Refreshing breakdown

Actors put themselves into a lot of weird emotional states and get in touch with weird, deep-down things inside of them. So sometimes, in the middle of something innocuous, you can burst into tears. I'm sure every actor has had it happen to them at least once. And singers and dancers too, maybe- I can't really divide the three into completely seperate things since they all intertwine for me. But at any rate, at Randolph it's a regular, well-known occurance. A student will be singing a song they've sung dozens of times, or performing a monologue they know top to bottom, or doing an in-class exercise trying to breath into their back, when suddenly they burst into tears. Sometimes it's not so sudden, and it's a by-product of whatever emotional state they're exploring in the particular exercise, monologue, etc.

It's happened to me working a monologue in Scene Study, and singing in MTP, and it happened to me today in Voice & Text. We were exploring the Four Humours of the body- Blood, Yellow Bile, Black Bile, Phlegm, a.k.a. Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, Phlegmatic, a.k.a. Wind, Fire, Water, Earth. We had done Sanguine already- it's airy, generous, light-hearted. Sanguine is the clown, the person that wants to make everyone else as happy as they are. Then when Joy, our teacher, was talking us through into Choleric, the image she used was the throat. She said, "Now feel in your throat every time someone's told you you're not good enough, not tall enough, not thin enough, not old enough, not pretty enough, not..." etc and I just started to cry. She says that the throat can be a huge trigger for some people...

Then she had everybody walk around the room in Choleric, then speak lines of their sonnets in it. As soon as she told us to move around, I had to stand off to the side against the wall because I was so... in tears. I was breathing really quickly and shallowly, and I was sort of scared of the other people in the class. Choleric is violent, vengeful, firey, animal, and the sounds they were making and the way they were speaking to each other got to me. Then Joy came over while they were speaking lines to each other, and helped me work myself out of the state I was in. She had me connect my breath back down in my sacrum (lower back, lower belly, center of the body) and breathe out in big, long exhales on sound. (On sound means with some sort of sound, rather than just air.) I wasn't quite back, but she called everyone back in the circle and asked me to join them. She then pulled me back up a little more with more deep, connected breathing, then had me work the rest of the way through it with my sonnet. She pointed out my disconnected breath to the class and, as I got it connected and came back to myself, she talked me and the class through it. Then she had people speak a line of their sonnet to someone in the circle, in Choleric. After I did a line from mine, she said, "Wow, that was powerful. That was a good exercise for you!" I agreed, because I did feel a fire in my core and a bit of vengefulness on my tongue. The breakdown, wherever it came from, helped me find a really powerful Choleric/Fire feeling.

After those random breakdowns, you usually feel one of three things: rejuvenated, depressed, or sometimes confused. After mine, I felt really refreshed and lightened.

That was the highlight of my day. Besides that, Jazz was fun although I really want to move up- I don't feel at all challenged enough! I learned a lot of things to do and not to do in an audition in MTP, which I always like.

All in all a good, albeit long, day. However, tommorrow's the longest day of the week by far, with 6 hours of class from 8 to 2:30, then tap from 5:40 to 7. But I have lunch at White Spot with the ladies to look forward to. All my classes on Wednesdays are fun, though, it's just by the end of tap class I just want to crash.

Oh, I've chosen a monologue from Helena in All's Well That Ends Well, I,iii,184-210.