Weeknotes 2024 W44: Frustrating performance

October 28​–​November 3, 2024
 
1300 words

Quick bits:

I had my first public theatre performance, but the whole performance, along with the acting course that preceded it, was overall a frustrating disappointment.

First, this acting course had a near-total absence of core acting technique. There was no mention of stakes, super-objective, scene objective, obstacles, conflict, moment before, given circumstances, tactics, actions, beats, or subtext.

This course is really about formalistic acting, i.e. doing the right movements on the stage, the right gestures, all at the right time. It is superficial and hollow. It is a make-believe version of what acting is. It very much is not what I wanted.

I signed up for this course thinking that any exposure to the stage would be beneficial, allowing me to practice my craft. That did not really work out.

Secondly, the written scene material we worked with was just no good. Some exercise scenes were so badly written that I found them barely performable.

For the final performance, I got assigned scene from a play. Or rather: a snippet of a scene, with the beginning and end missing. It’s tough to perform something that is not anchored — and, in my opinion, also an exercise in futility.

Another problem with this scene snippet is that the writing was chock-full of errors: grammatical, content, and punctuation errors that were so bad that it changed the meaning of the dialogue.2 I attempted to be helpful, and provided my teacher with a corrected version of the scene, obtained from the published play. To my surprise, though, I got a nasty reaction from the teacher, who for a while insisted on performing the broken version anyway.

I was also requested to do a second scene, which also had a bunch of problems. I said no, for the simple reason that I did not want to have yet another argument with the teacher.3

On several occasions during this course, I considered quitting. I stuck with it, in large part because quitting would have sucked for my scene partner; it’d have been a selfish move.

Do I regret taking the course? Yes and no. I now know what to watch out for when taking acting classes in the future. That is a valuable negative learning experience. Apart from that, I don’t think I got much out of it, alas.

Some former acting classmates suggested finding a space to regularly rehearse, all together. I like this idea, and I had already put in some work to prepare exercises for potential occasions like these.

Unfortunately, rehearsal space is hard to get. Rooms are either fully booked, or prohibitively expensive. It makes no sense to rent a room for rehearsal if the hourly rate of the room makes it more expensive than an actual acting class!

I would not mind having people over at my place, but I feel that rehearsing at a home (rather than a proper rehearsal room) is not going to work well. In terms of layout, my home also is very much not a good fit.

Ideally, rehearsal rooms have some basic equipment, like a table and chairs. That also is already a lot to ask, unfortunately.

If a reasonably priced rehearsal room becomes available, I’ll grab it. But for now, my focus will be on taking acting classes as I have done in the past.

I’ve been trying to get the dark mode design for my web site to look good. It’s not quite working; I find it bland and sad. Designing for dark mode is hard.

I have made some technical improvements, though. Only recently did I find out about the light-dark() CSS color function, which simplifies the code for my site a great deal:

:root {
  --color-page-fg: light-dark(
    var(--blue-800),
    var(--gray-100));

  /* [snip] */
}

I also only recently found out about the prefers-contrast CSS media feature, which I’ve used to increase my site’s contrast when the operating system’s “increase contrast” or “high contrast” setting is turned on:

@media (prefers-contrast: more) {
  :root {
    --color-page-bg: light-dark(
        var(--white),
        var(--gray-980));

    /* [snip] */
  }
}

The difference is subtle, but worth it, I think.

Entertainment:

Links:

Entertainment links:

Tech links:

  1. See also: Are week­notes ever edited? ↩︎

  2. There also were a bunch of spelling errors, which I can excuse because, in the end, they don’t matter; you can’t hear spelling errors. ↩︎

  3. I have no idea where the broken versions of these scenes come from. It’s easy to find the authoritative source of the plays, as published. Why would you opt to not use the real source material? ↩︎

  4. Alan Wake II (Remedy Entertainment, 2023), published by Epic Games Publishing. ↩︎

  5. Alan Wake II (Remedy Entertainment, 2023), published by Epic Games Publishing. ↩︎

  6. Shirley Jackson, We have always lived in the castle (London: Penguin, 2009). ↩︎

You can reply to this weeknotes entry by email. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
If you like what I write, stick your email address below and subscribe. I send out my weeknotes every Sunday morning. Alternatively, you can subscribe to the web feed.