The past two weekends have been like a Walden-esque return to nature for me at our rehearsals for Romeo & Juliet. We removed ourselves from the stage, set up shop in a completely different location, and began to focus solely on digging into the physical and spacial relationships between our characters.
Suddenly I felt myself back in Stacy's acting class (God, I miss those days!) at UAOT and all the anticipation that came with it. Am I going to get this method? Will I allow myself to accept it? Can I let go of my preconceived notions and just play? Who here is judging me? What are they seeing that I'm not? Once we can silent these mumbling naysayers, we can begin to dig in and open up ourselves to action and more importantly, a sense of freedom onstage. Our director, Dr. Hugh Long, spent a week this past summer working with Jane Brody on a technique she's exploring called "Super Scenes" which allows actors to explore characterization and physicality through archetypes and neuroscience. (Don't panic. I was scared at first too.) I've only just been introduced to the world of Super Scenes, so my explanation is elementary at best, but from my understanding and the work we've done these past few weekends, it's essentially "physical Meisner" with borrowed elements from Viewpoints (Y'all, I haven't spent this much time "on the grid" since Dwanye's dance class during GLOS and it was GLORIOUS!), Suzuki, archetypes, and The Hero's Journey (a roadmap to every story ever told, by scholar Joseph Campbell). This technique, or almost lack thereof, allows actors the freedom to be theatrical and honest all at the same time. The basic momentum several different actions: push, pull, hold, & stop propel actors through scenes. I was super jazzed when I was first told we were going to work on this because WHEN do you ever get the chance to work on technique like this outside of academia? I've had the immense pleasure of working with several different FABULOUS theatre companies since undergrad whom I've loved dearly, but our focus was always pretty clear, put on a play. Know what you're saying, block it, perform it. Done. All the nitty gritty push-pull, actor-to-actor relationships are something you're expected to bring to the table and grow organically (hopefully!) during the rehearsal process. Very rarely do you have the time to step back and say, okay lets explore this relationship. What do I want from this person and what do they want from me? Ignore the words, the costuming, all the added ingredients. What is the sole base of what is happening in the scene? All the rest is gravy. It would take me 11 hours to go through a detailed description of all the exercises we explored over the two weekends, but I do want to share some of the thought process that stuck with me. If you've studied Meisner or Viewpoints, I think you'll find this thought process familiar. Be honest. Feel me in this space. Look at me. Allow me to feel YOU in this space. Take the loss. Celebrate the win. This is a play about ME and this is MY poster! (Okay, so that last one was a you-had-to-be there moment. :) Early on in this rehearsal process I was constantly reminded not to be too "Disney princess-y" when it came to my characterization of Juliet. I studied her in high school and college and certainly had immense respect for her, but I needed to figure out how to bring her off the pedestal we always see her on. I know I needed to find the angst and the nerve in this character. A breakthrough moment came when we were exploring the moment Juliet stands up for herself when she meets Paris in the Friar's cell and has that little passive aggressive confrontation with him. When we did the Super Scene work on this scene, I let myself get pushed around too much. I felt like I was being chased the entire time & I was. Guess what though? I was letting it happen. I was letting the Friar and Paris have too much of a say. After we stopped the scene, our director brought this to my attention when he reminded me, "Find your POWER." At first I was flustered. How much power does this 13 year-old dingbat really have? He was right though. Juliet's resolve doesn't manifest itself in a physical confrontation, but it's there all the same after everything she loves come crashing down - Romeo's banishment and the crushing edict her parents issue after she refuses to marry Paris. Her resolve to rewrite her own story has to come across in that sheer do not mess with me focus. To illustrate this point in an exercise, Hugh got up and told me to make him change direction as he simultaneously tried to force me into a corner of the space. It was frustrating at the time, but I was ultimately grateful for the challenge. I needed that anger and that desperation. Discovering Juliet within the bounds of this production has been a constant journey which I'm sure will only continue throughout the rehearsal and performance process. For now, I'm just incredibly thankful for this conservatory-type work. I've already brought elements of it into my own acting classes - awesome awesome stuff! XO, Lo
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Life is weird. If you had told me a year ago that I'd be getting ready to play Juliet (Yeah, THAT Juliet.) in a few short months I would have thought you were CRAZY. I've never really even entertained the idea of it being a possibility of it happening. Never mind the fact that I'm 23 (I'll be 24 by curtain) and Juliet is 13, a fact that's referenced FREQUENTLY throughout the play. Is it crazy to have a complex about this? Probably.
As a singer first and foremost, my performance background has always been tightly defined, lyric mezzo-soprano (with "a belt" if we're talkin' MT Land). Translation: I'm the plucky best friend (sometimes literally)/3-scene maid/old lady/occasional whore/PANTS ROLE. The fach system rules opera so there isn't a whole lot of freedom as far as repertoire goes. The most famous R + J adaptations in the opera rep are Gounod's Romeo et Juliette and Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Both feature sopranos as Juliet. Before this production, I was far more familiar with the character arcs of Stephano, a somewhat superfluous character in Gounod's adaptation that doesn't even exist in Shakespeare's text & Romeo in the bel canto rep - also a pants role. Bellini's Romeo is a kick-butt role, one that requires incredible energy and sensitivity as an actress, but it's a far different physical capacity and headspace than playing a female character. Both of these operas take considerable liberties with Shakespeare's story, but that's to be expected as one can tell from the vast disparities between the film versions that exist. This role comes with a lot of expectations because everyone has an idea of who this character is. As I'm delving into this script, I'm trying to find pieces of myself in her. It's certainly interesting looking at this play at this point in my life compared to the past two times I've delved into it. I remember reading the play and watching the Zefferelli and Baz Luhrmann films in 9th grade and the only thing I really solidly remembering is all the sexual innuendo and jokes that were pointed out to us. I feel like that, plus learning the time span in which the story takes place, put me off the play. I think I really learned to appreciate it when I studied it in college in my EN333 Shakespeare class. The class was an English class, but our professor had a deep appreciation for the stage (We all went to see Othello that spring.) and that coupled with her completeness and thoroughness in our leading our readings, really helped me appreciate the play in its Elizabethan frame of mind. Romeo as the Petrachaen lover, Juliet as the grounding force in the balcony scene, the analogies to books (Lady Capulet telling Juliet about Paris) and rewriting stories, the list could go on and on. I saw Romeo as a much flightier although equally passionate character. The stress put on Juliet seemed so far greater. She was bound by far more conventions as a woman than Romeo was by a man. Pressure from her family controlled her and ultimately she commits the more violent of the suicides (stabbing vs. poison). Plus we have the Prince's final line where Shakespeare lists Juliet first: "Than this of Juliet and her Romeo." That's powerful and interesting stuff! This is a young woman with an incredible amount of heart and in a sense, a unique sense of strength. I'm curious to dive into her mind and bring her to life here in North Alabama. |
Lo & beholdRunning on iced coffee & iambic pentameter. Unabashed worshipper of the holy trinity – Barbra, Bernadette, and Sutton. Archives
May 2017
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