Today in Viewpoints we were working on putting Tempo, Duration, Kinesthetic Response, etc. into practice on the “grid” moving around the room. The young actors were impulsively creating shapes, rolling on the floor, repeating the movements of someone while duplicating the rhythms of the next. Students were loving this stuff! Part of the charm of this style of training is that students are never in their seats. If their body isn’t saying it then they truly don’t know what they are saying or it isn’t worth saying in the first place.
(What I have learned over years of teaching this acting “stuff” is that when actors are broken off into small groups there is only so much time they can use productively. They simply do not know enough to keep their self-led rehearsal valuable. This year, I am doing much more work in full groups and minimizing time that students have to work independently. I’ll let you know if this direction proves fruitful.)
After our day of Viewpoints, I gathered our forces together and solicited responses as to what they though the work had offered them. I have tried hard to create the atmosphere of the class to accept opinion for exactly what it is. I am always prepared for students to say that it was silly, it didn’t have a point, or that they felt out-of-shape – – on and on. Fortunately, more of the comments were very positive. They were slowly beginning to see how work on the body was not separate from work in their head. The body work complimented the head work; it inspired the head work; it told stories more innovatively!
One very soft spoken young lady in the class raised her hand and paused. I wasn’t sure what was going to come out of her mouth. She often makes some very smart comments that tend to wiz around the thinking of all of her peers. This time she was different. She apologized to everyone upfront – – which I discouraged – – opinions are not to be apologized for – – she went on to say that today is the first day she can actually remember jumping. And she wasn’t jumping to get in shape or to make a point. She was just jumping and it felt good. Why in the world did she give up jumping so long ago? Doesn’t she know that the surest solution to depression is just jumping up and down? One can NEVER be sad when one is in the midst of a jump. Hopping is good – but a jump it is not!
This bright your lady went on to many classes that day, taking math tests and refining history notes, but I do think the biggest gift public education gave her that day was the encouragement to jump.