Do You Love Me?

After yesterday it was a relief to have Thomas teaching improvisation today! "We'll try and have some fun today."

We played a game of Mr. Hit, then did a little warm up exercise in which we had to imitate and then slightly exaggerate the walk of somebody else in the class. I was a bit off the mark in terms of imitating the core thing about Katie. She was pretty neutral so it was a bit hard to exaggerate. Needed more pleasure too.

Then for the rest of the class an exercise with the objection: "Do something to make us love you."

We went up in groups of four, standing a metre or so from the back of the room. If you do something the audience likes, you take one step forward. If you do something they don't like, you take one step backward. Fucking scary! Suddenly it becomes really hard to think of anything to do. Thomas actually said later it's not so much about having ideas at all. You just need to listen to the audience and try and figure out what they want from you. Try one thing. Try another. Get closer to it.

I got up in the first group. Stepped forwards and backwards throughout the 10-15mins my group was on. I found that when I'm big and heavy - when I try to be liked - I'm not liked. But I found that when I sing a song really simply with my body open, my voice clear, and my eyes on the audience, just letting the words and sounds communicate, then it's beautiful. Gotta keep it simple. Be light and sensitive. Don't over perform. Don't ever forget about that sensitive relationship with the audience and/or my scene partners. I also won a bit when I pulled my hair up (talking to Anna it seemed that the audience weren't watching me when I did this, so when they finally saw me, my hair was a surprise) and did a goofy grin. The goofy grin was similar to what I found with my Indian Mr. Shalimar character last year, and I didn't push it too much.

Don't push. Don't stray away from where I win.

Interesting to note that I don't find it that hard to do what I did today in terms of singing. I just need to be comfortable and relaxed. And when I get there, then it's really easeful for me. And easeful is good!

• For Maria-Louisa, who made this silly squeaky noise with her voice and we laughed, a game had been created, so all we wanted from her was to make that silly noise. "Sometimes life is simple."
• Ciara sang a gospel Sister Act kind of song, which was incredible - she has a wonderful voice, but she coloured the song with lots of trills. Like me, we like her when she is more simple = "It's better without the cream on top."
• Gwen found a game of stealing the thunder off other people's bad attempts. She'd just turn and 'present' them to us (by framing her hands as in an infomercial) when others were doing awful stuff, and we laughed. Nasty. But we liked it. But then she did it
• "You have to change your tactics if it's not working."
• "You have to be more sensitive."

Thinking that what we want from each actor is unique to the dynamics of those particular actors on stage together, and unique to that moment. The same group tomorrow would need something different. This highlights the need to be so sensitive to your audience, your fellow performers, and the 'energy' of the room, for any performance to 'land'.