Acting Workshop Day 2
May 14th, 2009 by Alan Yu
That was a longer workshop than expected yesterday. It started about an hour late as the acting coach was asleep apparently at home. The reason being we were told was that the third week of the workshop we were suppose to do a Yoga exercise class of some sort and so he thought he was able to take time off.
As you may know though, we missed last week’s workshop as the instructor went to the US and so this was technically just our second time still. So many of us just practiced our scenes while we waited and I got to mingle around with some of the other actors. When the coach arrived, there were also two other people that came in to audit the class it seemed.
I did perform my scene and got some interesting feedbacks. One thing the coach did was that he mocked me as the scene was supposed to start off with the person waking up in a bed. Keep in mind that this is an audition style class and so all we had was this chair and a big blue studio space. He was saying how it looked like I was in such a lazy esque positioning which made it look like a model posing or something. Hilarious and fun way I thought as a way to get one’s point across.
The other interesting comment was that after I performed my scene he gave me a direction about really thinking about a certain line and to try it again. I then did it with the feedback and he was very enthusiastic saying how he gave me such a very difficult yet complex direction and I managed to pull it off perfectly. That was interesting too I thought.
It was interesting because on the same day there was another lady that did a scene and ended up accidentally crying. I know that sounds odd to many people. Basically what happened was that she was doing a scene and when she said her line it seemed like she accidentally said those words based on her own life experiences which she felt was a bit emotional.
A good example is say you having a loved one pass away in real life and then you performed a scene that dealt with that type of situation. When you speak those lines, you accidentally cross reference it as if you are saying those lines during the day your loved one passed away.
I say it is interesting because like for the direction I received it came down to personal real life experiences too to a certain extent to enable you to get into a particular emotional mood. In the moment it doesn’t feel complicated or difficult at all which is the funny thing despite how it seems to an outside party.
It is going to be interesting next week. Not really sure how this Yoga class thing is going to turn out as I didn’t expect it at all. I was just joking with another fellah too that I guess I will treat it as another day attending a martial arts class. My assumption is that this is done to show you a possible way for you to relax yourself before doing a scene afterwards.
