Surround Yourself With This

        The sets are put away, the costumes in storage, and the actors back home, resting.  It has finally been finished: 7 performances of Honk! Jr. and we are a bit happy, yet most are deeply sad.  I have used today and yesterday to reflect on Honk!.  I made tons of new friends, enhanced my acting skills, and even learned things that no one would guess from theater.  I learned about honesty and how it empowers us, circumstances, which help when understanding the character's viewpoint, and I learned about the power of stepping back as an actor and taking steps in the process of understanding what makes up acting.  This is what I plan to talk about: Acting in Steps.
When I first started acting, I believed you just needed to walk up to the stage, put on a face and then recite some lines, but this is a clever trap.  In fact, Kivan has made it so that we had to step back and break it into steps.  In other words: be aware of your surroundings before going ahead and reciting a line.  You might be pondering now, “Well that’s easy!”  But it’s not, especially when you have to do it for the first time on stage.  So Kivan created an exercise where we look straight at the wall and yet have to keep everyone in your peripheral vision.  Then, we started walking in a circle, but no one could lead it.  It had to be unison, which was quite difficult (especially since I didn’t truly understand it until the performance day.)
On the last performance day, we were getting ready for Poultry Tale, and I was beyond excited.  I had seen some friends and heard they would be coming to watch, so that’s what put me over the edge in my joy.  Finally, the big moment came as we walked to the stage to get into our poses.  The song was going great, and then we came to the part where we scare off the cat.  Normally, we get our “huh” almost exactly on the same time, but people were anticipating, including me, and suddenly the “huhs” started.  Now, probably no one in the audience noticed that we had accidentally said the “huhs” at the correct spot; but, I was a bit flustered.  This was not a big mistake, in my opinion, and nothing to be worked up about.
So why did I share this story?  Well, as actors, sometimes we stop listening and just go with the flow.  People miss their cues or go too early before it’s time.  What would happen if something went wrong in someone’s line, and you just went ahead with your line?  That’s why it is so important to be listening.  If no actor ever listened to what was happening on stage, it would be incredibly confusing.  And, don’t go believing that it is only listening that is a part of our surroundings.  If you just used one sense, you would probably be very confused.   We also need to listen with our eyes.  That is what Kivan was trying to prove by his exercise, which I earlier described.  If you aren’t watching, you might just flop in front of the audience. This proves that, on the mentioned night of Poultry Tale, we didn’t do enough of using both our eyes and our ears.  We need to be listening and looking because otherwise our show would have been nothing.

Jacob Peters
(Snowy)