[Film] Acting

Last weekend, I acted in a workshop for The Wasps. 5 actors and 2 directors. We rehearsed a few scenes and learned about the dominance games people play when they come into conflict.

Andrew & Danyl (the directors) were great at creating a safe environment - where you can improvise and make mistakes & still feel completely supported. That was probably the best part about the weekend.

We started off with lots of trust games (which somehow ended with me being spanked by 2 women while giving a guy a shoulder massage), then watched some inspirational material in the form of Project Greenlight and Curb Your Enthusiasm. After that, we spend the afternoon of Day 1 breaking off into pairs and working through a single scene.

That was another favourite thing about the weekend: a) exploring different takes and interpretations with another actor and b) that Danyl and Andrew were very laid back about letting us come up with our own understanding of the scenes.

And then I discovered that the level of performance was much more grounded and realistic than I thought. It meant that scenes that seeemed like simple comedy beats were able to get fleshed out & made human. I think there's going to be this weird humour in The Wasps, where pain and serious dramatic issues become hilarious.

Day 2 was even more fun. We took a scene, then just improvised it. By not relying on the script we all got a deeper sense of who these characters really were & how to present them in order to bring out the comedy. It was this awesome division of duties - me & Leah having fun jabbing at each other while the directors figured out what was working and kept pulling us in that direction.