Trust

I have to admit that the day I ran over town looking for the plays, renting the movie and all, I didn't sleep all that well. I was partly relieved I had found the monologue and learnt it, but I still had to get some decent (or better) acting out of it in less than a week! And I also needed a new coach, since the one I was working on was now too busy to be able to help.

When I woke up the following day, I thought, "I don't depend on this course to make my trip a success. It'll be great experience anyway." This thought did a lot for my peace of mind. But above all what helped was that I found a coach in a former classmate of mine, who studied teaching and directing. She loved the monologue and thought it could work.

I continued working on my lines, and when I had memorized it to the point that I could act it a bit, I found that I had plenty of images. Yesterday, I met up with her, feeling considerably more self confident. She had brought some music to use as an excercise. There is something terribly soothing about working with Flavia. She is so calm and self confident that you automatically relax and trust her. Plus, she liked my work and trusted it would get better. I was surprised at how easy the monologue came out. I left for my dance lesson feeling actually good about it.

I think that, the less time you have to prepare, the more it helps to act as though you had all the time in the world. Devoting some time to merely trying out things with my speech, even if I knew I wouldn't use them later, did wonders for me. In the sense that I was working with a former classmate, with whom I share the training but also the way in which we see theatre, it was a bit like coming home for me. I hadn't trained with anyone from my school since graduation, and it was a beautiful feeling. And Williams was a great choice, because I've read a lot of his plays and more importantly trained on them for an entire semester.

So tomorrow I'll meet her again for some additional rehearsal and to shoot the speech. Then it will be a matter of burning a DVD and sending it to New York. By then it won't depend on me anymore. Right now, I'm blissed that this process has been a pleasant and enriching one, and regardless of the results I'm looking forward to tomorrow just for the sake of acting a beautiful speech by a wonderful playwright. You can keep your fingers crossed for me though.