Annoyance Level Two – Week Six

A Somewhat Brief Aside:
So as the more astute of you might have noticed Week Five of my annoyance classes is suspiciously absent – sadly I had to miss that class in order to make an important (and mandatory) meeting for all iO interns (apparently the intern program is going to be going through some changes – and after every session interns will be up for review and may be let go instead of the old policy of basically a guaranteed offer to return. Also the screening process for new interns is going to be a bit more intense from what I hear).

Also back to the world of the Annoyance for a moment. Enrollment for Level 3 opened up this past Saturday – Sadly I was not able to enroll, so there is a chance I might end up taking a two-month hiatus from Annoyance classes after this session is up (which sucks).
See the thing with the classes at the Annoyance is that once you get to level 3 there are only two classes offered each session (one Thursday night, with the wonderful Susan Messing – and one Tuesday night, with the equally delightful Rebecca Sohn) – So considering that there are 3 sections of level two being offered a third of us are going to have to wait around (though for level 3 if enough people end up on the waiting list and a qualified teacher can be found they sometimes open an extra level). It is important to note that Level 4 and level 5 only offer one section each session – and they have never offered more as the teachers schedule prohibit it (so registration is cut throat).
Susan’s Level 3 class (which is the only one I could take because of my Tuesday night rehearsals) filled up within the first half hour of registrations being open – I only failed to get a slot because their servers crashed and I had to call back, sadly I was just a tad slow calling back.
Still there is a glimmer of hope as I’m currently harassing the director of their training center and calling in favors from friends of mine at the theater to see if they can squeeze me in – so let’s hope.

The Class:
Anyway on to the class itself.

We started off today with the Annoyance staple of warm-up scenes. After of number of these Rich had us all spread out across the room, leaving ourselves as much space as we could in between everyone. He then told us we were going to be doing a big switch Character exercise. Rich would tell us to start and once he did we were to snap into a character and start a vocalizing (basically either talking to ourselves or having an imaginary scene by ourselves). At some point he would call switch and we’d have to instantly snap into another character and rinse and repeat until he called scene. All in all we inhabited each character for around 30 seconds or so each – for a total of 30 switches.
Afterwards Rich went around and asked each of us how it had felt going through that many characters – if we noticed any patterns in ourselves – and how we discovered new characters. For me it was almost always through physicality – whatever position or motion I found myself in when he yelled switch I morphed into a new character inspired by how it made me feel (leading with my body and letting my mind follow a little).

Next Rich had us all form a back line and told us we were going to be doing a character gauntlet. One person would step out and then be in 10 rapid-fire short scenes with other players. Each scene the person running the gauntlet was to initiate the scene and had to vary up their characters as much as possible from scene to scene. After three or four scenes Rich would pause the action and give the player a challenge for the remainder of the scenes – something vary up about their character choices.
We sadly ran out of time before everyone got to participate – but I was the last one to go. The Feedback Rich gave me (my challenge) was to really try and vary the speed at which I spoke in scenes – as dramatically as possible. He also noted that the majority of the characters I had played so far all tended to have very smooth movements to them and to try and really play with the rhythm of how I moved as well.

All in all it was a very fun class – as I love doing this sort of character work (being forced to try and come up with 40+ different characters is always challengingly fun) and is one of the reasons I love the annoyance approach so much, because it is so rooted in finding a character instantly.