A Breakthrough


This Friday was fantastic.

 I tend to be a very logic driven person in my everyday life, and as such it can be very difficult for me to  base my acting in an intellectual place, as opposed to an emotion driven place. This has been both a help and a hindrance in my training and career. I've attempted to make the breakthrough to my "emotional side" for quite a while now with limited success. I  started to understand where it needed to be last semester in acting 1, but I have yet to connect to that place again this semester. Finally, on Friday, I think I found that place again, if only a little bit. I don't know exactly what it is about the Poe piece, but it has connected with me in a way that few pieces have. Through the exercises we did, my breath control and grew tremendously, and finally I found what I've been looking for, at least to some extent. I'm still not entirely there with my emotional base, but there's certainly progress.

 I've been trying to think and analyze what exactly it was that I felt in that room performing that piece, and I think I'm starting to figure it out. I've never really broken down a script and scanned it in the same way that we've done in this class. I've always had a deep love for language, but I've never incorporated the process of dissecting and examining the words into my creative process, and I now regret that. The beauty of the language as been forced upon me more than ever, and the profound influence that a properly placed period, comma, or breath can have on a performance and the audience listening to it is so much more evident to me now than it ever was.

 I feel like I'm not really saying this as well as I would like to, but I’ve got 200 words left so I’m going to keep trying to make it make sense. In the script, one of my favorite lines is “of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest…” Before going through the piece in depth, I was just kind of blazing through that line and attempting to create any emotion from within myself. But now, some of the words keep popping out at me every time I go through it, and the coloring I can play with and explore in those words makes it so much more connected. Stuff like “tortured” and “tattered”, those T’s and R’s and diphthongs are so juicy in the mouth, you can’t not color them. And those commas surrounding the “which” break up the sentence very nicely, and they connect the breath to the words so simply but so profoundly.

Essentially what I’m trying to say is that I think I’ve found my new way to connect with a piece -- exploring the language. Diving into this piece has been one of my favorite theatrical experiences ever, and I can’t wait to keep going.


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