My week at drama school.

This time last year I was preparing to take part in a week long acting summer-school at the Guildford school of acting. 

Acting has been a hobby most of my life. Inspired by my mum and step-dads involvement I've been acting in amateur theatre almost constantly since was 8 years old. I even briefly considered applying to drama school before the cost put me off (£10k a Year was just too much and while may be norm for uni now, back then it was only £1.5k per year for a regular BA - so I went and did Media Production instead) 

But my dreams of attending a drama school were able to be (at least slightly) fulfilled when, many years later, I found out they did short summer courses. In the years leading up to a big birthday I floated the idea that paying for the course might be a good present idea for said big birthday to my significant other and a few family members and come my 30th... err, I mean undisclosed big birthday... I had the course booked for early August. 

Prep work included choosing and learning a monologue. so I scoured the various monologue books I could find to come up with something suitable. 

This is not easy. Nothing in these books seemed right. The ones I liked were for characters wildly differing in age from myself and one thing I did know was that it should be believable that you would be playing that role. Eventually I did find a comedy piece I quite liked but I had the nagging worry that it didn't have enough serious emotion in it to stand muster. But I was running out of time and I had to get learning, so I stuck with it. 

The next month's worth of commutes to work were made up of learning this monologue. That's pretty much when I learn lines for any acting I do. If I didn't have 2 hours of commuting on a train a day I honestly don't know when I would learn lines. 

Finally the week arrived and I made my way to Guildford for the first day. The strikingly obvious thing I noticed while waiting for registration was that the average age of attendees on these summer course were more than a decade younger than me. not that I was the oldest student there mind you. There were a couple of guys who looked in their 40s who were there for the singing course and one person I got chatting to in a coffee queue who was a year older than me and there for dance. And once I was registered in my acting class I found out that a couple of the people were only a few years younger than me. It's no doubt that these courses are primarily taken up by a-level students looking to a) try out different drama schools before applying for a full 3 year course (many were going on 2 or three courses at different schools over the summer) and b) to develop skills and learn techniques that would help them in the auditions to those drama school.

But whatever your age don't let that put you off if you're a non-teenage acting enthusiast. It's a worthwhile experience for anyone interested in acting regardless of if you aspire to make it a career or just a hobby, and you will learn a lot. 

Be prepared to be put through your paces though. Every day started with a vigorous effort half an hour warm up. Basically a full on arobics session complete with catchy rhythmic music. At the start of the week it almost killed me, but by the end I was coping much better and I could see that doing this everyday I could actually get quite fit. 

We had a lesson schedule for the week. Days were divided into different sessions covering different acting techniques. We had lessons on Laben movement technique (analysing ways the body moves that can be used in everything from interpretive dance to how your character in a play flicks a piece of lint of his jacket), lessons on Shakespeare performance (damn that iambic pentameter is tricky) , lessons on voice,  (How to use it, how to carry it).

All of these were useful in some way or another but I think the class I gained most from was the 'Actioning' sessions. 

Actioning is a rehearsal technique that aids in interpreting the text and deciding on a performance of it. I'm sure I won't do the technique justice here but, in an effort to sum it up, it's essentially the giving of each of your lines... Well actually each of your characters thoughts (which basically translates to each of your characters sentences) an 'action verb'. Something that could fill the blank in "I ........ you" 

So, "I scold you" or "I caress you" could be examples. These should be the desired effect your characters wants  to have on the person they are speaking to and they should be chosen to achieve your characters 'objective in that scene' 

You can see quite quickly that playing a line in a play with the action 'Scold' would produce a very different reading to 'caress'.

and remember these aren't (necessarily) physical actions. They are the intent behind the word. You can play a line with 'caress' as the action without actually physically caressing the other person. 

That's a very quick summery that doesn't do justice to the full scale of the technique so I'd recommend anyone to read up more on it. It's a very time consuming and often difficult process but you may well find your performances transformed by it. 

Or go take a short course. You may find there are still some slots on this year's summer courses but if not there is alway next year... And that will at least give you some time to hunt out that perfect monologue.