April 9 下北沢 Workshop - Rain & Blossoms

Wonderful to have a bunch of new challengers to join some of our returning champions at today's workshop! Some brand new people, some people I've known other places, and folks we haven't seen in a long time. So much fun.

We ran through some very simple scenes and worked to make them interesting through added information - emotion, character, secret knowledge, objects, objectives, voices, lies, and more. So simple an yet terribly challenging. Easiest to improvise these scenes as the reaction to your partner was most important and when your emotion is the same as your character's emotion, that's easy. We worked an old exercise from Uta Haagen where you practice looking for and finding something and then try to play out looking for and finding something when you know where it is. The split between the actor's mind the the character's mind can be very difficult to manage.

After the break we worked scenes from When Harry Met Sally. I'll be doing a different scene from the same movie for Waseda University's open college program starting tomorrow and this was a great chance for me to get some practice. Thank you new challengers and returning champs! Most important was to focus on what we'd practiced in the first part of the workshop - honest

reactions in the moment. We mixed up men's roles and women's roles to see how the reactions might change.

Most of us got to hang out afterward. We ate, drank, and talked about all sorts of things. That's when I finally remembered I ought to take picture...