Acting is Hard!

As our English class read Romeo and Juliet and other sources of acting, now I feel a lot more comfortable than before. Before I take this class, I had no relationship with acting, staging, or directing. Maybe last year's winter musical would be the only one experience of staging but I did not act there, so technically I did not know any. Acting was what I always have been interested in, so I like acting in our class, and because I like acting, I started liking staging and directing my own scene. Especially being a group and making or modifying a scene were really fun for me. 

While I act and direct the scene, an easy thing to do was line making. Line is one of the most important factors of performance because it is the direct way to convey character's emotion. For me, distinguishing between relatively not important line and important line (which have to be said in order to make the story flow smooth) was pretty easy. When I think about the large story, it is very straightforward that some lines must be said, and some lines are not necessary. For example in Act 2 Scene 6 of Romeo and Juliet, there is a line said by Friar Lawrence "These violent delights have violent ends. And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, which as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness and in the taste confounds the appetite. Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so". In this case, the line after "violent ends" is just long describing of violent ends, which is not necessary in terms of story. After eliminating what I get is "These violent delights have violent ends. Therefore love moderately". This way, it is easy to understand and more direct. 

The hard part for me was line saying. It is ironic. Especially Romeo and Juliet, I think that line saying becomes harder because of hard language. As the language is harder, saying line without mistake and with emotion is so hard. Also in order to add some motions while I act, it is better to memorize my lines, but because of the language I usually can not do that. However that is what makes me motivated. Last time when we watched the other class' scene, their fluency and naturalness made me want to be better. If I could understand the whole language, speak perfectly, and put my full emotion when I act, I definitely will improve in the future. 

In my opinion, a good scene is made up of (if it is a scene with more than one person) characters' active interaction and perfect interpretation, and clear line speaking and effective movement. Characters' active interaction will keep audiences awake and entertained, and make them fully put themselves into the performance, and in order to do that, their perfect interpretation about the story has to be on the basis because they must know what they are acting and what they need to express. In addition, line needs to be clearly spoken otherwise audiences will have no idea what the actors are talking about and they will get no sense about the story. Effective movement is also really important because it will be used along the line speaking to effectively express what they want to say, and for audiences it makes the scene more interesting to watch.

I still need a lot more practice and experience to improve and I really hope that I will improve through this class.