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...