Improvment Needed

First--Another great blog from Bob Fraser: How To Be A Pushy Actor This blog has good points to make about how to sell yourself and become successful in the business.

And now on to my class. My scene partner and I had been given homework for Friday's class, to take our scene out and about into different environments: A library, a busy street, and the grocery store. We were to run our scene in these different environments, just focusing on listening and connecting with each other, and be aware of how the different environments affected the moments between us.

So Thursday night, we went to the grocery store first, we could talk in normal voices. At first we were both more focused on "performing" the scene than actually listening to each other. Plus we were still struggling with the lines a bit. We walked around a bit and would generally stay in one spot if there were other people near by, we'd subtly check out their reactions or if they were even listening. We figured if we were really connected and listening to each other, the people around us wouldn't be able to tell we were acting or running a scene, they'd simply hear a couple having an argument.

Then we took our scene to Borders at the mall. (We'd swung by the library and it was closed.) Again, we would find a place with people nearby to run the scene. But we started walking around more, and started playing with being aware of each other as we moved, would he walk away at this point in the scene or would I? How did who was walking away from who affect the scene. We kept our voices down as if we were in a library, but it was interesting to see some of the people around us noticing our argument but minding their own business.

After that, we took our scene out in front of the movie theater, there were tons of people there. This was actually really fun, and we had to speak loudly in order to hear each other. The last time we ran the scene, we moved to the front of a busy restaurant across from the movie theater, stood under a tree next to the patio as if we were waiting for others to join us. My partner actually shouted his last line at me, which caused several people on the patio to look at us, so we both immediately walked away as fast as we could, laughing from embarassment and at our spunk. It was fun.

Class Friday night went okay. I feel like I'm falling behind in my skill level. Apparently I'm still having a hard time being fully open during repetition, but once I do open myself, I let my partner off the hook so much, don't stand up for myself and demand that he be completely present and honest in the moment with me. At this point, I'm having a hard time seeing when he's not being fully present and when I'm letting him off the hook. But it's now or never, so I've got to be demanding of myself to figure it out. John is certainly being demanding, but I wouldn't want anything less from him.

Then we ran our scenes--this is requiring a completely different mind-set than usual for running scenes. At this point we are not focused on crafting a performance, but more on opening our instrument, allowing ourselves to be completely emotionally open to the other person affecting us in the moment, and allowing ourselves to respond to our partner emotionally and behaviorally without thinking or censoring. So, it feels akward from a performance stand point, but, I keep reminding myself, that's not the focus of the exercise.