Picking up from last time –
Aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye aye!
So, on this one day in class, it was time for sort of a “test” of sorts – a 15-minute mono-scene to see if we could slowly build, add information, and keep things interesting…
In our mono-scene, we got like a fall hayride thing. My partner opened by saying this time of year made him feel really nostalgic. So, I thought, “okay, how can I use nostalgia to tie in some more information to the scene?” I said it reminded me of the time we took a hayride field trip in 5th grade – labeling us as people who’d known each other for a long time.
The teacher already stopped me there. She said before I labeled relationship, she wanted to know my point of view – she wanted the scene to build more first. Well, I think the problem may be that I don’t understand mono-scenes. ‘Cause I know in normal scenes you try to label relationship within the first couple of lines.
I just don’t understand how to talk about hayrides and stuff when I don’t know who I’m talking to.
Then she was like, “Okay, it’s a first date.” So we tried that, and had a little awkward first date. But she didn’t like the awkwardness.
She asked about my opinions on hayrides and fall and such and I said I didn’t really have one. She said I had to have one, when really my attitude is just indifferent. I’m a pretty opinionated person, but not about hayrides. She pushed me for an opinion. I tried to just pick one, but she said she didn’t believe it. And I said that’s ’cause I don’t know how I feel about hayrides.
So then she put us in a hot air balloon. She didn’t like that one either. So then we were a couple at an anniversary dinner. Basically we had a ton of false starts and never did a 15-minute scene and I felt so bad for my scene partner, ’cause I felt like I kind of ruined his chance at a mono-scene. Aye aye aye aye aye.
The other thing I mentioned in my last post was that not everyone felt the same about this week. There’s one person in my class who is a self-professed non-actor. He’s a farmer coming in to do improv. And he said that doing all these exercises to figure out how to put yourself in the scene, to having to sort of do less acting and maybe less thinking (when there’s already so much to think about), he said it kind of freed him.
So, it felt like it handcuffed me and freed him. Weird how things can work so differently for different people, huh?
One thing that didn’t help was I ended up pulling all-nighters twice in a row that week (once for work, once for a volunteer thing at a 24-hour festival (which I will actually talk about on this blog)). So the whole not sleeping thing probably didn’t help matters much, since lack of sleep makes me super cranky.
Thankfully, we all survived that week and pushed on into… [dm da duuum *triumphant, excited chords*] week 5.