The common hearsay and grapevine rumours suggest that drama schools are all about tearing young actors apart and then building them back up again in a certain image. It makes them all sound terribly draconian and sinister. It also suggests that each and every day, the students risk being devolved into inert puddles of primordial mud out of which their promethean tutors will cast new personalities better suited to being cast in the next episode of "Neighbours" or the next "Miss Congeniality" sequel. Well, as Monsieur Gershwin once penned, it ain't necessarily so.

 

My personality isn't seriously at risk when i sense my breath enter my ribs, my sternum, my shoulders, my back, my sacrum or my lower abdomen ... though doing this for two hours a day, three days a week for a whole year could be classed as a form of slow, agonising torture.

 

My sense of self isn't under heavy scrutiny when i lie down, hold the big toe on my left foot with my right hand and then thread my right foot through the created loop in such a way as to bring myself into a one-footed standing yoga-cum-ballet pose.

 

Nor is the integrity of my idiosyncrasies under constant attack when i (attempt to) perform forward rolls, shoulder rolls, cartwheels and handstands. Though if any of my fellow students had mistaken me for a gracious mover with great upper body strength, they would have had a change of heart.

 

I'm not trying to glibly downplay the importance of these exercises or suggest that i'm immune to change. No, i just want to demystify the process. There needn't be e moment of epiphany or a moment of direct personal deconstruction. Instead, there's a reason this course goes for three years ... the changes happen surreptitiously,  unconsciously, non-dramatically.

 

Now for some notes on notable classes ...

 

Movement class: in a rather advanced trust game, groups of seven worked together to allow one of their number to achieve various otherwise impossible/difficult tasks (without talking to one another). In other words, one of the group would, without mime or words, get the remaining six people to, for example, carry them through the air in a superman-flying pose; allow them to walk on their hands around the room or up a wall; allow them to somersault in mid-air etc etc. This then became a parody of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Potplant" when two teams of seven would create an improvised fight sequence with the two combatants given the same supernatural abilities usually reserved for Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, Jackie Chan et alia.

 

Voice class: apart from a lot of breath-sensing we have had the opportunity  to watch a brilliantly funny educational video from Norway featuring Bjørn, an ethnomusicologist with a folk-singer haircut and lumberjack moustache who over-enthusiastically orated the importance of rhythm in everyday life in traditional African communities. nothing warms my heart quite like a sincere Norwegian hippy in an anorak. What he said was actually interesting. ... Speaking of Norwegians, there's a Norwegian girl in second year who's so happy there's another Scandinavian in the school that we've taken to speaking only Swedish to each other, much to the mirth and confusion of those around us.

 

Acting class: we've been working on a system called Pulse, which is essentially group improvisations based around certain directions. For example, seven people enter a performance space with the parameters that all they can do is walk, run or stand still. From this, they must try to create an engaging piece of theatre (without any opportunity for planning) based on simple principles of repetition, development, contrast, suspense, climaxes and ensemble work. As the sophistication develops, more actions are included: falling, hugging, pulling one pants down. Of course, if it's warranted and it adds to the development of the piece, we can introduce new elements of our own accord (so a hug can turn into a kiss) or a repeated action of pulling one's pants down can gradually develop into taking one's top off as well (which is why the entire class had already seen me in nothing more then my jocks after only a month). We've now introduced speech as an element, which is far more difficult than you might think because literal meaning is secondary to musicality ... though with Dutch, Italian, Ghanaian, Swedish and English being used, it makes for some amazing sounds.

 

Movement class: walking. We partnered up and imitated the natural walk of our partner as closely as possible until even our faces took on similar expressions. Great fun to do and fascinating to watch people of different body shapes walking in the same way.

 

Acting class: "the shower" exercise is so-named because the inventor thought it should be done as often as one showers. Place a rag or towel on the floor at a distance of about ten metres from a group of actors. One by one the actors assess where the towel lies in relation to themselves, close their eyes, walk forward and attempt to pick it up. Whether they succeed or not, they should carry out the process with complete conviction so that if they miss it an audience would think that they meant to miss it, rather than thinking they made a mistake.

 

Acting class: crying and laughing. having established the necessary breathing and muscular patterns involved in both laughing and crying we worked on seamlessly and believably shifting in between the two. More interestingly, in a group of around fourteen we sat in a circle in a totally dark room and one after the other cried for around two minutes each (while keeping in mind the principles of contrast, development, repetition and suspense). Needless to say, emerging half an hour later from a black room having heard nothing but crying was remarkable.

 

Production class: we have the fabulous task of putting on a hypothetical production. My team of four have decided to mount Steven Berkoff's adaptation of Franz Kafka's "The Trial". We've already had to find a venue, work out cast numbers, produce a design concept, a sound outline and a lighting concept. We'll have to budget the show, work out marketing arrangements and we'll get to learn the tech stuff of lighting and staging a show. No dumb actors here. No, we're being bred as theatre makers! But seriously, my group has definitely taken to sitting around drinks at Degraves St after a day at school in order to discuss to the nth degree the themes, the set, the costumes, the relevance of the piece and all that jazz. It might seem like hot air now but the mission of VCA is to bring actors together to form theatre companies that go out and create new work, so we're on the right track.

 

In other news, i had a very exciting day of domesticity at IKEA yesterday. It even SMELLS like Sweden!! I went along with a couple of other students and we managed to bump into four other VCA kids while we were there, who knew IKEA was the hub of Melbourne student life? At one point i managed to scare a very polite family when, in a moment of temporary insanity, i started loading my purchases into their shopping trolley ... bemused smiles and red cheeks all round. I almost bought some pickled herring but restrained myself.

 

Carl