Voice Overs

Recently I subscribed to the podcast by the Voice Over Experts and I've really been enjoying it. I'm starting to look into how to do voice overs for commercials, animation, video games and such and I've found this podcast to be quite informative. One of my friends has also agreed to help me put together a demo reel, so now I just need to figure out which voices I would like to showcase and what I should read for each voice. I'm excited though. This should be a fun addition to my career as acting and will hopefully bring in some extra income.

Special Pleasure

I'm taking a movement class with Natasha and it is brutal. I've progressed a lot, but it's hard. The first week Natasha said, "The first week you will hurt. The second week you will really hurt. The third week you will go numb." I'm happy to report that I'm in week three and I have not gone numb. In fact it still hurts. The best part is that whenever we are in an intense stretching position twisted into some sort of human pretzel Natasha will ask, "Can you feel the special pleasure?" Apparently she likes calling pain "special pleasure". She's crazy.

Today I successfully went into a bridge pose from standing and then returned to a standing position. I then failed at flipping from a bridge to a downward-dog (though I succeeded in going from the dog to the bridge). My cartwheel is getting quite good on my right side and today we practiced doing it one-handed. It went pretty well.


Me, Natasha, and Matvei

Whew

The trouble with keeping an update of what's going on is that I'm getting home so late and have to get up so early that I'm just too tired to write anything. I've got a great post about Misha that I started writing, but I haven't been able to finish it. I wanted to keep updating, but couldn't find the time to finish that post. So, it will have to wait as I attempt to make small entries.

Today was Acting Exercises, Acting Seminar, and Scene Study. All went really well. I saw some wonderful portrayals of objects in Seminar and we started showing our animal observation exercises. I'll do mine on Saturday. I also need to re-read "Uncle Vanya" by then. Scene study went okay. I wasn't well enough memorized and so there was only so much we could do. David and I had to step out and work on our memorization. I sure hope it sticks for tomorrow. I'm really struggling memorizing right now and I'm not sure why. Perhaps I've been away from it for too long (it's only been a few months). Perhaps it's the fact that my character doesn't follow much of a logical progression of thought as he talks. I'll get it though. I'm not worried. I'm just disappointed that we couldn't do more work in class because we weren't as prepared as we should have been. I'm ready for tomorrow though.

Week 2: Misha

I just completed week two here at the Stanislavski Summer School and I'm still really enjoying myself. That's usually a good sign. While the first week was an introduction of sorts into the type of work we are going to be doing here, for the second week we just dove right into it. The 34 students have been divided into three groups to work on scenes from the works of Anton Chekhov, and each group is headed by a professor from the Moscow Art Theatre School. As I mentioned in my last post I have been assigned to Mikhail Lobanov's group, and we will be performing scenes from three of Chekhov's short one-act comedies (the "Vaudevilles"as they are called): "The Proposal", "The Boor", and "The Anniversary".

First let's talk about Misha. Misha is one of the top acting teachers and directors in Russia and is an all around great guy. He's incredibly friendly and easy going. I love him. I have him for my Acting Exercises class as well where we work a lot on becoming like a child. We play various games and do different exercises that are supposed to loosen us up and help us work on communication and concentration. It's funny whenever he explains a new game we have so much trouble with it and he says (with a thick Russian accent), "I teach this game to little kids and they have no trouble with it, but you big actors can't do it. Why is this?" He's always teasing us for being big, fancy American actors with big heads. It's very true though. If we could all be more like children not only our acting, but our entire lives would be better.

So, for Scene Study Misha as assigned me the role of Ivan Vassilich Lomov in "The Proposal" by Anton Chekhov. It's a great little one-act comedy about a guy who is very nervous coming to propose to the girl he loves, then just as he's about to pop the question a little argument starts between him and the girl and it erupts into a terrific fight and then her father gets involved and other such things happen. It's quite funny. This upcoming week we should really get to work a lot on it and I'm excited.


Photo from our showcase performance at the end of the program.

Week 1: Yuri Yeremin

Time for an update on the events of my first week at the Stanislavski Summer School. This first week has been an incredible experience. Already I've learned a lot and had a lot of what I've already learned re-enforced. I'm very excited for the next four weeks! It's going to be awesome! So, let me tell you a bit about the four different classes that I had last week. First reference this site to get a feel for the credits each of my teachers has.

I mentioned a little already my acting lectures with Yuri Yeremin. Yuri is one of the top directors and acting teachers in all of Russia and has international acclaim for his work. He doesn't always teach at the summer school so we're lucky to have him this year. I performed my observations of the lady eating the ice cream cone and it went well. The ice cream cone I bought for the scene melted a lot more than I thought it would and so I ended up with ice cream all over me, but I kept in character and it ended up going really well. I felt great about it. For our next assignment we were put into groups of three and we were to create a scenario based around a love triangle. I ended up playing the boyfriend who unknowingly slept with his girl-friend's best friend and then met her "for the first time" the next day. The scene we played out was the three of us getting together and the two us realizing what had happened while trying to keep the info from our mutual friend. It was an awkward situation and was very fun to play. It also went well. The two girls I was working with are quite talented and fun to work with. In fact, everyone here is very talented. I'm excited to work with them.

I needed a paragraph change. I'm still writing about Yuri's class though. I'll try to wrap it up. The main focus of his classes has been "given circumstances". Using action as the basis for everything that takes place on stage you then have to contextualize the action down to the smallest details. He broke this down into the "where", "when", "what", "who" and "why" of the scene. Remember you have to be specific. For "where" and "when" he said to start big and go small (i.e. United States -> Massachusetts -> Cambridge -> Lesley University -> Mellen St. -> Doble Bldg. -> Second floor classroom and so forth). The same holds for time. Start with the century or even millennium and work your way down to the exact time. Don't forget the weather either. The more details the better. Use the script for clues and fill in what you don't know. Also, make sure you write all of this down. The "what" is the events that occur to influence action. These are the most important part. You have to know what events have occurred to cause your character to act the way that he is acting. Something happens and your character responds to it in a given way. Events and action become the primary aspects of acting. Then you have "who", which is just understanding your character. Go deep and find everything said about your character in the script. Make a list of characteristics similar to yourself and different from yourself. Those are the ones that you as the actor will have to pay particular attention to become your character. The "why" then of course is "why am I doing the things I'm doing?" I thought he would spend more time on this talking about objectives, but he didn't. He just left it at that. I guess his discussion of action covered objectives. So, that about wraps up Yuri's class. We will continue having a group discussion about acting, but from now on it's going to be led by Oleg Topoliansky who just arrived from Moscow.

So, that's Yuri. He's a great guy. He's very strict and direct, but you can tell that he has a very compassionate heart. His eye for detail is incredible too. I'm amazed at how much he can notice in a performance, and how much he knows what a performance needs. Sadly, I won't get to work with him as much anymore since we've been divided into different groups and I'm in Mikhail Lobanov's group. As disappointed as I am to not get to work with Yuri too much anymore, I am very excited to work with Misha.

Day 1

I don't guarantee an entry every day while I attend the Stanislavsky Summer School, but I figure the first day warrants a little something.

Today was the first day. My dad drove me down to campus and even took a picture of me on my first day of class. What a best dad. There are 34 other students attending the program. Most of them are from the US, but about ten are from abroad: India, London, Paris, Russia, Korea, the Netherlands. I think that's it. We had our orientation meeting where we met with the professors. Three of them were there. Two more are flying in from Moscow tonight, and one more is coming later in the week. It was so cool listening to them speak in Russian and understanding most of it. Fortunately there was a translator so I could pick up words I didn't understand. Hopefully by the end of this I'll be back up to my game with Russian. We'll see.

First Yuri Yeremin led a discussion about what is "acting". A few people ventured ideas and he shot them all down. It became clear that he was looking for something specific that differentiated acting from everything else, something simple and clear. I decided it was pointless to try and guess what he was thinking so I sat there and listened to everyone debate the issue until he finally just told us what was on his mind. "Acting" is exactly what the word implies: action. Staged action. This makes sense. Acting isn't just about living truthfully onstage or even about telling a story to the audience (though these are important elements). It's about depicting people striving for something. People want something and they will do what it takes to achieve what they want. If they want it badly enough and the circumstances force them they will do just about anything to achieve it. That makes great drama. Or comedy.

Next we fulfilled our assignment: tell a story from your life. Didn't matter what it was. We had three minutes. I told the story of when my Grandpa passed away this year just before I went to Chicago for grad-school auditions and then Saint George for ACTF and talked about the crazy emotions I felt those three weeks and the things I realized about myself and my art. That exercise took up the remaining time and a few people didn't get to go. He then gave us our assignment for tomorrow: go and observe someone who doesn't know that you are observing him or her, then tomorrow in class we will have three minutes to depict what we saw. On my way home I watched a woman who looked like she was disabled and homeless eating an ice cream cone. It was quite fascinating. This little old woman, whom no one else seemed to notice, was by far the most interesting person on that street. She was so absorbed in her little world and didn't care what others thought. I had a hard time not staring at her because she was so interesting to watch, but I didn't want her to feel uncomfortable. Please understand that I wasn't treating her like something in a zoo. I was very aware of her humanity in that moment. I'm excited to see what happens tomorrow. I just need to find some ice cream beforehand...

Short Horror follow-up

Just to let you all know that our little film project won the audience choice award for our group. Hooray! Truth be told if we had gotten it turned in on-time I think we would have won some of the other awards as well. Oh, well. Maybe next year.

Stanislavsky Summer School

For the next five weeks I will be participating in a professional actor training program called the Stanislavsky Summer School in Cambridge, MA. It is run by the Moscow Art Theatre School and faculty are actually Russians from the MXAT. How awesome is that! The focus of the program is how theatre is done in Russia today and how the works of such greats as Stanislavsky, Chekhov (both Anton and Michael), Meyerhold, and others have influenced Russian theatre and world theatre. The summer school also shares faculty with the American Repertory Theatre/Moscow Art Theatre School Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University. This is an MFA program I applied for this February and hopefully attendance at their summer program will help me get into the MFA program. In was, in fact, based off of my audition for them that they invited me to participate in this summer program. Over the next few weeks I will keep you all updated on how things are going and what I am learning. Wish me luck!