Acting Course Day Five

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Acting Course Day Five....

We are halfway through our ten week course. In todays class Joe was furious. Or was he only acting? We began with our breathing exercises. Even Dominique, our breathing teacher from France, was scolding us. He loves asking people how many days they practiced. If you say three days he asks in a booming voice, "WHY only THREE?!"
At this point it is smarter to remain silent and let the abuse move to someone else. Besides, Joe likes to yell, "BECAUSE HE'S LAZY!!!!"

After about 20 minutes of breathing. Dato Farida Merican takes our class through a series of fun warm-ups. She is 69 years old and still running around, jumping, producing plays, acting, teaching, and managing two performance art centers in Kuala Lumpur and an Actors Studio in Penang. Joe claims that she will far outlive him. I don't doubt it.

Meanwhile Joe Hasham is truly a world class man of the theatre. He has been in the industry for over 40 years. He starred in a long running television series in Australia during the 1970's about two gay men. He also sang with the sexiest actress and performer of those times, Abigail. Today he is currently involved with nine productions, teaching two seperate acting classes, directing commercials, peforming voice overs, and fullfilling his duties as Executive Director. Damn he's good!

So we all take his class very seriously and i'm sure everyone will be sad when it ends. Thankfully we still have five weeks to improve our skills and to develop our two different plays. We each have two groups to work with on separate little skits.

Joe definately expects us to work outside of class. There is truth that when you really focus on what you are doing, and put in the hours of training, you can get to new levels of understanding that would never have been accessible before. It seems like a test from the Universe to see see how far we want to go...what risks we are willing to take?

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