Actor Growth

So yesterday was day three of the acting workshop and as mentioned before it began with a Yoga class. Coincidentally enough, there seemed to be less people in the workshop today than usual. It was pretty standard I thought from what I read and heard about Yoga in general. Basically, you are trying to relax your mind and become more aware of your body energy, strength and flow.

We were also asked to do things like handstands as well with the help of a partner. How did this exercise class relate to acting? Well, the theory was that you need to really loosen and open yourself up when it comes to doing scenes and this is suppose to help you with that.

After that we went on to perform our scenes. There was an interesting twist to yesterday’s class though. When a person was brought up, they were asked by the acting coach, Andrew Mcilroy, to establish the scene with objects and other actors who would act as a clay for you to mold and you would have to explain everything as if you were that character watching yourself.

For example, in my scene it basically revolved around two high school kids. So, I had to choose a girl to bring on stage and as well a guy who was standing in as my character. While explaining to everyone else in the room, I had to explain the background and details of the world in character while molding the other actors and also the stand in as if that was the character too. Almost like a time freeze of a guy walking around in his own memory. These sessions and scenes weren’t filmed though this week.

Now here was the thing that was absolutely new to me and to virtually all the other actors in the room. Essentially once you are done explaining the scene you then tap out your stand in and go ahead with it. Now my scene happened to dealt with a guy trying to apologize to a girl who didn’t want to hear it. In context of the scene in terms of actions, this was all improvised and the actress literally began to walk off the stage.

The acting coach was like “chase after her if you have to. We’ll follow”. Literally, she walked off stage and out of the studio room and I was literally going after her outside to the office admin area as the scene kept going. The whole class was running out of the stage room too to watch it unfold. Was actually really entertaining and a unique experience I thought. Imagine that happening in an audition. Too bad it wasn’t filmed.

That made me think too on how the scene would have been really great if I didn’t hold back. It was just kind of a conflicting moment for me as the class is suppose to revolve an audition style setup. One thing I was taught in auditioning is how people have their own “bubble” meaning you are not suppose to get near or touch the reader. In this situation, my inclination for the character was to eventually just run up to the girl and then lift her up to stop her from running in a funny desperation type of setup.

One more interesting note of the day. The acting coach couldn’t remember my name. At first he kept calling me Jimmy and then afterwards he kept calling me Calvin. It wasn’t until he complemented me and then I just gave him that funny confused look where he asked me why I was doing that and I mentioned that wasn’t my name. I was then going to refer to him with a different popular Vancouver acting coach’s name as a funny joke, but thought that may have been taken the wrong way.