Hello to Goodbye: A Semester of Learning

This past semester in acting class, I learned a lot about different kinds of acting. I definitely feel that what I got out of this class falls in line with what I was hoping to learn and improve on. I’ve gained more confidence when it comes to acting and in general. At the beginning of the semester, I learned about how to better project my voice, which is a skill that’s useful in many situations, including public speaking. Next I got the chance to learn about memorization and expressions through the monologues. The first one, which was dramatic, was easier for me because it had not too much movement and was just more in my comfort zone. Meanwhile, the second monologue, which was a comedy piece, was much more difficult because I had to pretend to be basically the opposite of my usual personality. This was more challenging than I expected, but it taught me about overacting, which I felt helped a lot.
After monologues, we began doing silent movie work. This was my favorite unit because it’s where I got to do a lot of physical acting. From this unit, I had to learn about pacing and delivery of my actions in order to get the proper effect. I had to go from calm waitress to angry, but I had to show a clear, natural transition. This was a challenge for me at first, but with suggestions from classmates it became easier. Next, while doing mask work, we were presented with an even bigger challenge — acting with only our bodies. Here we learned about really exaggerating certain movements and about how the way we hold ourselves has to match our mask. This was my least favorite project, but it was also very quick. Our final project in this class was scene Work. I’d looked forward to this for a long time and I really enjoyed this. It also helped me learn quite a bit about how to convey emotions using more subtle movements and facial expressions. I also got to learn from my classmates about new ways to use voice (especially with volume) to convey things like sass, accusation, and fake happiness.
Overall this year I got to learn a lot about acting. Before this class, I knew almost nothing about how to act beyond stepping out of my personality to be someone else for a while. During it, I got to learn a lot about the basics that every actress needs to know. I learned about how to use the props and other people in your scene to really give it a complete feel. In future classes and programs, I want to really work on playing characters that are opposite of me, so that I can learn more about comfort zones and trying to get out of them. I also want to improve on my physical acting (mostly body language) even more because I feel that I am still not moving naturally for some things in acting. I also possibly would like to learn some new warm up exercises for actors. There are also some more specific skills that I’m curious about knowing more about, such as how some actors are able to make themselves cry on command, or how to they prevent themselves from bursting out laughing in the middle of a serious scene (like a death scene). To wrap it up, I feel that it’s been a  fantastic semester in acting class and hopefully I will be able to do more acting in the future.