Alive In The Moment

Class last night was so much fun, I was in such a good mood! =)

For my activity, the imaginary circumstances that I created were that the guy that I've had a crush on finally asked me out, he was going to pick me up in 10 mintues, and I was putting on my make up. Lots of nerves, lots of laughing, and again my partner that entered into the scene joined in with me. =)

And the cool part was, the next two activities I participated in after I'd put on my make up, the two other guys in class both commented on how nice I looked. =P (I don't usually wear much make up to class.) But when I went into the bathroom after class and looked at myself in the mirror, I thought I'd actually done a crappy rush job on my make up, but oh well. At least it was just imaginary circumstances.

And then, to keep the date theme going, when it was my turn to knock at the door, the need I created for that was that my date was coming to pick me up in 10 minutes, and I'd locked myself out of my apartment by accident, all my stuff was inside still, including my cell phone, so I needed to use my scene partner's phone.

So the feedback I got on my activity was that I was lively, entertaining, honestly passionate about what I was doing, and John complemented me on choosing an activity based on my passions in real life but adding that imaginary cirumstances twist-- but I almost feel like I was cheating because even though the circumstances are imaginary at this time, I could so connect to it because there seems a very good possibility of it becoming a reality at some point in the future. So that made it very easy to connect to my activity, very easy to be alive in the moment. But as a professional actor, what if I needed to play a scene like this, but I've just been dumped hard core in real life, or a family member just died? Or vice versa, I need to play a death scene, but I feel so vibrant in real life. How alive and connected to the moment would I be then? I'm wondering if I wouldn't better serve myself by choosing activities that are not necessarily linked to my real life emotional state?

As for my needs for knocking on the door, that hasn't gone so well. Monday, I didn't have quite enough urgency attached to it, so it got lost in my scene partners activity. Last night, I'd made it a little bit too urgent, and John said something about we're not supposed to be working at performance level yet-- if we were learning to play piano, we'd still be working on learning scales, not actually performing a full song. I guess that means I came in at performance level with my need? I didn't realize I'd done that at the time, but looking back I guess I did rev myself up a little bit too much, so that I wasn't simply connected to my need or to my scene partner.

We also got our first scenes for the class. At this point all we're doing is memorizing the first two pages, only our own lines as one continuous paragraph, without any inflection or emotion. We're not making character choices or breaking down the script in any way. We're simply memorizing the lines so that we can repeat with them and be connected and reacting to our partners.