I Got The Feeling: Our 1st Performance

*Side note: I meant to post this awhile ago, but I've been fighting with Blogger over uploading my videos onto my blog. For whatever reason, it wasn't working, so I finally got the videos on YouTube & now all is good in the 'hood again. lol.

Monday, September 22nd was an excellent day for me on a couple fronts. First, and most importantly, it was a mini-showcase of the work we've done over the past 3 weeks. We heard about this showcase during our 1st week in class. The assignment was pretty simple, a playwright was writing a new play & she wanted us to stage a portion of her brand new play. So we were gonna do a staged reading (prepared by our acting professor), a movement piece (prepared by our movement professor), and a devising piece (prepared by our devising professor). In each class, we've done some intro stuff then went into a couple class periods preparing on this performance, so maybe we've had 2-3 class periods to prepare. Doesn't sound like a lot of time, hun? It isn't at all, but we do have each class for 2 1/2 to 3 hours a session, so we have enough time to make something bearable to watch.

The day finally came, after a few weeks of hard work & a weekend or nervous chatter amongst our small theater circle, and I was amped to do this (because I'm a ham & love to perform, duh). The audience we had for the showcase was a group of theater professors from the US who were attending a conference, which was nice because they were checking out our program & were excited to see us. And to my surprise & peace of mind, Dr. Bradley (the Theater Department Chair at Spelman College) came as part of the conference. I can't tell you how cool it was to see a familiar face from home, but for it to be a brotha that I look up to meant a lot.

We had a luncheon with the professors, then went to prepare for the showcase, then went afterwards to Smock Alley Theater (which The Gaiety School of Acting will be moving into in the coming years) for a tour of the facility & its plans for the future. So, that's the outline of my story, but what I really wanna share with y'all is part of our showcase performance. What I recorded for y'all is our Devising piece. Devising is basically like improv, in the fact that we don't work from a script & come up with a performance through certain inspirations. For this piece, we took 6 words (stillness, waiting, overwhelmed, incomplete, diminish, & despair) and were split into 3 groups of four, with each group having to come up with a piece of physical theater showing us moving from word to word. I recorded the other two group's pieces, since I obviously couldn't of recorded mine. We did have one of our advisers record everything, so hopefully I can get my group's part from her one of these days. Here are the videos: