Great Days, Rejection, Good Company, and A Pilgrimage

I'm sorry that it has nearly been a week since my last post! So that means grab some popcorn, silence your technological devices, and prepare yourselves for an epic (in quantity and in quality) recap of the last week, in which I get very personal and dramatic about some of the experiences I have had.... What can I say, I'm an actress! #noshame

Thus, Week 2 has come to an end, meaning we are officially over the hump with less time til the end than from the beginning. AHHH! Isn't it so crazy how the best experiences go by so quickly while not so great experiences are the ones that seem to last forever.

But enough of such sad thoughts for now!!

Let's rewind back to last Tuesday to begin this tale. It was a such great day in my classes! We started off the day in Modern Acting class during which we were officially assigned roles and scenes that we will be working on for the remainder of the program and that we will be performing on Open Day two Saturdays from now. I was casted as Enid in Scene 7 of Carl Churchill's play "Blue Kettle." The play is about a man named Derek who finds women with long lost sons, meets them, and tells those women he is their long lost sons, even though he is not, in the hope that they will leave him money when they die. I play Derek's very dependent, conflicted girlfriend in a scene in which Derek and Enid are having dinner with one of his fake mothers and that fake mother's husband. The best and most challenging part of this play is the fact that Carl Churchill has purposely replaced certain words with the words "blue" and "kettle" progressively throughout the play. For instance, one of my lines reads, "Kettle that's blue I'm so confused." It seems the line should read something like "Guess that's why I'm so confused." It's up to the actor to decipher the concealed words in order to find the true objectives in the scene. We will begin working on all our modern scenes this week, and I am super excited to face the challenges of this bizarre text!

In Shakespeare class, I got to work on my Titania scene and again received, extremely positive feedback from John Gorrie. I am definitely feeling myself growing as a Shakespearean actress. I can just feel it in my body and hear it in my voice, that I am becoming more comfortable with the language and am now willing to play more and make stronger character choices. It's a great feeling :)

Lastly, (one more thing! I told you Tuesday was a great day!) in Physical Theatre class I took myself WAY out of my comfort zone. We are currently working on a play called "The Chairs" in which an extremely old couple hosts a meeting for a great number of guests for whom they have to keep bringing in chairs. However, the catch is that all the guests are invisible. The actors who play the old couple must bring these invisible, silent guests to life! To practice talking to invisible people, we did an exercise on Tuesday in which one person sat in the center chair surrounded by three other people in their own chairs. The center person had to be in LOVE with the one person, had to utterly RESPECT the second person, and had to HATE with a passion the last person. The three outer people asked the middle person questions and the middle person had to act toward them accordingly, either with extreme love, respect, or hate. Then, at some point, the outer three people went away but the middle person had to continue their conversations and actions with them as if they were still sitting in those chairs. They had become invisible people. In essence, it was an extreme improve game, and out of 15 students, I volunteered myself to be the 4th person in that hot seat. I was terrified. I do NOT do improve. I fear it like the plague. But I did it. I had a great group of three around me to help get me started and to really push me to those three extremes; then, when they left, I kept those conversations going and ultimately got so many laughs!! I was found FUNNY! Like, what?! Hahaha. Afterwards I was so proud of myself for taking that leap, that risk, and was just so happy that I had actually made people laugh without preparation or a script! So yes, Tuesday was a bloody good day!

Wednesday I had a great tutorial with John Gorrie, my Shakespeare teacher, during which we talked about film auditions and how film acting differs from theatre acting. The main thing I took from my tutorial was "When you are rejected as an actor, they are rejecting YOU." When I first heard John say this I found it incredibly pessimistic. I didn't agree. But what I was supposed to get from this statement was actually a very optimistic concept. More times than not, we actors will be rejected not because we aren't talented. We may be just as talented as the actor that actually did get the part. But, ultimately if we don't fit the picture in the directors' minds, especially in film, then we've already lost the part the moment we walk into to the audition room. At the end of the day, John was telling me not to let rejection get me down or let rejection make me question my talent. Just keep auditioning, never stop, and don't doubt yourself. It was a very interesting way of seeing the industry, one that will likely stick with me over my career.

Classes on both Thursday and Friday went really well! We continued to rehearse Midsummer and
Twelfth Night scenes in Shakespeare, did table work (script work) in Modern, and had great fun while learning in both Voice and Physical Theatre.

Friday evening, we had a BADA only barbecue on the lawns outside the beautiful New Building on campus. We ate good food and watched our peers play croquet. I personally spent most of the time taking pictures with all the great people I had met and gotten close to over the first half of the program, seen below. It was a really lovely evening with great company!

Sarah, Me, Charly

Meagan, Sarah, Libby, Me

Oh Michael 

Cordelia 

Cecily

Niru

Jack, Me, Matt, Jameson

Adrian 

Erica 

Friday night, I went out with a group of friends to a very elegant pub called The House. We all got drinks (I got virgin strawberry coladas) and talked for an hour and a half before heading back to bed in preparation for Saturday.

Tess, Me, Anita, Niru

Saturday was a day we had all been waiting for: the day trip to Stratford Upon Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare and home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The day began strong with the most beautiful ride through the English countryside. From Oxford to Stratford, we passed through nearly a dozen tiny 13th to 15th century, picturesque villages surrounded my lush green hills and a pale blue sky. We arrived in Stratford around 12:30 and went straight to Trinity Church, a Parrish church from the 1200s, where Shakespeare is buried.  Irina Brown, my Audition Techniques teacher, took us to the church and first gave us a summary of Shakespeare's life from being born in Stratford to being buried in Stratford. She then succeeded in getting me a bit emotional. She talked about how actors, writers, theatergoers, and literature lovers have voyaged to Shakespeare's grave for centuries. It has become a pilgrimage for many, a must-do in their lives. And as I approached the grave, outlined in a thin blue rope and marked with a small sign, otherwise quite inconspicuous on the stone floor of the church, I felt a surge of emotion. I can't really put it into words. I guess, I feel that without this man's contributions to the art of theatre, I would not be who I am today and the art of theatre, this art of LIFE that we love and practice would not be the same. Maybe those are too strong of statements, but then and now, still, I feel that they are strong but, in many respects, true. It was an experience and feeling I will never forget.

Trinity Church

Shakespeare's grave

My friends and I then ate lunch at The Dirty Duck, a pub whose real name is actually The Black Swan but is widely known as the former. The Dirty Duck is where all Royal Shakespeare Company actors have gone to eat for decades, and their headshots grace the walls. Who knows! Maybe some day one my BADA friends or even my own pictures may dawn the walls of the Dirty Duck! :P

After lunch, we toured Shakespeare's birthplace as well as his new house where he lived with his family and eventually died. The highlight of the tours were the gardens at the new house. The flowers were so beautiful, and the amazing sculptures depicting some of Shakespeare's most famous plays and texts were a stunning addition to the lands he once owned.

Shakespeare's birthplace

Gardens at the New House

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Inside New House

All 90 of us convened at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to see Henry IV Part II put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The production was simply incredible. Shakespeare plays in general are incredibly challenging to play and to convey to an audience, but his histories are probably the most challenging. It was a spectacular piece of theatre presented by a beyond talented cast whom I desire to emulate in my career. Watching them makes me want to perform in more Shakespeare plays...Who knows! Stratford, you may not have seen the last of me! Haha :P

On Sunday, we got to have a Q&A session with Paola Dionisotti and Jim Hooper who both starred in the production of Henry IV Part II that we had seen the previous night. (Side note: Paola was in an episode of Game of Thrones. She was one of the "judges" questioning Baelish after Lysa's death and she comforted Sansa after Sansa opened up about her identity and about how Baelish has helped her. #GOTlove) Jim and Paola have worked as professional actors for decades and have performed hundreds (actually probably over a thousand) of times on the RSC stage. They were both extremely entertaining and knowledgable guests! I took a lot of great notes and laughed a lot. It was a really good session and was such a treat and honor to get to personally hear from two such great actors right after seeing them perform!

If you can't tell, I am enjoying myself immensely. It still doesn't seem real sometimes that I am here. It's been a fairy tale (well a very challenging, exhausting but great one) so far, and I can't wait to see where the story goes from here over the next two weeks!

Stay tuned for the epic sequels in my saga!
Coming Soon to a PC or Mac near you! (hopefully! I will really try!)

A Living Legend, Beautiful Runs, London Calling, and Week 2 Kicks Off

So the second week of classes has begun! And it is a sleepy start after the past few days we have had!

Backtrack to Thursday ~~~~
After tutorials and the amazing masterclass with Julian Glover on Wednesday, Thursday meant classes resumed. However rather than having Voice class that day, we had our first Audition Techniques class with world renowned director, Irina Brown. The class was amazing!! First, she had a bunch of people play out what their WORST audition imaginable would be like. My friends preceded to play out such things as forgetting lines, invading the directors' space, bolting from the room the minute they finished their piece, and bolting from the room mid-piece to go vomit. The exercise was both fun and cathartic to do and to watch! Then three people pretended to actually audition for Irina. Afterwards, she commented on the quality of their entrance, conversation with her, and exit then dissected the performance of the monologue and the monologue's success as an audition piece. Sadly we only have these classes once a week and therefore we probably only have time for everyone to go once. But, it was definitely one of the most insightful periods of time I have spent at BADA so far and I can't wait to perform a monologue for this brilliant woman!

Thursday evening may have taken the prize as the most monumental experience of my entire time at BADA. It was the workshop with John Barton, the greatest teacher of Shakespeare alive and who's tv series, "Playing Shakespeare," I watched entirely in my Acting Shakespeare class as UR.
Now 86 years old, Barton has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company for decades and has taught multiple generations of Shakespearean actors, like Patrick Stewart and Judy Dench how to "play" Shakespeare. He worked with 9 randomly chosen students on sonnets while my group watched and took notes. He is so old and yet still offered such eloquent advice and critiques and even cracked jokes about all the sexual puns in Shakespeare's sonnets. It was an opportunity young actors will, in the near future, never be able to have again. Such a workshop is one of the top experiences students of theatre could only dream of having. And BADA and John Barton made it possible for us. My gratitude cannot be explained.
 
Thursday night I went for a run in the park behind Christ Church college (you know, where they filmed scenes in the Harry Potter films) around 8:30 as the sun was beginning to set. The beauty of this town continues to astound me on a daily basis but this view made me abruptly stop my run and document what I was seeing. Simply stunning!

Friday marked the end of our first week of classes. We only had three of our usually four, so we ended early, getting out at 3:45 rather than 6. Our last class of the day was Shakespeare and we rough blocked all of my Titania scenes in "A Midsummer," or as my teacher, the great John Gorrie likes to call it, "The Dream." It was so fun being onstage acting again. I have barely acted since Ui last November, so to be working on a Shakespeare scene with such an accomplished Shakespeare director like Gorrie really excited me and made me strive to impressive him (especially after my not so great audition I did for him earlier in the week). And it went marvelously! He said in the rehearsal, and I quote, "I am amazed." He was impressed with how well I was able to play the very poetic language in which Titania speaks so early in the rehearsal period. My hard work and determination to improve is already staring to pay off!!

Friday night, I went out with three of my best friends, Libby, Niru, and Anita, to the Turf Tavern (for the second time). Afterwards, we ended up walking around Oxford, down roads we had yet to see and down other roads that had already become very familiar to us after only a week.

Early Saturday morning, I set off on a bus to London with seven friends. We only really had one plan made which was to get tickets and see the show "Holy Warriors" that night at the Globe Theatre.  As a devout planner, going into England's great capital without a day fully planned out was daunting to me and put me a little on edge at times, but ultimately I had an very very lovely time with my friends exploring the Southbank area, and then taking many, many pictures with Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, the show "Holy Warriors" was a great disappoint. It was the world premiere of the play and it told the story of the wars fought over Jerusalem from the 12th century to the present day. For a history buff, I really did find the story interesting, but it was an extremely heavy, complicated, and looong story, and the production was of a very weak caliber as far as the acting, singing (god-awful singing), and certain design elements we concerned. BUT being in the Globe Theatre was magical, just magical! Just getting to be in that space for those hours was worth the money. But, the next time I go to a show at the Globe, let me tell you it will be a Shakespeare play; I'll make sure of that haha! I ended up getting back to Oxford around 1:30AM and was super grateful to sleep in on Sunday!

Sunday was my friend Sarah's 24th Birthday! So, I took her out to lunch at a local restaurant and then took her to Ben's Cookies, to get her a gourmet birthday cookie.

That afternoon, we had our fourth session with a famous, accomplished guest. It was David Leveaux, who most recently directed Orlando Bloom and Phylicia Rashed in "Romeo and Juliet" on Broadway! We had a Q&A session with him rather than a masterclass, so students got to ask him questions about his work on Shakespearean plays, his theatrical work in Tokyo, his theatrical work in communist East Berlin before the wall came down, and about what he looks for in his actors. I could have listened to this man speak for hours. He was so eloquent, so kind, so inspirational, and so informative about the industry we all are entering into. He told us that as doers and makers of theatre "we are in the business of life; all theatre is a resistance against death"............ What a beautiful, inspiring statement
for a bunch of young and eager but frightened actors to chew on and to take with us! It's moments like that Q&A that make me completely certain that my choice to be a working actor is a worthy, bold, beautiful and not simply selfish choice.

After the session, a bunch of us went to the Turf Tavern (for the third time) for Sarah's birthday!

Today, classes resumed bright and early! Modern acting class was great because we did non-contextual scenes in which you are given very general lines and then with a partner must come up with  a specific situation to fit those lines. I laughed our loud to myself when I was handed my non-contextual script. It was the same one I had worked on many times all those years ago at my Act One Theatre School! I am loving how international certain theatre practices seem to be. But, the  highlight of today was Voice class. We were having some crazy breakthroughs! John Tucker, our teacher, is simply incredible. First, I have never had a teacher that brightens up a educational space so much with his contagious laughter, enthusiasm, humor, and wisdom. Second, he is a miracle working when it comes to the voice. He got all of us to open our voices today in a way I never suspected, in a way I never felt possible. It was an emotion class with tears, smiles, laughter, and a lot of Baldwin-group love!

This evening, I took another run in the park behind Christ Church. Yet another beautiful evening surrounded by such a beautiful landscape!

Wow!! SO MUCH INFO! .... Probably should have been studying my Shakespeare lines rather than writing this post but I know the work will only pick up from here, so I figured why not write more blog entries while I still feel I have time to do so! Hope you enjoyed reading my novel! Congrats if you made it this far haha!

Baldwin, Fairy Queen, Inkling Pub, and Grand Maester Pycelle

So ends Day 6 of my Oxford adventure and Day 3 of classes/tutorials! And there is SO MUCH to tell!

Soooo first, my group! Following Saturday's placement auditions, our teachers set to work for hours  determining which students would be working on which plays and with which teachers. On Sunday afternoon, I learned that I was put into the Baldwin group that was to work on "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Twelfth Night," and Carol Churchill plays. I was pretty happy (especially about Carol Churchill's controversial, modern plays!), but what made me most excited was that 7 of the 15 people in my group were people I had hung out with on Saturday! What were the chances?! We were all so excited and together welcomed the other 8 students into our friend group.

Sunday afternoon was also our first masterclass. Pippa Nixon, a young British actress, who has worked many times with the Royal Shakespeare Company, led a class on Audition Techniques. As actors, she said, if we don't make it to fame and fortune but manage to become working actors, we will spend 2/3 of our lives in auditions and only 1/3 in rehearsals/productions. She was honest, entertaining, encouraging, inspiring, and very knowledgable!  Ms. Nixon began our work here with BADA on a high note!

Sunday night we had a formal drink party and three course dinner in the Harry Potter-like dining hall! We all dressed up, had Pimms (a famous, beloved fruity British drink; I even had a few sips) and then had a beautiful, candlelit dinner! Below are some pics from the evening with my new friend.

Me and Libby <3

Niru, my next door neighbor!

Libby, me, and Sarah

Bright and early Monday morning we began classes. We have a Shakespeare acting class, a Physical Theatre class, a Voice class, and Modern acting class, each 1 hour and 45 minutes. My favorite class so far is definitely Physical Theatre! We play a lot of the same games I played in my Physical Theatre classes at Richmond but with little changes. It's crazy how these simply, fun theatre games exist on both sides of the big pond! 

On Tuesday, we were assigned roles in our Shakespeare class. My audition the previous day had not gone over so well. My teacher, an extremely qualified but VERY scary man, did not agree with my interpretation of my Joan of Arc monologue. Needless to say, I was very nervous to hear about casting even though I knew we would all get at least one pretty strong role to work on. I was given the roles of Hippolyta in Act I Scene I and Titania in Act II Scenes I and II of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." I am feeling pretty good about it!! Titania is the fairy queen and a very strong woman with very long, poetic monologues which I am very excited to work on!

Tuesday night I went to some pubs with my friends. We eventually ended up at the Eagle and Child, a pub where the Inklings, a group of writers including Tolkien and CS Lewis, used to meet to discuss their literary ideas. It was such a neat pub!

                                           

The Eagle and Child

Me and my friend Sarah who told me about this pub

On Wednesdays at BADA, we take a break from our usual 4 classes a day schedule and take time for private tutorials and for masterclasses. Today, I met with my Modern Acting teacher, Zoe Waites, and discussed how to go about choosing modern monologues for auditions. I also met with my voice teacher, John Tucker. In our voice classes, we are focusing specifically on vocal techniques for acting, but today in my private tutorial, I got to work with him on singing technique. I only had 20 minutes with him, but the exercises he had me do were so fantastic!! 

Lastly, we had a masterclass today with Julian Glover who plays Grand Maester Pycelle in Game of Thrones and has made a huge name for himself in theatre, film, and television. What an honor it was to be in such an accomplished actor's presence! All 90 students met up with him behind Addison's Walk in a large field surrounded by trees and one very curious tree sculpture (pic below). Such a beautiful, inspiring space to work in! We focused on Act III Scene II of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," a HUGE crowd scene in which Brutus first convinces the people that him and his friends had to kill Caesar for the good of Rome; but then, by the scene's end, Mark Antony manages to completely reverse the crowd's opinion of the assassination, leaving the Romans to go murder the conspirators. Julian Glover talked about how remarkable this scene is and of the genius Shakespeare 

was in writing it, and he then randomly gave out roles/lines and we ultimately did the entire scene there in the grassy field. As the crowd, we yelled in protest, then cried over Caesar's body, then rallied in mutiny against the conspirators. 90 of us actors bringing this crowd scene to life in a natural, not theatrical, space. It felt so real! It was such an incredible experience with such an incredible actor as the director! 

The field where we had the masterclass

Wow, just now realizing how long this post is. Did not I intend to post such thorough updates like this but hey, I shouldn't have expected anything less from myself! Haha!

Well that's all for now! More to come soon! :)

CHEERS from Oxford!!

I MADE IT!!

I am currently lying on my bed in my gorgeously old room in Oxford. Check it out!!

I landed in the UK at 7:10AM yesterday morning (although it still felt like 2:10AM to me), went through customs (which took nearly an hour UGH), and finally got to my ride that was taking me from the airport to Oxford about an hour away. Other than the long wait at customs, my flights went smoothly and I got to Oxford in all four pieces (me, my big suitcase, and 2 carry-ons)! My experience with customs was, however, brightened by the fact that a little girl in line, maybe 6 or 7 years old, was wearing a Richmond Spiders sweatshirt. It definitely made me smile. #spidersaroundtheworld

Once I arrived, I was first led to the BADA office, where I was given an info packet, and then led to my room. I am still not sure what the section of Magdalen College I am living in is called but we all have come up with a variety of guesses based on how we have heard our British instructors pronounce it. Those pronunciations include "Sir Swiggles," "St. Smithies," and "Smith Swiggins" among others. Thus, GOAL #1 at Oxford: learn the real name of my dorm haha!

After unpacking and a little shopping on High Street, we all had drinks on the Cloisters Lawn seen below and then ate in the Great Hall (pics to come). I met a TON of people last night and even more this morning!

This morning I had my placement audition. I again did my Joan of Arc monologue and thought it went really well. Tomorrow, the groups and plays each group will be working on will be posted. I am super anxious and excited. After the audition, I teamed up with six other students who had auditioned around the same time as me (only one of which I had met preciously) and we spent most of the day together!! We went to the parks around Christ Church, to the Thames River, to The Bear (a pub from year 1242) for lunch where I had great fish and chips, to Bodleian Library, to a pub in a back ally way for dinner call The Turf, and finally, we took a walk around Addison's Walk on our campus and found a beautiful pond around which we sat and talked.

Christ Church

Bodleian Library

Turf Tavern

Pond on Addison's Walk

  ***Interesting side note: we were talking about ethnicities at dinner and I had my friends guess mine and their guesses were, without much/any hesitation, Spanish, Latino, and something Mediterranean. I found that pretty cool! Haha :P

Today has been great and has really settled the good deal of nerves I had yesterday. I'm starting to know my way around and have met a lot of great people. I only hope some of them are in my group. Tomorrow will tell! Fingers crossed!!

Ready to Go!

ONLY NINE MORE DAYS!!!

Tomorrow, we leave for Myrtle Beach, and, from there, I will be flying to London next Thursday. Finally it seems that I have reached an end to my crazy packing venture, and tomorrow morning I will be saying goodbye to my home for 7 weeks. I am getting SO EXCITED! As I gather all my Oxford paperwork, continuously recite my Joan of Arc monologue for my placement audition, and double check that I have not forgotten to pack anything, it is becoming more and more real.

When I arrive in Oxford,  I hope to post pictures of the town, Magdalen College, and my dorm room, so stay tuned later next week for those pictures and more written posts. I am really looking forward to sharing my experiences with you! :)