November 12, 2009.

PG: Today I deserve a 100 because Phil said that my monologue was "performance ready", and i was free to play with it. That made me really excited. It's always nice to hear nice things after you out your entire being on the line. Today is my brother's 12th birthday. That should count for something, right? What else did I do today... I'm pretty sure I got a 100 on my vocab test. I only have 3 marking periods of high school left!

So, Phil asked use to write a paragraph to bring in for tomorrow about our experiences this week and what we want out of tomorrow. So this paragraph will also serve as my blog.

One of my favorite things that Ms. Aladren does for us is bring in guest artists who have different methods than what we're used to. For four years I've been trained in Meisner and have touched on Adler, Stanislavski, and methods from the Atlantic Theatre Company. What I love most about being exposed to all these different techinques is mixing and matching what works for me and tossing what doesn't. This week I was exposed to some of the techniques of Michael Checkhov for the first time and was excited to add this to my list of mix and match.

The biggest probelm I've always had with monologues and audtions is a sense of place. I knew where I was but I didn't see and feel where I was. I didn't really start understanding character development until recently. Over the past week i have been able to make character development and character body organic. I wasn't sitting there thinking like "ok, I want her to walk funny". I learned that I had a lot of pre-conceived notions about my character due to my enviornment. that doesn't mean you're judging them, but rather your making them look a certain way to fit what you think would fit in the enviornment. i have a problem with that because apparently, i think like a director. i automatically thought, "ok, I'm in a crazy house. cold, constricted". like, i know my characters lonley and what not, but i was forgetting all about who the character was to make it look like she belonged in the enviornment. i kept forgetting this girl got sent there for lighting someones hair on fire and she's totally chill. i don't know, but something just clicked.

The techinques that helped me through this what was the "collapseable set" and sight lines. I now see where I am, rather than just know. Interacting with the differnt objects in my set that mean something to me help spark character memories. Tomorrow, I hope to continue achieving a good sense of my enviorment and having a really good, solid, deep moment before. I want to play around with this charcter more and see what I can do with my prop.