I bear a charmed life.

I performed at Shakespeare's Globe!

(Ok, ok....so I wasn't on the mainstage treading the hallowed boards.  And I wasn't speaking classical text.  As a matter of fact, I wasn't speaking at all.  But it was thrilling nonetheless.)

I participated as a member of my MA Acting class in an interactive symposium on Gesture - doing an experiment with two of my teachers on Bulwer's Gestures.  The three day symposium was a chance for scholars and practitioners to come together and explore the use of gesture in theory and performance.  Our performance was based on early modern gestural manuals and the information they provide about early gestural practice.  It is also being considered as part of future actor training in our school - as a way to wake up gestural life (responding to the actor's most common question: 'What do I do with my hands?').  We worked as a group exploring the meanings of each of the common and rhetorical gestures that accompanied certain thoughts or ideas as noted by Bulwer in his manual.  Each gesture had a Latin word or phrase that accompanied it - things like "to show irony" "to betray impatience" or "to explode".  As we discovered, the right hand was almost exclusively used in early modern gesture - the left hand being so deeply recognized as evil at the time.  Things like "to steal" would be gestured with the left hand.  With a basic understanding of how to bring the gestures off of the page, we then were led in three groups by three separate actors (from last year's MA course: one actor was working from a rhetorical Shakespearean text, two were working on a scene from Hamlet.  Each of these actors looked at their texts individually, and chose from a list of the translated Latin verbs actions to accompany both their actions and reactions (without seeing what the gesture associated with that word was).  They then taught us the series of gestures - in pure form - that they would be exploring in the scene (which we did not watch them rehearse and incorporate).  This pure series of gestures is what we brought to perform for (and to teach to) the audience.  The audience then watched the scenes performed by the actors using each of the gestures within the scene as a way to connect to and physically express the thoughts.

It was an extremely well received presentation.  The audience was abuzz with questions - and even more fascinatingly, even with their small tutorial - their hands were actively engaged in asking these questions.

All this keeps circling back to what I keep chewing on from my movement class: what the actor's body DOES, the audience FEELS.  Our understanding is so much more about reading people's bodies than hearing their words.  I don't think that was the case in Shakespeare's day - as the society had a much more tuned ear.  Television has 'viewers' - which has informed how we WATCH performances.  Even though a theatrical audience implies 'audio'...we see much more than we hear these days.  Our understanding happens on a very base level through the visual.

Movement class seems to be where I feel like I'm doing my best exploration and growth right now.  Of course, having a teacher who plants ideas like "Your very small preconception of yourself is inaccurate.  The idea of yourself is minutely small compared the all of who you actually are."  Think of a small box called the Polite Self (who you are on the train, to the cashier, with the dry cleaner).  The box around that is your Social Self (the you that your acquaintances and colleagues know - the one that functions best within the world).  The box around that is your Intimate Self (the you your closest friends, family members or lover knows).  Around that is your Private Self (contains all of you that your conscious mind knows about).  Around that is your Unfamiliar Self (a total of the conscious and subconscious self - the self you get glimpses of in dreams).  Most of us consider "who we are" to be the Social Self...the self we present to most of the world all of the time.  Even if we acknowledge the Intimate, and maybe even the Private....we still define ourselves as (and as actors - generally bring to the work table) - the Social Self we are most comfortable in presenting.

Just starting to chew on this idea of bringing the much larger vision of myself into the work opens up all sorts of possibilities for exploration, discovery and play.  

Which is very exciting.

This is why I came to school.  To get excited about the work.  To rediscover the play.  To bring unusual and interesting choices to my acting.  I am the first to admit that my desire to 'get it right' combined with my extremely analytical literary analysis usually create an understanding of text that is very clear ... but also very predictable.  The performers that we enjoy watching (and as I'm discovering...the performances I enjoy giving) are ones where the choices work in surprising and unexpected ways.  This involves a certain amount of risk - risk of failure (those choices that make the performer and the audience go 'blechk!' and spit it back out like a child with their first bite of spinach).  But what we are missioned to do is to bring LIFE to the stage.  "Life" implies failure.  We don't live and learn anything in life without it.  And what is scary is not actually the failure, but embarrassment.  

Who cares about embarrassment?!

Up next?  My first scene for class (Twelfth Night - Maria/Sir Toby Belch) and clowning (getting on stage without line or script or character - just bringing the true Caroline - and making an audience laugh.)

Bring it on.