Back to school last night with another class at West Chester. This time it's Acting 103 with Dr. Hashimoto-Sinclair, aka Dr. Hash.

To begin with, I'm not sure what I expected from this class. Practically, this class fills a general education requirement for art. It also seemed more fun that Computer Art 113, which is taught by a guy who may know art well, but is too fascinated by Macs for my test. I also know that I wanted to get a little more experience with voice acting; not so much with moving around a stage, but with using a voice (mine?) to act audibly. This would austensibly be for future features of this site.

So, I arrived a little early for class in the studio, room 010, at the E.O. Bull Center. It's a smallish room with a stage and theater seating for about 40, complete with a compliment of lights. I wonder if there's a control room in the back - with the lighting, I didn't see it directly, but I didn't investigate, either.

Dr. Hash is a nice Japanese woman, who clearly has a lot of experience with theater. She has done work recently with the opera in Wilmington, doing makeup design for their actors. She's friendly enough with an accent that is sometimes difficult to understand, but never too hard to infer from.

My classmates number five, not including myself. One of them, Chris, is a graduate student who teaches language arts in Coatesville, along with a gifted program there, and is both taking the class and helping teach it somewhat. Bill is actually a film student at a Maryland college who is taking cheaper courses closer to home to fill out his credit hours. Bob, Danielle, and Deon are nurses at various local hospitals who are all completing a baccelaureate program through work, and all just happen to have taken this same class.

Everyone in class seems willing to do the work, and isn't as reluctant to try "acting" as one might expect from students taking a general education course. This is both good and bad because while I like enthusiasm among my classmates (rather than disinterest and complacency), it also leads to personalities like that Philosophy geek -- People who are too into the class. There are a couple of people like that in here who I think are taking this intro class way too seriously. There is at least one student who seems maybe a bit reluctant to participate or unsure about the whole acting prospect. I hope everyone meets a nice compromise in attitude before the short summer term is over.

After discussing the basics of class procedure and the syllabus, which Dr. Hash had us read aloud to hear our voices, we spend a good part of the class doing hand coordination exercises. This involved standing still and facing her, moving our arms in certain patterns to mirror her motions.

At first it was easy. There are only three simple patterns, each one named for the number of motions. The easy part is doing the same pattern with both arms because the arms mirror each other. But then the more difficult part was moving arms with two different patterns.

After you work it out in your head, it's not a big deal. I explained my ease of taking to this new skill by relating it to my piano lessons, which essentially requires you to play a different part of the same musical piece on each hand. Both hands coordinate, but don't play the same thing. My "mirror" partner, Danielle, didn't take to the coordination excercises as readily, but she seemed to get the hang of it after a while. I'm sure with more practice (which we will apparently do at the beginning of each acting class) she will eventually nail the test on this that will contribute toward our grade.

After the coordination exercises, we did some improvisation sketches -- Three. The first one I did was with Chris, portraying a scene where we were roommates. Some of his friends are coming over and I'm not helping him straighten up the place, but eventually I agree to help. This scene did not go as I expected for a number of reasons. I suppose that after spending a little time with Chris during class, I could have known better what to expect, but then I didn't.

It seems to me that Chris is one of the students taking this class very seriously. I learned later in the class that he has learned or believes that comedy is difficult, because of timing or whatever, and I get the impression that maybe he's a little afraid of not being serious. I did not expect our scene to be as serious, and was quite unprepared for his yelling about not helping clean up. As a result, I don't think I played the scene as well as I could have. I don't think I will have the same energy as Chris in coming at these improvisations, so I will have to keep a more serious mindset when I perform with him next.

My second performance was with Bob. We did a scene where Bob is going to sign up to join the army, and I'm trying to convince him not to. Apart from my own floundering trying to come up with excuses for him not to go (I really thought I had some, but I guess they didn't play out in our dialogue), I think the scene went pretty well. One of our classmates commented that our dialogue seemed natural, which I'm sure it did, being so off-the-cuff. Besides that, the topic (we focused around Iraq) was so contemporary, that it was easy to pull topics for it.

I think Bob and I did well, and I wouldn't mind doing another scene with him. He is kind of an intimidating-looking guy, obviously he's spent some time in the gym, but he seems pretty easy-going. Plus, he shares my opinions on Bush and Iraq, so that's a plus.

My last scene was with three other people, Bob, Bill, and Deon, and we were shipwrecked on an island. We each took on a different method of trying to organize our efforts. Deon was democratic, Bob was a dictator, and Bill was socialist. Oh, yeah, I was anarchy.

The scene was going pretty well for a while. Everyone was pulling off their personas pretty well. I was mostly saying, "If we're all gonna die, I'm leaving a tanned corpse and laying here on the beach." But then someone couldn't decide what to do next, and started complaining about the jungle or something. I don't even remember. In my anarchic way, I made a comment like, "Hey, is that a monkey?" And then the craziness started, and not in a good way. Bill went off-stage and found himself a monkey, being apparently rightfully fearful of monkeys, he tossed himself back onto the stage, "breaking his leg," and turning the whole scene (which I thought was quite light enough without the leg breaking) into another dramatic turn.

"What are we going to do for poor broken Bill?" others wondered. I quickly pulled out our end-of-scene dialogue, "Maybe there's a doctor on that ship out there." Then, Bob and I ended up dragging Bill off-stage, because he was too broken to move. Hmm.

Well, the scene went ok, but it could have gone better. Some of my classmates' scenes were pretty good, but I'm getting this nagging pull in my gut that says I'm in one of those classes filled with angsty people.

Something Nana said to me a while ago when she was taking painting classes has always stuck with me. Her teacher had asked the class to capture an emotion on their watercolor canvasses. So they did. And when they were done, the class had filled their canvasses with violence and sadness and anger; blacks and deep reds. Nana's painting was pink and orange with hints of blue. She told me she was remembering Gramps, and sure, she had all of the feelings that her classmates had, but she didn't need to use her brush to let those feelings out. Since then, I've considered trying to highlight positive things in my life, not really pushing back the negative, but allowing the good things to blossom. If you'll forgive the poetics.

So we finished up our improvs, and then did this yoga relaxation thing. Dr. Hash went on at length about religious issues. It's that speech that certain teachers give that can be summed up as, "If something we do in class goes against your religious beliefs, feel free not to participate at no penalty." Instead, it always ends up taking 15 minutes to stammer out. I think that teachers who are prone to need such statements should prepare them in advance, since most of us would behave that way whether they said it or not, and it's easy enough to convey the point with a few succinct words.

Anyhow, this yoga was basically sitting with legs crossed and doing deep-breathing. I wasn't sure what the purpose of the whole Hawaii beach visualization thing is, maybe that's calming for some people. I don't really like the beach. Had I known this was going to be some kind of chi-building exercise, I would have defaulted to my usual visualized place. Is it me, or is someplace you've been before more powerful for that sort of thing?

At the end of class, we went through some scripts. We will have to memorize lines and perform a scene with a partner by next Wednesday. There's not a lot of time in these summer sessions, is there? My partner is Deon, and we hastily chose something from one of the books of contemporary plays Dr. Hash provided. I'm not really sure what's going on in the scene - I only briefly skimmed the summary. It apparently includes me doing some things with an accent, which is more what I'm looking to get out of this class.

Deon seems pretty nervous about the whole thing. I have to admit that I'm worried about memorizing a whole scene, which I haven't done since second grade. The feeling is weird, though - not really nervous, just kind of worried that I won't succeed. I think that I should be nervous, but this is a distinctly different feeling.

I think the best pairings in the class would have been Bill with Chris and Deon with Bob, leaving Danielle and me. Bill and Chris have that same seriousness about them in doing their scenes, and so I think they are more compatible in attitude for affecting their performance. Deon and Bob have the same sort of neutral approach to the class that might prevent them from being overwhelmed by whoever else they might play with. Danielle seems to have the same interest in comedic effect as I do, which was stifled (as I mentioned previously) by Chris. I mean, there's only one way to find out how hard it really is, right? And our impromptu patter was good during the coordination exercises.

I have several things that I need to improve for myself for class. It's not just a behavioral change but a change in mental approach to the class. I need to characterize a little better - someting that might improve more with instruction - which I think I can do by "feeling" like the character I'm trying to play. I should learn to use my body to be more emotive; move around the stage a little more. I need to concentrate a bit more on the scene and its goals and the characters I am opposite.

I think the most important lesson our whole class can learn is to have fun and not take the whole thing so seriously. We'll all take more away from the class if we're having a good time with it.