2. Committing to the character vs. trying to make it feel natural
Pacing
Today, our main focus was pacing; trying to slow down our scene to maximize Ella's options and acting choice within the scene.
We've worked on pacing before, making sure to mark the pauses/beats, and trying to take a scene slowly. But today we went to a "hit the wall" (or extreme) place with our pacing. I made Ella stop for 3 seconds at each beat at the beginning, forcing her to slow the scene down to an extremely unnatural place, trying to get the slow pacing in her acting DNA as we continue to build her acting tools. From there, we sped up the beats to 2 seconds, and added distinct action in our 2 second beats. We then worked on slowing down the lines themselves - imagining that people had to act out what we were saying - If we went to fast, we would be robbing the actors of action and reaction time, and not adding to the scene at all. We started pacing the scene so that our words could be acted or illustrated - emphasizing key parts that were crucial for the opening scene (like the name of the play or musical and key plot points and emotions).
We will continue to work on this as we continue our acting classes! Each class Ella gets more natural/comfortable with what we're doing and she improves so much!!
Committing to the character vs. trying to make it feel natural
Today we also worked on committing to a character that is nothing like ourselves. A lot of times, we can draw from personal experience when acting - trying to make the character some extension of how we would act. Doing this works for some scenes and monologues, but ultimately limits our acting choices. We worked on our "whimsical fairy god mother" character today, drawing from things that had nothing to do with Ella, building the character from an unnatural place. By doing this, Ella was forced to commit to certain voice inflections and movement that were 100% "whimsical fairy" and a much less percentage of Ella Huss.
We are working to get Ella to the place that she is used to committing to the characteristics we have mapped out, bigness of the scenes, and really feeling like she is being silly or making a fool of herself with the extent of her character choices and movements - so that it doesn't matter what she is acting in, she will be a chameleon, becoming the characters themselves - being an asset to any cast.