Daniel Foley + Chad Austin

 

Shakespearean ACTING:

1. Bite into the muscle of the verse. Burrow down.
2. When learning lines, do it as meditative act like Anthony Hopkins.
3. Keep your energy UP.
4. Gesture at the end of a line to keep it lifted in your mind as practice.
5. Give audience time to adjust as they get used to the language.
6. Whisper your lines and then say them in a normal tone.
7. Think of rhythm of the piece but don’t let it control you.
8. If you can’t see the audience, they can’t see you.
9. Standing at a diagonal is a strong position rather than a straight line.
10. Disturb your space on stage.
11. Take your soliloquies to the audience.  Dialogue with the audience. Engage in interplay between yourself and the audience.
12. See the conflict of your piece and get it over to your audience
13. Feel the rhythm with your hands, then your feet, then your whole body. Do the Flamenco.

*taken from Mrs. Moon's notes*

Daniel Foley's workshop was skillfully placed during our rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet. Everything we learned could therefore be applied to our characterization and presence on stage. He really stressed the idea of how we need to ease the audience into the progression of the play as the language is something that they are not familiar to. There are three ways to familiarize them with the language: first, to pace your lines well (slower in the beginning); second, to articulate everything you say loudly and clearly; and third, to use lots of gesticulation to help them visualize the poetry of Shakespeare's language.

We were also taught how to disturb the space on stage and to tell the beautiful story of Romeo and Juliet and pull the audience in. There's a rhythm to the language of Romeo and Juliet that we as actors had to maintain with our voices and our bodies. And the ends of the phrases should never drop.

With Chad Austin, we had a very short period of time with him so it was difficult to obtain a lot from his lesson. We kind of worked on the subtext of what we said by working on the exercise: Hey, How are you. We can say it like we met an ex, an enemy, a long lost friend. Everything depends on how we say the phrase. We also worked on how to act during audiences - to keep our heads up, to be natural yet avoid signs of the lack of confidence and unprofessionalism. This must have been very helpful for those who are auditioning for theatre programs in college COUGH COUGH George.




A Blog post dedicated to Romeo and Juliet will be up soon.