I made a reassuring discovery earlier: The director my oral reasearch presentation is on is French, and I never really registered his name at first. I kept thinking "Jacques Cousteau," which made me feel very silly. I was quite glad to look back at my assignment sheet and find out that his name is Jacques Copeau. Three cheers for not being as ditzy as I feel!
On a slightly more "Oh, Nita" note, it's just after noon, but I feel totally Monday-morning'd. Because of daylight savings time, I woke up after 1:00 yesterday, and so I didn't go to sleep until 2:30 last night. I am now very tired. Getting out of bed didn't seem like a priority to me this morning. When I finally did get up, I stood in front of the mirror and looked at my pajama pants as if they were the weirdest thing ever. When I realized what I was doing, I left my bedroom, but, instead of going into the bathroom to put in my contact lenses, I stood outside of it, poking the basebaord-type molding around the doorframe. I even said "poke." I have no idea why this seemed like the thing to do.
Miraculously enough, I was 5 minutes early for class. I laid on the floor on my stomach (acting classroom--no desks or tables), and my prof dropped the presentation schedule on my back. I made a noise and looked up, and he was looking at me funny. But I was there in time to learn about Stanislavski! I still don't get Method acting, though. There must be a reason it's called "Method," but there seems to be only one thing to it, all the ways I've ever heard it described.
My Ligeti paper went well enough, but I could not figure out the pattern for the Piano Etude #9. So I turned that to my advantage and said that the randomness was the main device used to make the piece "ametric," as I termed it. I juxtaposed the random but existing emphases of the etude with the continually unemphasized (and continually emphasized, in the B section) contralpunctal pulse stream of the string quartet. *pats self on head* Even if it's not what the prof wanted me to get at, I think it merits a paper. As I said in my conclusion, if music is sound over time (and people have already asked what the requirements are for the sound), then Ligeti asked what the requirements are for the time.
Watch me fail... But at least I got the concept of the ametricness from the performance notes, so I can't be *that* off.
I'm putting off going to the library to get books on Copeau because I don't think I can stay awake through a day's worth of reading, much of it in French. I think I'll compromise by doing online research today so that I can focus my book readings tomorrow. Thank God this doesn't have to be a scholarly paper, nor must the sources be scholarly. Our bibliography is supposed to include anything we found helpful, and I asked about the scholarly requirements of the sources to be sure. To Wikipedia!
Oh, and lastly, I got my first choice for the female actor for my 383 final scene, but everybody wanted, like, four males (well, two people wanted four males, but that's still 8 males when only about 9 auditioned and 11 other directors also need male actors), so I backed down completely on that front. I wound up e-mailing Nathan to get him to ask Andrew Henry if he'd be interested. Nathan said he'd pass along the message, but I haven't heard back yet. I e-mailed him again this morning to say that I needed to know soon, because I'm starting to worry. The actress I cast has a voice recital three days after the performance of the scene, so the last week can't be intensive rehearsal, which means that we need to get started soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment