Week One - Acting & Expect Respect

This week has been crazy. I didn't really realize how much I had gotten myself into until I lived through a week of it. This past week I have done quite a lot and also realized a lot that I have left to do and fast. During my project I am continuing with teaching Acting 1 and co-directing their show that will be performed in the last week of May. Every morning this week I have showed up to help teach and run the class. Mr. L and I have been working on their scenes for their show with them and recently we gave them new scenes from the thriller Veronica's Room. The main focus this week has been on their show, Voices From the High School. The show is multiple scenes and little monologues that connect all of the scenes. We cut a couple of scenes out and based on that and our casting we had to reorganize the entire script. For the beginning of the week I focused on putting together a copy of the script in order which was actually pretty hard to do when you had a monologue and parts of two scenes all on one page that all needed to go to three different places. Then, the focus switched to blocking all of the transitions. Mr. L wasn't able to be at school a lot of the week so I had to do this all on my own and I actually found out on the spot on Wednesday. I had to throw something out there and hope it worked. In the end, in class on Wednesday I blocked all of the transitions for the first half of the show. It's pretty complicated because I set it up so there were three chairs on each side of the stage. When chairs were needed for a scene they came from those chairs. Then, I had to have different people sitting in the chairs watching scenes while people were doing scenes and some people were off stage. I thought this was the best way to do it because my class is mostly freshman and they're always very energetic and not always the best behaved. This way I only had small amounts of people off stage together and then I didn't have a lot of people on stage together for long amounts of time so they don't get bored and chat. All of the transitions new people are entering, exiting, and sitting so it is basically a giant game of musical chairs.

The other part of my project is working with Expect Respect which is a group that during the school year goes around to different schools and youth groups to teach and raise awareness about teen dating violence, abusive relationships, and bullying. I have been a part of this group for two years and this past year I have been one of the two people in charge of the Advisory Panel. I am really involved with the program and it brought me to the idea of creating a retreat that they can use for years to come starting this year. This is designed to help everyone in the program get their feet wet and get to know everyone without the labels of cast member or advisory panel and before jumping into the summer training program. Each week I will be working in the office at JFSA with Dahlia Harris on Monday and Wednesday for about 4 to 5 hours. On Monday I got my own sign in and e-mail and desk to work from. The two days I was there this week I did a lot. I created a survey for feedback from the year to help us prepare both the retreat and the training program for the summer and I sent that out to everyone. I also, sent out e-mails trying to find out who all was available for the retreat so I can plan things out accordingly. Working on the retreat, I created a generic itinerary, booked our location, and figured out our food situation because we have to keep it kosher because we are run through the JFSA.

The location I chose was the Sheep Barn that is owned by Case Western Reserve University so I also had to meet with Ginny who also works at JFSA who is an alumn so she could be our sponsor. Finally, I worked with Dahlia just on minor tasks of getting ahold of members of the group to figure out availability for upcoming performances and I also helped her work on setting things up for our callbacks that we will be having next week for the Expect Respect play.

After all that, I have really learned a lot about office work and how difficult it is to get in touch with over 30 kids and get their availability for certain dates. I also learned a lot about how well I've done over the year of gaining the respect of my students by how well they cooperated when I had to do blocking with them and by how well they treated me this week when I was left on my own to teach them. I was surprised at how much I was actually doing at JFSA and how much I was actually getting of my own and to do on my own. Next week I will hopefully be getting some video to put up from acting class.