PHASE #5. why do I always miss the fun things

Somehow, I have a knack for missing the best things.

Suffering from the after-effects of pulling an all-nighter, I couldn’t make it on time for class today as I woke up with a pounding headache and a slight fever that left me bounding in the opposite direction towards the campus clinic instead of the NIE Playhouse as usual.

Yet, from what I’d gathered from the best bunch of classmates ever, class was held in the Blackbox today! The actual Blackbox! Imagine my angst. All the glorious equipment that I could’ve touched and messed with, all the theatre feels and dramatic twirls I could’ve had in that space!

My classmates told me about how they’d put up a mini-performance, a homework piece left over from the previous week. They also further practised the onstage depiction of character relationships, and how to actually work that push-pull factor to ‘make’ your fellow actor do something. Instead of it being a round-robin turn-taking exercise to recite your own lines, actors should in fact listen to one another speak and react accordingly. Actor A, in order to push the plot along to Actor B turning around in dismay, should scream in a way that would in real life cause someone else to turn around in similar dismay.

And the biggest takeaway of the day – that comedy and tragedy are in fact closely related. Who knew that Julius Caesar and Bottom the Ass-head had more in common that they (and we) thought? When Andrew brought it up, everyone was confounded.

Of course, it’s not so simple or difficult to comprehend. Both require great levels of tension in the body and between characters, as we studied in a previous lesson. Furthermore, both must be truthful and rooted in reality to be relatable. Dramatic collapses and piercing laughter may be easy on the eyes in a theatre space, but will fail to evoke genuine reverberation from the audience without a particular sense that this could actually happen. As Andrew commented on the different short pieces, he remarked that it mustn’t all be pretend; that there is a certain difference between acting and performing where the former is simply pretense while the latter is laced with threads of reality.