Classes

I've been taking three classes in my time here at Vassar - and I absolutely love all three of them. I wanted to just talk a little bit about what I'm doing in them and all that so you guys knew how I spent the majority of my time. Each class is two hours, and on Monday and Wednesday, I have two classes, and on Tuesday and Thursday, I have one class. The classes are Composition, Text, and Acting. So today, for example, I had my acting class from 9 to 11 with Brian McManamon (who I will also be working with on Taming of the Shrew as an assistant director... more on that in about a week when the rehearsals actually start, but he's a super cool guy and very fun to work with).

Composition - My composition class is with Tomi Tsunoda, this amazing woman who basically teaches us about the aesthetics of a scene and how to convey a message to the audience. So far, we've been learning the different ways of telling a story on stage - we don't use texts or formulas, so it's all very organic and improvisatory. My assignment for yesterday was to take 30 seconds of music (any music of our choice) and convey the feeling of that music to the rest of the class without using sound. I chose the first 30 seconds of "Riders on the Storm" by the Doors, which is like the coolest 30 seconds of music ever composed in my opinion, but I didn't have to go yesterday because we ran out of time, so I have the whole weekend until Monday to revise my project. I think I'm going to have everyone lay down and close their eyes, because it's a very dreamlike sequence, and then I want to like flick water on their faces or something I don't know. I'll let you know what I end up deciding.

Text (otherwise known as "Anton Chekhov, you are one crazy bastard!") - Text is my favorite class, because it combines very deep textual analysis (English class!) with ideas for staging and performance (Theatre class!) We're working with Chekhov's The Three Sisters, which, when I first read it, gave me a headache and a sudden desire to go to Moscow, but now that we're getting really into it I'm really starting to like it. The class is taught by Anthony Luciano, who's directing Twelfth Night, and he is incredibly smart. Like, in our very first class, he took LITERALLY the first 11 lines of Hamlet and we spent 45 minutes examining it until he basically used it as a metaphor for the entire play. It blew my mind away. Then we did the same thing with a scene from Twelfth Night (he's a Shakespeare fanatic), and now we're doing the same thing with The Three Sisters. It's really exciting to work with him because he's made me realize how much I miss when I simply read a play. Although, he does assign a lot of work... He has this crazy way of, in the last 30 seconds of class, just dropping hours and hours of homework at our feet in kind of a passing comment. Like, "So, yeah, I just kind of want you guys to investigate the role of the dead Father in The Three Sisters, and maybe like go through the whole play and mark every line where there's a reference to him and maybe just kind of explain the significance of that line and it's contribution to the scene." The first homework assignment (which I still haven't finished!) was to go through the whole play and write down, for each page - and the play is four acts - what we learn and what happens in each line. I'm on Act 3 and I've already spent at least 7 hours on the assignment. But the thing is, it's helped me understand the play so much that, instead of bullshitting the last two acts and just not doing it, I know I'll be missing out in class if I don't do it. So what I'm trying to say is that I feel like everything I'm doing has a purpose, and that is the perfect feeling to have in a class.

Acting - I think Tom Pacio, the director of the program, is absolutely brilliant for having the Directing and Playwrighting Apprentices take an acting class. Personally, I already know a lot of what I'm learning in the class from Rob, but there are several people in the class that just never got the fundamentals of acting, and this is obviously necessary experience when working with actors. We've been working with contemporary stuff - for example, I performed a scene today that I've been working on for about a week from an almost brand new play by Lucy Thurber, Scarcity. And I remembered all my lines! That was good enough for me. But Brian McManamon is really talented as an actor and I'm learning a lot from him that I can't wait to try out next year at AIS.

Well, that's all for now - I want to update about the Gala last Saturday and other stuff that's going on but I'm going to see if I can get any pictures from that before I write about it. Love you guys!