Twice the Whiplash

Two classes in the same week is a good week 🙂 Last night, I joined the Wednesday class to do my second scene of the month with Patrick. It was an interesting class, because it was so small, with only 6 students, and four of us doing the same scene from Whiplash.
Patrick and I went first, while the other group doing our scene were sent out back to rehearse. We did it a first time, and it was fun and easy, a nice date with me trying to talk a lot to cover the silence.

The second time, Suzanna had us make it more awkward, explaining that both of us were kind of socially inept, and neither of us had game. It was different, more charged. Patrick, who had seen the movie, was also trying to not do it the same as Miles Teller, which I think was a really nice choice, because it pushed us to discover new things about the scene, and new reasons to say things without the triggers that might have been in the movie.
The third time, we were told to take pauses each time the subject changed, and the fourth time was mostly just adding pauses the 3 specific times where I had missed them, which I definitely realized as they went by.
The scene was nice, and I don’t want to call it easy, but it wasn’t a stretch for me to imagine myself in those circumstances, or to understand what is going on in her mind. It is a part I would love to be able to play some day 🙂

We watched two women do a scene from Beaches, luckily not one that makes me cry, and then we watched the other pair doing our same scene. It can be very intimidating to have someone else do the same scene as you, and I am pretty sure that I would hate it in a performance setting, such as back in London, but I kind of really enjoy watching it in class. Seeing how someone else takes the same lines and interprets them in a different way, hits certain emotions rather than others…I wouldn’t want to try and copy exactly what they did, but I like getting inspired by other people’s work 🙂

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”

-Robert Louis Stevenson