"Going for It" by Noelle Mestres

I’ve become addicted.

I HAVE to take Step III: Basic Scene Study.

I had no idea how involved I would get in the world of learning to act. I’ve embarked upon something that has captured me completely. In Step II: Acting with Text, we have worked and worked a portion of a scene from a play. Each week we performed and with Sarah Harlett’s help have played with and worked on how to react to our scene partners and bring the stakes for each character to life in the scene. I’ve been most helped by the gentle, insightful guidance of Sarah and the safe environment she has created for us while we totally put ourselves on the line each week and do things that, frankly, I’ve never done in front of people before.

For me, it’s been all about dropping self-consciousness and just going for it. I have found that the writing exercises we’ve done helped me immensely in terms of really getting into the head of my character. I’m amazed at how rehearsing lines and re-reading the scene [and the play] helped reveal more and more about the characters and, really, about myself. One day after a writing exercise in class I just GOT where my character was coming from. It’s like I could feel it in a way that I hadn’t up to that point ... and that was after reading the script, by then, about 3 times (!). I had fun with having memorized my lines. Once they were in ... they were in. This freed up the rest of me to work on really being my character ... or at least giving it my best shot.

I went to Freehold’s website the other day to get ready to sign up for Step III and I re-read: “Explore the You You Don’t Know”; whoa ... no kidding!

If you’ve ever thought of doing this ... do it.