan, Claris Nelson in background.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Production at Northwestern Workshop Theatre about 1960?</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Directed by Stuart Hagmann</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eo-h4IMIMIw/USOuc91auJI/AAAAAAAAEHg/H3_oWM2T-PA/s1600/suddenly385.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eo-h4IMIMIw/USOuc91auJI/AAAAAAAAEHg/H3_oWM2T-PA/s400/suddenly385.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-T1yv4OnvmQk/USOuj4qK2ZI/AAAAAAAAEHo/bB1m4SiQT9M/s1600/suddenly386.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="296" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-T1yv4OnvmQk/USOuj4qK2ZI/AAAAAAAAEHo/bB1m4SiQT9M/s400/suddenly386.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7sNn2SrNhx8/USOunVguMGI/AAAAAAAAEHw/YymZbyvbZdM/s1600/suddenly387.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="201" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7sNn2SrNhx8/USOunVguMGI/AAAAAAAAEHw/YymZbyvbZdM/s400/suddenly387.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1AzhcS0w9ZQ/USOurhfAJZI/AAAAAAAAEH4/BTxmpulGAxI/s1600/suddenly388.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="257" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1AzhcS0w9ZQ/USOurhfAJZI/AAAAAAAAEH4/BTxmpulGAxI/s400/suddenly388.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
I can't remember the names of the rest of the cast. I'll look for the program.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-58146080158071765332013-02-19T09:49:00.003-07:002013-02-19T09:50:07.433-07:00A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE: photo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-J9ycd8nNDc8/USOsmqIoR0I/AAAAAAAAEHQ/S1HDCpliRcA/s1600/streetcar374.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-J9ycd8nNDc8/USOsmqIoR0I/AAAAAAAAEHQ/S1HDCpliRcA/s320/streetcar374.jpg" width="219" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
"A Streetcar Named Desire" 1960 season</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Dave Zegers (Stanley) and Robin Deck (Stella) here.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Production directed by Stu Hagmann. Blanche was played by Janet Lee Parker from Portland, where we went to high school together.</div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-80858472499628976402013-02-18T17:23:00.004-07:002013-02-18T17:23:43.801-07:001957 CREW FOR "House of Bernarda Alba."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ctdn5tGR53g/USLFDAnD71I/AAAAAAAAEGY/NJf0NYT1vGs/s1600/alba+crew376.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="328" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ctdn5tGR53g/USLFDAnD71I/AAAAAAAAEGY/NJf0NYT1vGs/s640/alba+crew376.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Full drew of <i>House of Bernarda Alba</i>. This was the first crew I ever worked on at NU. I can only name four people: myself, obscured on the edge of the door frame, Rollie Meinholtz, now a retired professor in Missoula, MT. He married the lady with the pitcher on her head -- later married someone else. And Dave (now Tony) Roberts at the right hand end of the front row. Linda Radley above him.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Please help name the others!</div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6826376369103418442.post-21446908813611879722013-02-18T17:11:00.001-07:002013-02-18T17:12:22.465-07:001980: FULL COMPANY<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--SpntD04uPE/USLBiLzQMfI/AAAAAAAAEGM/9M4kVH1tlbU/s1600/full+cast375.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="328" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--SpntD04uPE/USLBiLzQMfI/AAAAAAAAEGM/9M4kVH1tlbU/s640/full+cast375.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
On the set of <i>Twelfth Night </i>at Eagles Mere, 1980. L to R, bottom row: Sarajane Levey, Rod Nash, Marshall Mason, Dennis Parichy (behind Marshall), Claris Nelson, Mike McCourt, Robin Deck, Laird Williamson, Linda Radley, Dan DeMott, Gretchen Walther, Kate Emery, Vance Jefferis.<br />
<br />
Three in between: David Roberts, Penny Fuller, Nancy Kilmer.<br />
<br />
Top row: Jerry Zeismer (in the trellis), Russel Lunday, Dave Pressman, Ron Willoughby, Bonnie King, Wayne King, Miss Alvina Krause, Mike Griswold, Ron Dobrin. Mary Strachan, Faye Johnson, Dave Zegers, Bill Pogue.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1