Beginning Acting. Winter quarter Sophomore year 1974. The Creative Imagination.
Letter
Do you remember your attempts at Othello? Horrible! Awkward! Self-conscious, unbelievable -- words without meaning, emotions without motivation -- Why? Because you were not using your creative faculties to become Othello. Your creative faculties were dead. You were a typical acting student -- memorize words, speak them with emotion and that's it --
The objective of the quarter on imagination is to start the creative faculty working again -- to stimulate the creative mind -- to demonstrate what creation is and the glow of it. My exercise worked for me. Scrap it if it didn't work for you. But find it! Did you get people thinking of how their creative minds functioned in childhood & then they got to H.S. & they started to follow the heard [sic]. Did you get your class excited about recapturing this lost faculty? Creating a character is far more difficult than creating a fantasy -- A child can build a universe on the beach sands -- Scatter some objects, fabrics, etc., on the floor. Build a Moor out of them -- While building say he is dark, a different skin, his blood is hot, his heart is warm, passionate, he trusts too much, he loves too much, he is a soldier, a leader, etc. -- Pick the fabrics for each quality -- Devise your own system -- But stir the creative mind!
****
Letter
David,
I can't remember where Complex Oedipus came from! [An article Krause gave me and that I had misplaced--DD] If it is a newspaper clipping probably it came from Lucy's niece in England. If you send it back to me maybe Lucy could identify it. More probably we would need to send it back to Jerry.
Imagination -- Try acting the titles of plays: Gamma Rays...Man in the Moon Marigolds -- alcoholic mother (The college here might have had a good production if they had started with the title) --
a tailor.... a lion.... a Roman Emperor
Or take a title of a play and add other elements in the play --
Rhinoceros ... Paris ... !
Such a process might show students the relation between creative imagination and acting -- Oh yes: Marchbanks (not April or May or August but March) -- an Episcopal minister .... a fireplace or ?
You can't be Marchbanks unless your mind has played with the word!
****
[I'm including this photo because it's the only way I can think of to get facebook to offer it as a thumbnail accompanying these letters as shared status posts on facebook -- DD.]
No comments:
Post a Comment