the case of a glorious night.

last night, my acting class with Joe Hasham was officially concluded. you may remember me mentioning my involvement with this class in 'the acting saga continues'.

anyway, last night was the culmination of the class - we (myself and my fellow 'actors') basically put on a 'presentation'. it wasn't a play. it wasn't a show. it was a 'presentation'.

what we presented was what we have been working on throughout the course of 10 weeks (slightly more actually - but it generally comes up to 10 classes lah).

here is the program for the night.

8 - 8.30 pm: Arrival of guests made up of friends and family.

8.30 - 9.15 pm: The Presentation:- which was made up of ...

1stly, 'Dear Bosie'. this is our interpretation of a 30,000 word letter that the famous Oscar Wilde to his lover, Alfred Douglas whose nickname was, 'Bosie'. of course, the letter we used was an abbreviated version of the original. it's quite difficult to explain what we did, but what we basically tried to do was to convey the letter to the audience with musical accompaniment (i played the guitar - Sheryl Crow's 'Strong Enough' was the music i chose to play) and *appearances (more on this later) so that the audience can 'feel' how Oscar must have felt when he wrote the letter. Or at least, our interpretation of how he might have felt from the extracts of the letter which we presented.

for more info on this whole Oscar Wilde and Bosie ... you may go to http://drake.marin.k12.ca.us/stuwork/comacad/poets/WILDE/bio.html OR this one for more a more detailed explanation: http://members.tripod.com/Barry_Stone/wilde.htm.

so through the Dear Bosie presentation, our aim as a group was to convey the emotions of Sadness, Anger, Disappointment, Love and Closure. once again, this was done via reading the letter aloud with music and appearances.

2ndly, we then performed our very own personal monologues. there are 13 of us and each of us basically related a personal story which has impacted our lives. here, as an audience, you would have been privy to moments of pure and unadulterated truth. some very private and revealing stuff were talked about and shared. through this exercise, we (as students) learned how to express ourselves or more importantly, learned not to be afraid of expressing ourselves.

3rdly, we each did *appearances. this is an exercise where a person would walk out to center stage and using only the body ... from facial expression to posing ... that person would want to convey an emotion.

each of us had the difficult task of conveying 4 emotions ie LOVE, ANGER, SORROW and LUST. this is a difficult exercise, even for seasoned theater performers simply because it's a full and complete exposure of one's self to a bunch of people. and you'd be amazed at what you can discover about someone when that person attempts to 'appear' in front of you as LOVE, ANGER, SORROW and especially LUST. you'd be able to see if someone is insecure about his or herself with any one of those emotions.

4thly, we presented some smaller group skits. there are basically 2 scripts with the same words and we were split into 5 groups. and these scripts, if read directly on paper, in which you are not given any type of context in which there words are supposed to be used - literally mean NOTHING. it was up to us as actors to use our creativity to invent scenarios and give meaning to the words. and i suppose the shock factor here was how different each group interpreted the same words and how absolutely different each scenario was.

and that was it. all in all, i would say it was a good presentation. nothing flashy. just honest, down to earth and cosy. no hamming it up for the crowd. it was more about us than trying to cater to the masses and that was the 'cool' factor about it.

oh well, on a more personal note - the only downer for me was that i really didn't have someone to share the glorious night with. it shouldn't be like that. it should be about self satisfaction and all that jazz right? yeah, but i guess i'm not that self sufficient. i guess for me to feel truly satisfied with something, i need to be able to share my success with someone. and i'm not just talking about a lover...friends to share in with would be ultra cool too, family...you know somebody...

so that when i come home after a glorious night and after i take my shower and get ready to go to bed, i won't wake up the next morning feeling as if 'nothing happened'.

oh well, it was a good night.