9 augustus 2017

Reisblog | Week 4 t/m 7 in London



Okay! First I have to apologize for three things. One: as you might have noticed it has been a whole month since my last blog. I can be short about that, I was quite occupied with a lot of awesome and crazy stuff which I will tell you about in a minute! Second: This will probably be an monstrous long blog. Three: I’m writing this in (probably not perfect) English! It just felt weird having had this amazing experience with some of the best people in the world and not being able to exchange my thoughts with them. So just in case one of you want to read this, here it is in my verrrryyy best English! 😉


So! What the hell have I been up to then??

Well the first week of this awesome month I’ve spent with my best friend and we saw a crazy amount of shows together (Ohyea, my bank account hated me after this week). The highlights were without a doubt:

-Lady day (a musical about Billy Holliday played by the astonishing Audra McDonald). Of course I knew this woman was good since she won 6 Tony awards, but I couldn’t imagine how good, good was, because OMG she was good!!! This one woman show one-womaned me on the edge of my seat at all times! Amazing.

-Matilda (of course) This is one of my favourite shows ever, so seeing this for a second time wasn’t a waste of money at all!!

-Hamlet (starring Andrew Scott) Of course, being a huge Sherlock fan, I was already extremely excited to see Mr Moriarty himself play. But luckily he did perform very very well live too! He made Hamlet super vulnerable, impulsive and emotional. He seemed constantly in the moment which was awesome to see!



And then Hell broke loose! I’m kidding of course 😉 But as I told before I would attend the Guildhall summer school! And cheesy as it might sound, these 3 weeks were kinda the best  3 weeks I ever had!! I can’t possibly describe the experience with the right words, but I’ll try my very best anyway.

I didn’t know anything about this school when I started. I actually were a little afraid I maybe wouldn’t learn new things or wouldn’t be challenged because it would be “just” a summer school. Boy was I wrong! The very first lesson actually already proved me the opposite. We had a voice lesson and talked about “breath.” I thought, having had quite a few lessons about that subject, I would know how to breathe properly by now. But then we all walked around the room and the teacher asked us to stop and stare one another in the eyes. Then he asked were our breath was. And be damned, my breath was sky high. He was right. We humans kinda don’t allow ourselves to fully breathe. Especially when we are aware others are looking at us. This might sound kinda silly and obvious at the same time. But for me at that moment it was an eye-opener. Even having had quite a view acting lessons and being used people watching me. I still got a million things to learn. I’ve learned a lot over the last few years. I have developed some good and creative ideas about theatre, but I’m not there yet. I really feel I still need to learn some craft. And that craft starts with… Jup, with: breathing!


screen acting! My good that's hard!
But of course the learning didn’t stop after that insightful moment. Every day was split into two sections. One half we had lessons, the other half project rehearsal. The lessons were super diverse. We had text, movement, impro, puppetry, screen acting, stage combat and so on… Oh and of course I mustn’t forget: period dance (which is basically medieval dancing) and TANGO! To show of our new learned fabulous dancing skills we also had a dance night where every acting group danced together, which I thought of as a hilarious evening! 

"The men go in and they calp..."
I'm never the "showing of looks" kinda girl,
but I am quite proud of the tango outfit I bought!

The other half of the day we spent rehearsing. Everybody had brought some material to work on; some scenes, songs, poems. We then mixed everything up to make one big hysterical and quite hilarious show. It was quite a long time ago for me to act and sing (and ohyea I even danced! Jup no kidding, a full-on chorography of “You can’t stop the beat!” After every run I needed a few oxygen containers… but let’s no talk about that!) And omg how wonderful it was to play again! I didn’t even realize how much I had missed it!

As I said before I didn’t know anything about this school, but as it turned out the way they teach here felt so right to me. Guildhall is all about the ensemble. About a group of people working together to tell a story. And share that story with an audience. It’s about an actor being human, about breathing, being brave, about being in the moment as much as possible. It’s about craft and working hard hard hard and disciplined, but all with love. I can still feel my eyes glistening when some of our teachers or directors talked about this stuff. Because I just couldn’t agree more about all those things. And damn how I want to learn more in this way! We were all treated as professionals and were expected to behave as such. Being late or going to the bathroom during rehearsal was simple not exactable. There was so much commitment from all the teachers and from the students! I loved every single minute of it.


Puppetry! Ohyea!
And of course with all this philosophy it simple isn’t possible not to connect as a group as well. And omg how I loved every single person in my group. On day two everybody got to sing there song for the first time. And after a few songs everybody started crying and didn’t stop. To do all this work, you have to put yourself out there and be vulnerable. Which everybody dared to do. There were so many great moments were you could see somebody managing to do something they didn’t know they could do or dared to do before. This was so amazing to witness. And I also felt it myself. Especially with the song I chose to sing. The song is called: Astonishing (form little women) and is basically, about... well, about being Astonishing. And to be honest I didn’t feel that astonishing in the beginning. I haven’t felt astonishing for a long while. And during this amazing three weeks, learning from these amazing teachers and meeting these amazing people I got to feel Astonishing again. So as one of our directors said: “No way back now!”

lots of love!!




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