I'm almost at the end of my second month at Drama School and my god what an experience this has been so far! The first month was an absolute baptism by fire. I have never been so exhausted in my life! Everything hurt - My legs, my back, my brain. It is so physically and mentally demanding and my body is still trying to accustom itself to the increased stress levels, but I think I'm finally starting to level out - my RHR at least is back to my normal, pre-drama school level (61) more or less whereas it skyrocketed and stayed high (between 73 & 80) for the first 6 weeks. I put on a stone in weight and 5 inches round my waist which was mostly water retention from my body being stressed I think - I felt puffy and swollen for weeks and I'm more or less back down to my usual measurements again, although my weight is still higher - though I am attributing that to putting on muscle rather than fat gains.
Fear Facing
I have never faced so many fears in such a short space of time before - A prime example - singing has been a lifelong phobia of mine - since primary school I have mimed happy birthday and lipsynched hymns when I've had to go to church for school/weddings etc. The very thought of singing in front of somebody else has always made me feel like I was about to throw up.
The other week I sang in front of 13 people. I felt sick to my stomach the entire way through, but I did it and didn't die. I wouldn't say I 'enjoy' it (yet), but I'm so proud of myself for doing the big scary thing. My singing teacher is amazing - I don't really have singing lessons with him in terms of technique because I'm not at a musical theatre school - it's more about giving us the confidence to get up and do things that scare us in front of other people - in a way that is like exposure therapy, so starting off with just finding our range in a room on our own with him, then singing a song with him, then singing songs as a group, then singing our song as a solo in front of a couple of people, and increasingly more people, and finding character through song. Also so that we can say we sing, know our range (low mezzo/contralto) and stick it on our spotlight profile. In November I'll have to sing in front of 30 people plus a load of my teachers and I am shitting bricks about it I won't lie. One of our buildings is shared with a police academy and every morning I go to a floor that is mostly empty to practise my song and I'm almost at the point of not caring if they hear me wailing at the top of my lungs or not. Which is huge progress considering I was shaking with my throat closed up with nerves just singing scales a few weeks ago in front of one person in an empty school.
Another example is dancing. I have always said I HATE dancing. This is mostly because my brain doesn't hold choreography very well - My hand eye coordination is fantastic which is why I'm a good at making things - art, sewing, graphic design etc. But once I have to factor feet in it is game over for me. For a start although I'm mostly right handed, I am entirely left bodied. I'm left eyed and left footed, so I'm always turning the wrong way and on the wrong foot because my instinct is always left foot first. When I was little I had dance lessons inflicted on me by my mother because all the other kids were doing them and my teacher was a salty hag who was too short for the royal ballet and who took her own insecurities out on kids - by pointing out my belly rolls and calling me a hunchback when I was 7 and making me feel like an ugly, talentless, deformed troll which put me off dancing for life. Until I came here. In week one our teacher, who is an absolute legend had us doing night fever and flamenco and god knows what else. Last Monday I had my assessment which had to be performed in front of our teachers and the other MA group. I didn't think I was nervous - I told myself 'I'm an actor not a dancer, it doesn't matter if I fuck up - I have no intention of ever auditioning for a musical'. My head wasn't nervous but I was up the entire night beforehand, so had to do 4 hours of voice in the morning which was very physical, and then 4 hours of dancing. On 2 hours sleep. I made plenty of mistakes, but considering I had 2 hours sleep I thought that was pretty decent, and by the time it came to Night Fever as the closing dance I was almost enjoying myself. Which is not something I ever thought I would say about dance.
I think the key message of this month has been feel the fear and do it anyway. Always try. If I'm going to try and fall spectacularly on my arse, there is no better place to do it than in this school where I am surrounded by amazing supportive staff and students who are all rooting for me, and are SO positive and encouraging and supportive. Where, if you do fall on your arse, people rally round you and help lift you back on your feet and remind you of how deserving you are of your place instead of laughing at you and feeling superior and making you feel like shit. Where if problems are encountered, solutions, support and workarounds are offered, not condemnation or shame. I know this is not everyone's experience of drama school and I have heard some absolute horror stories. I don't know if I'm just lucky with my cohort, but my school I can't sing the praises of enough. It definitely has its failings - the organisation isn't always the best, and the ridiculous rules imposed on us by the university we are associated piss all of us off - students and staff alike - for example - something as simple as not being allowed a kettle because it's a 'health and safety risk' is just ludicrous, but I guess when you are associated with a large grey institution, there are sad people in offices who need a hobby and turn to petty bureaucracy when really they should just come over and join us actors for a round of 'Zoof' in the morning instead and they'd be a lot happier.
Why actors are 'weird'
A large part of becoming an actor is to undo all the societal conditioning to be an 'adult': to suppress our instincts and impulses and stop following them, to withhold our voices, to make ourselves small so we don't take up too much space or stand out. To not allow ourselves to play, to fear failure, to not allow ourselves to be silly and to fear looking silly, to not try if we don't think we will automatically be good at something.
The one thing that struck me more than anything else when I started school was how all of the teachers who were actors had such a playful, mischevious twinkle in their eyes - they have a genuine sense of passion and joy about life and about the work and a sense of fun that it is infectious. I know we're not supposed to have favourites but I absolutely ADORE my tutor who I'm very lucky to be working with intensively for a couple of weeks on my Ibsen scene study. He is hilarious, calls everyone darling, plays a game called 'zoof' with us in the morning, makes fun of himself, makes fun of us (in a loving way), does silly voices and jokes around constantly and yesterday he was so happy something he asked someone to do worked as well in reality as it did in his head that he did a little Billy-Elliot style happy dance in the middle of the room. He is also INCREDIBLY smart and switched on- he knows his shit and is an incredibly experienced actor who has played at the National and the Globe multiple times and is a Shakespeare consultant for the RSC. Nothing gets past him - even if your finger twitches when it shouldn't playing zoof he'll notice and call you out. I think I may have learned more from him in the last two days than I have the entire term so far. I would do anything for this guy. They are all incredibly funny, warm people who are a joy to be around - and this is a big part of being an actor - being easy to get on with because we are constantly having to be 'the new kid' because our jobs are so short. We spend a lot of time playing games and being silly and failure is not a bad thing as long as you don't take it personally and you must, MUST learn to laugh at yourself if you can't do so already.
Fitness, Discipline & Self Care
I've always hated that word. I hate routine, and I'm rubbish with self discipline and procrastinate like an absolute pro. During our first week we had the words 'fitness' 'core strength' and 'discipline' thrown at us a lot and I was inwardly groaning - my inner rebel throwing a total tantrum. A warm up every morning? having to exercise every morning and do voice stuff every morning? PLANKS??? oh GOD.. urgh. do I HAVE to?? But actually, the discipline has been the easy part. Every morning I get in and it feels good to stretch it out - I find myself doing it multiple times a day - I had a hell of a time convincing myself to do yoga before I started school even though I love yoga- now I love having a good old stretch before bed and when I get in, and on my lunch. I find myself humming scales to myself on my walk to school, doing a tongue plank on the train into school (sticking your tongue out with the tip curled up for a minute. I wear a mask on public transport because I'm paranoid about getting germs because I can't afford the time off school so I don't look like a complete psycho at least). I get in early to practise my song and feel intense pride when I FINALLY nail a tongue twister at top speed. Here's one of my daily standards for you in case you fancy having a go:
She stood upon the balustraded balcony, inexplicably mimicking him hiccupping, whilst amicably welcoming him in.
I've even voluntarily started doing planks to build my core to help support my voice. I think my big beef with exercise in the past was I never saw the point of it because as long as I'm healthy and fit into my clothes I don't really give a shit about what I look like - now, doing it helps my everything hurt much less, and I'm learning to look after my body better becuase it is my instrument - I'm hoping to have a 40 year career out of this if I'm blessed with a long life so I need to make sure my ol' bag of bones can take me through it. Also it's embarassing when some of my teachers who have been pensioners for quite a while are stronger, faster and more agile than me. I have no excuse to be outdone on a wall sit by someone who is almost 80.
Another thing with actors is that we spend a lot of time sitting on the floor. I CANNOT sit on chairs - I HATE chairs - whenever I'm on a chair at school within about 10 mins my back is aching, my neck siezes up and my heart rate goes skewiff and I start getting arrythmia. They're also just incredibly uncomfortable and I gravitate to the floor very quickly. It's so much better for your hips and back and I'm finding I can go for longer periods sitting properly with a straight back since doing all this work on myself.
Spatial Awareness
A lot of our exercises also involve walking/running around a room at varying speeds, in various directions, chopping and changing without altering our speed and without colliding with other people. This cultivates a very strong sense of spatial awareness in us which is useful on a stage. It also highlights to me (and others I've spoken to) just how little spatial awareness Muggles (what we call people who are not actors) have. Just going out on the street people bumble along in their own little worlds with absolutely no sense of the people around them and I find this extraordinary - the number of people who get to the top of an escalator or flight of stairs and stop while they ponder where to go next absolutely blows my mind, and how people congeal in clumps at stations and following each other like herds of mindless cattle with no seeming concept of flow.
I can guarantee you if you had two platforms with 'prop' people standing around on them as obstacles and emptied a trainload of actors onto one platform and a trainload of muggles onto another platform and half of each train had to go to one end and down a set of stairs and the other half to another end and down another set of stairs, the muggles would be in clumps getting cross and squishing past eachother and getting stuck round prop people and forming queues and most would still be there 3 minutes later, while the actors would flow like fish and the platform would be cleared in seconds only leaving the prop people. It's actually fascinating watching people moving in spaces now I've got some of this training under my belt and am a much more keen observer of people and their ticks.
What I've done
Over the last month I've had some movement classes, voice classes, singing, devising, intro to Ibsen, intro to Chekov, intro to Michael Chekov, approaches to text, with some intensives on Uta Hagen and Meisner. Uta Hagen was largely centred around doing and being. So the exercise we worked on for a couple of days was focussed around the last 5 minutes of leaving the house - so we had to go home, and notice ourselves and what we do for those 5 mins and rehearse it, and then perform it in front of the others, and then a new set of circumstances would be added - for example, you're having to do that while your friend is asleep on the sofa in the next room, then again with the friend on the sofa, plus the time you have to get out is halved, then the location has changed and how you would repeat those exact steps in reverse entering a new building. I actually really liked Hagan and can definitely see the value in it in terms of self-awareness and finding naturalism in 'doing'. However, if I never hear the word 'Meisner' again I will be very happy. It was 9 hours of standing opposite a partner noticing them and saying what you notice and repeating it til there's a change in either them or you and fixating on that instead.
For example:
a: you've got glasses on b: i've got glasses on
a: you've got glasses on
b: i've got glasses on.
a: you've got glasses on.
b: i've got glasses on
a: you've got glasses on. b: you're swaying a: I'm swaying
b: you're swaying a: I'm swaying. You're smiling b: I'm smiling
a: you're moving your hand....
..... ad nauseum.
My brain was melting and running out of my ears after the first hour. 9 hours of this was pure torture. Our day is cut in half so we have 3 hours of one class then three hours of another class. The other class we had during that week was devising, working with a writer called Freddie Machin who we all absolutely love - he is a diamond of a human being and is so much fun to work with and I recommend him to anyone who is wanting to learn about devising, but we were so drained from the Meisner class Freddie's class really suffered which was a real shame because he is a universal favourite with us. I can't believe some people go to schools specifically to study Meisner for years - it was AGONY and I never want to do it again. I felt the entire thing was an utterly pointless waste of a few days and I learned absolutely nothing from it other than that I hate it. We were told it's a way to keep things fresh but personally I feel like unless you suffer from a severe lack of imagination you should naturally find new things in a text anyway without having to put yourself through that bollocks. My humble opinion.
What I'm working on right now
I'm working on a scene study of Ibsen's Rosmersholm. Usually we just take scenes and work on them, but my director has made his own cut of the play so we are putting on a condensed version of the entire play that runs at 1 hour long. So far we've united the script and researched the socio-political landscape of it, and blocked the first scene. Next week we'll be working on actioning and putting it all together and starting to rehearse off book (not holding the script - so learning our lines) after that we have a week of classes and then we're into panto season so we'll spend a couple of weeks working on that before touring it round some schools and one of the groups will take it up to Malvern for the xmas holidays which will be fun for them. Sadly I need to work to help pay for my fees so I can't afford to be spending on transport, food and board for a panto even if it would mean I get a professional credit on my resume before I even graduate. But thems the brakes unfortunately. I have a singing performance in a couple of weeks which may or may not be assessed, I'm not sure. And I'm putting myself forward for the Carleton Hobbs Award - which is a BBC run scheme for the big drama schools in the uk where if you win you get 6 months working with them on radio dramas which would be super cool so we are all encouraged to audition for that and I'll be submitting my first round of in house auditions this weekend. It's all go!
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