Thursday, July 22, 2010

LAMDA: Halfway Point

I'm now more than halfway done with my stay in England and three-quarters of the way done with the school portion so I thought I'd blog a little bit about my classes. The focus of the classes that I'm taking is "Shakespeare and His Contemporaries." Every morning I have two different classes depending on what day of the week it is, but each afternoon is the same.

For the first five weeks in the afternoon we worked with director John Link to prepare Shakespeare scenes. My teacher is a very interesting guy: he left school at 14 and acted in London and also in LA before settling in to teaching and also paints portraits of Shakespeare's characters that appear in theatre galleries all over. I was given two scenes to prepare for our final performance. I was Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Celia in As You Like It.

Beginning this week and continuing for the last two weeks, we've moved from Shakespeare in the afternoon to his contemporaries and are working on Jacobean plays. Our new director is John Baxter and he's really awesome. He is supposed to be LAMDA's best director.

My morning classes change everyday, but are typically really fun.

I have seven sessions of Historic Dance which I think are really fun. My teacher, Diana Scrivener, choreographed the recent Robin Hood film, and also choreographed two Heath Ledger films. We've learned a variety of Medieval and English Country Dances.

I have Movement twice a week with Donna Berlin. This is one of my favorite classes because its basically just like Zumba or a Cardio-dance class. We do lots of straightening and coordination work and it kicks my butt for an hour and a half. Donna also plays lots of Michael Jackson, Prince and Queen, and made us learn the words to TLC's "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls" to sing while she makes us work our abs!

We have four Improv and I'm sad its only four because I love improv. Its definitely one of the most useful classes in terms of my own life because I find it more interesting than theatre and would love to possibly do it at school.

I'm studying Stage Combat for the last three weeks which is pretty cool. Were working on hand combat and with rapier and dagger.

I have Singing either once or twice a week with either Gary Peacock or Jenny, an old English lady with bright dyed hair. I've actually learned a lot in this class, like how to match my voice to a note on the piano, which I didn't even know was necessary before... I still can't really sing, but I've definitely learned a lot from it.

I have six sessions of Physical Theatre with Mark Bell who is a very scary dude. Physical theatre is very popular in England, and there are tons of physical theatre companies working all over the UK. In practice, I think its theatre with a much heavier focus on movement and also often incorporates some modern dance. My teacher is just a very angry dude, jokingly, but still kind of scary, though his class is pretty fun.

John Baxter, who is directing our Jacobean scenes, also teaches Mask. He studied Comedia del Arte in Paris and is very funny. We haven't done much mask work in the morning sessions, but are incorporating some of the work into our Jacobean scenes.

I have Voice lessons twice a week which are all about breathing right and using your diaphragm and all that jazz. For the first four weeks I didn't really like this class cause my teacher, Ginny Avery, believed in herbal medicine and I think that's a load of crap. But now we have two teachers each week, George and Melanie Mehta, who are a lot more fun.

We have Alexander Technique once a week with Bethan Pugh which is a really weird class and I always fall asleep in it. What this class entails is laying down with your head on a book for twenty minutes with your eyes closed to help your posture. We're supposed to lay with our head on a book every day for fifteen minutes outside of class too-I never do...


Mostly school is just a lot of playing games which is fun. My classmates are from all over the world so I've definitely learned a lot from them. At the end of my program I'm going to visit one of them in Istanbul and another in Dublin. Overall, an interesting experience.

This is my Shakespeare Scenes group with our director John Link.

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