Emotional Rescue

Yesterday in Conservatory, we worked with emotions.  We did a whopping amount of work with emotion.

Tim coached us to be emotionally honest.  In fact, he's offered that advice several times during this course.  (Perhaps it's important.)  One of his insights was that truth, honesty, and realism make for good theatre.  In doing our scene work yesterday, he encouraged us to play characters close to who we are in real life.  However, this doesn't necessarily mean that we react to situations as we would in real life.  For example, an audience connects with people standing up for themselves. And standing up for oneself may not seem like "yes, and..." but it still affirms your scene partner's choice when you move the scene forward.

We spent a considerable amount of time coming up with a list of words to describe a spectrum of emotions.   We covered the following basic fields: Love, Anger, Fear (both normal and abnormal), Happiness, and Sadness.  No, I'm not listing the words here. Use the aforementioned word, grab a thesaurus, and make your own damned list.

In working with the emotions, our goal is to physicalize these emotions without saying the word.  Saying the word dispels its power. Tim's goal for us is to get us to be emotionally mobile as actors, truthful with our emotions, and able to change emotions with the scene. Most of the trick in accomplishing this goal is figuring out what your scene partner wants.  That being said, we were warned about hidden objectives in a scene because they can throw things off kilter if and when they aren't picked up by our scene partners.

As usual, we did an extensive amount of three person scenes.  We also did some five person scenes.

In the three person scenes, we had pretty funny one where VP and Christine were sisters who pushed Scott (Christine's husband) to the breaking point.  The poor guy's epic Labor Day weekend was ruined, but he got to have his barbecue during the five person scenes.  He played a roided-out suburban dad who intimidated his daughter's new boyfriend by lifting a huge barbecue grill -- while it was cooking steaks.

Jesus Christ, is that all I have from yesterday?  Making that list of words took up a lot of time.