Annoyance Level Two – Week Three

We started off class today as per usual wit a series of open warm-up scenes to get the juices flowing.
After a number of these Rich had us pause on the Back line and posed a question to us:

What is Heightening?

And: How can you Heighten your Character?

The three answers we came up with for the latter questions were to focus investing more in our Physicality and Emotions or to focus on the idea of Repetition (finding patterns our characters had established and keeping them alive: be it a certain phrase or sound, nervous ticks, reactions, etc)

The rest of the class focused on heightening.

Rich had us all stay in a line on the back wall and picked one person to start off. They were to say a simple line dialogue: “I’m here to stay.” Then the person next to them has to repeat the line while heightening it in some way: “I’m here to stay, mom and there’s nothing you can do about it.” This then continues down the line till everyone has gone – each person adding on to the line heightening it in some way.

After everyone had gotten to start off a line in the above exercise Rich had us grab a seat and asked for one person to get on stage. That individual was then asked to say a line of dialogue and then repeat it five times (each time heightening it in some way).
After this had happened another player joins her on stage and a scene starts where the first person has to use those five lines as their first five lines of dialogue. The player joining them can respond however they want – but is encouraged not to tailor their choices to the lines they know are coming.

After everyone had completed this exercise we had run out of time.

We left class thinking about these ideas:

There are a lot of different ways to heighten in a scene
Often reinvesting emotionally in something can breathe new life into a scene
It’s not what you say it’s how you say it
Calling people crazy (on drugs, etc) can be a weak move if done out of fear or confusion – However played strongly & deliberately on both ends it can be a powerful choice and a fun scene.