I was so freaking tired today, in spite of having gotten enough sleep. That time of month always drains me and makes my brain fuzzy. (Sorry if that's T.M.I.) Really wished I was at home in bed.
Anyhow, we spent the first half of class in group repetition, as always, and we spent the second half of class exploring the seven psychological gestures--(Yes, I know for sure now that there are only seven.)--and tempo and quality of the gestures and how that affected our monologues or scene lines. For example Pushing slowly and fiercely. We would repeat the gesture several times, say whatever thought popped into our heads while repeating the gesture, then hold the gesture and radiate, step into it and begin our monologue, allow the gesture to change the way we said the words. It was a really interesting way to explore different possible view points of the monologue, maybe something we wouldn't have thought of before, for example find a tender moment in an angry monologue perhaps, bring more depth to it.
And I discovered that the habits I thought I'd been breaking are still alive and well. For example, I'm still smiling even when I'm upset, even when I allow my tone of voice to express that I'm upset. Someone called me on it during the repetition, and I thought I let the smile go and said, "The smile's gone now." and he replied, "Well, no, it's not." SHIT! I don't know how to get rid of it.
I also discovered that I'm still laughing to diffuse my anger. I've been letting myself slide on that a bit, I think, when I'm in a repetition because that's just who I am, but when my scene partner and I were rehearsing after class, he started ad libbing things like "Crazy psycho bitch" in between his lines, and within the context of the scene it really struck deep and pissed me off. I say within the context of the scene because as an actor rehearsing with another actor, I did not mind at all that he was doing that, it's part of his process. But within the scene, his character and my character, I felt his words very clearly affect me on a deep level, and I saw myself laugh as a way of avoiding the anger it created. And I saw the opportunity I missed to really get psychotic and in his face because of that.
As I mentioned in the previous post, the scene we're doing is from Misery, and it's the part where Annie is forcing Paul to burn his book. Starting with "Paul, this is no time for jokes. You must rid the world of this filth." The scene is actually really short, especially compared to the scenes the rest of the class is doing.
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