10/09/18 First day!

Today marks the first day of my Level 3 UAL acting course. I was apprehensive about today as this is my second college and I was afraid it would be as awful as the last one. However, some comfort to me is that everyone would be feeling some of the same things that I was.

To begin the day we did gelling exercised to get us comfortable within the group. We started with a hand guiding exercise. We were put in pairs, A and B, A put their hand in front of B’s face and B had to keep their face level with A’s hand at all times following where they moved it. For the second exercise we formed two circles facing each other. The inner circle had to think of two conversation lines, mine were “Alright beautiful, what brings you round here?” and “Do you know anywhere around here where I can hide plutonium?” The outer circle rotated after improvising around one of those lines. After this activity we walked around the space and our teacher, Rob, shouted out a number. We then had to get into groups of that amount. The final number was seven, once we were in those groups we were given a piece of paper and a pen. Each group was given either ‘Hopes’, ‘Fears’, or ‘Skills’ and were told to fill the piece of paper with words related to the title, later to be read out. Our group received ‘Skills’. Listed below are some words written from each category.

SKILLS:

• ·         Observation (the world around you)
• ·         Confidence
• ·         Awareness
• ·         Discipline (of observing and respecting other actors)
• ·         Thinking outside the box

       FEARS

• ·         Getting it ‘wrong’ (we must learn to embrace our mistakes)
• ·         Being judged
• ·         Not making friends
• ·         Workload
• ·         Performance anxiety

HOPES

• ·         Friends
• ·         Openness
• ·         Good teachers
• ·         Learn new techniques
• ·         Interesting scripts

As the hopes and fears were read out it made us realise we all shared the same anxieties and hopes coming into our first day. I was glad we were eased into the course with getting to know people and becoming more comfortable with each other. I left today’s lesson looking forward to tomorrow’s.