Incubator practice, Week 3, Jon Karpinos coaching

I let this slide again. I am finding that I am getting more out of classes and practices when I record my notes, but sometimes it’s hard to sit down and put everything into words.

We threw the balls around again and it was so cool when we had six different balls all flying through the air at once. Then we learned that when a softball hits a basketball in midair it can bounce off in an unexpected direction. And we learned that softball is a misnomer. They are actually quite hard. Then we learned that you can toss a wallet around, but that when it hits a basketball in midair the wallet will explode and shower its contents all over the room. (I’ll bring a tennis ball tomorrow night, Jon).

We worked on group scenes and did several of the exercises Jeff Griggs had us doing in the DSIF workshops on ensemble scenework. We first had a brainstorming session where we came up with the worst ever ad campaigns for various products. We all threw out crazy ideas and agreed that they were BRILLIANT! We wound up with some really wild, somewhat disturbing stuff and it was huge fun.

Then we did some three and four person scenes. It’s challenging to try to establish different relationships with several different people in a scene, but I think we all did pretty well. I especially had fun being the teacher who completely loses it with the kids at the zoo (all except the one with ADHD, because he couldn’t help being a pain in the ass).

Then we played seven person scenes. The first one we did was really good. We had great relationships and a really awesome environment. We were in a baseball stadium and we had about four chairs. Kit sat on the back of one and I sat on the seat and with that we all agreed that these were the bleachers. I could really imagine us in the cheap seats of a stadium. That was a really fun and easy scene.

The next scenes we did were not as clear and not as much fun. We were kind of muddled, and we often wound up arguing with each other. That is something I have noticed about our scenes sometimes, and it makes them feel unsatisfying. I hope we can work toward agreement more often.