I learned that the way I express my feelings is to use words. All Shakespeare is doing is talking about how people feel. I wonder if the way I express myself makes people see me a certain way?
I think I want a rhyming dictionary. By learning about rhyming patterns I discovered that many words have similar spelling patterns.
I discovered that character is as much found in the face as it is found in the body. By using a mirror, I can make my face into many different types of characters, and display many emotions. I also learned that my voice sounds different if I contort my body in one way or another.
I learned that memorizing scripts and monologues is made easier when moving. Each movement represents a thought within the written piece, and that movement allows the audience to understand those thoughts better.
I don’t think I will fear creative writing too much. I now know that I don’t have to come up with an original storyline, but rather, I can use what has already been created, and re-imagine and interpret it to fit my story.
I learned that many of Shakespeare’s plays have been reinterpreted for a modern stage. Now I want to go see one. I think that modern people speaking a certain amount of rhyme makes sense. Rapping, we learned, has the same pace as lines written by Shakespeare. You can rap Shakespeare! What a discovery!
We played a game called, standing, sitting, kneeling. When one actor stood up, another had to sit down. When an actor sat down, another actor needed to stand. I learned that actors, even those who are not the main actors in the scene, need to move meaningfully on stage. The balance of the stage image is everything.
Painting the backdrop helped me understand the setting...I knew how to move in space. Using the props allowed me to feel like a human being representing another human being.
Going through the full play with very little instruction was cumbersome. As we progressed through the scenes we went faster and faster when we realized how much we had memorized. For a moment I lost track of who I was, and transported to another place and time, became my character heart, soul, and thought.
Saying my lines for an audience was so different than practice. First of all our play only took a few short minutes to complete, and it sounded so different to us. More people in the audience meant that we needed to speak louder.
