Our timetable informed us our morning would begin with an improvisation class for the first half of the day. I was petrified. Improv? Sounds like a good opportunity for me to embarrass myself in front of 38 new friends. I like to think of myself as having a good sense of humor, being witty sometimes, and occasionally coming out with a great joke. But put me in front of an audience and it’s like the English language vanishes from my brain. So an improv class sounded a bit scary.

I should have known it would all be fine. I had forgotten, of course, that improv isn’t just being funny and getting laughs. Improv can help you build a character and build an ensemble. Our improv class was AWESOME.

(This is when the blog will get pretty hippy-dippy sounding for all my non-theatre friends. And every entry is going to start sounding like nerd central. I’ll try to keep it brief and just capture the highlights but I apologize in advance.)

In the improv class we did a number of exercises and all were great. It was so refreshing to be in a room of people who were committed to doing the work. During warm ups and the exercises, there wasn’t anyone in the corner rolling their eyes, clearly thinking what we were doing was silly or stupid. Instead, every person jumped at the chance to work and committed fully to whatever the task at hand was. This is a good group of people who should prove fun to work with over the coming months.

After improv, we got some lunch and headed back for another lecture by Rodney. I think this is our last Rodney lecture for a while which is a shame. I love that man. He is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met yet has an incredible sense of humor. Much like Shakespeare himself must have been, Rodney can go from spouting a beautiful piece of wisdom to telling a ridiculously dirty joke or asking an actor to put the f-word in front of any other word beginning with an f in a monologue. We all had a good laugh today over a little language difference between the US and England. In the US, when you hit someone in a car from behind, we call it rear ending. Well, over here, it most definitely does NOT mean to hit the back bumper of someone’s car. Ok, ok, but in all seriousness, he’s wonderful. Over the course of the afternoon we discussed the differences between editions of Shakespeare’s work and worked our way through act one scene four of Henry VI. It took us just about three hours to work through the whole thing, starting and stopping to swap out actors for each role, discuss the meter, discuss vocab words, and much, much more. The pages of the script that I have are covered in notes. What was especially educational was that everything we worked through can be applied to any other scene we need to analyze (though some of the stuff Rodney pointed out I never would have found even if I stared at the scene for a million years). Queen Margaret makes a formidable speech in that scene and I was one of the people who got to work part of it on its feet. It was so much fun and I am officially obsessed with Margaret’s character. My ideas for my thesis are running rampant around my head but, again, a story for another time. Here’s the section I worked but I highly encourage looking up the rest of the scene. It’s really something else.

Brief background: Richard, Duke of York has tried to usurp Henry VI through war, after promising to allow Henry VI to live out his reign and then Richard and his family could take control. Margaret, Henry VI’s wife, and her lover, Clifford, have defeated Richard and his army. Clifford killed Richard’s young son and now Margaret and Richard meet on the battlefield. Margaret makes Richard stand upon what is probably a head of one of his soldiers or possibly even the head of his son. She then ruthlessly mocks him and torments him.

What! was it you that would be England’s king?
Was’t you that revell’d in our parliament,
And made a preachment of your high descent?
Where are your mess of sons to back you now?
The wanton Edward, and the lusty George?
And where’s that valiant crook-back prodigy,
Dicky your boy, that with his grumbling voice
Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies?
Or, with the rest, where is your darling Rutland?
Look, York: I stain’d this napkin with the blood
That valiant Clifford, with his rapier’s point,
Made issue from the bosom of the boy;
And if thine eyes can water for his death,
I give thee this to dry thy cheeks withal.

I bet you all didn’t know that reading my blog you’d get a little Shakespeare education as well! And I bet you all appreciate it oh-so-much. (Really I have visions of everyone scrolling past all the monologues. I’m not offended, really I’m not. You’re just missing out haha)

Rodney’s lecture ended right about 5:30 and we had a bit of a break. Then, we met with two members of the Student Council at LAMDA. They gave us some information about LAMDA and London and we could ask them absolutely anything we were wondering about. Both of them were incredibly nice and told us to not be scared to meet the rest of the students at the school. There is a party at LAMDA on Friday to welcome everyone back for the term. It should be nice to meet students from other programs there.

Now I am back in my room and still can’t believe this is my life for the next few months. I apologize for sounding like a broken record… This is just exactly what I was hoping for and more and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be here.

Until next time!

Cheers!