The Music and the Mirror

What an incredible week. It was on of the most amazing weeks of my whole life. I loved so much of it. I can’t believe how wonderful this program is and how much I love the people that I’m doing it with. I’ve been having such a fabulous time I can hardly contain my excitement.

On Tuesday we started the day with our vocal technique class. Our teacher Marie, is a sweetheart. She is a really great teacher in musical theatre and technical voice. Unfortunately we didn’t spend a lot of the class doing things, but we did a really great breathing exercise at the end of the class. Then we went to straight into our vocal repertoire class. The teacher, Gail, immediately introduced herself and sort of half explained the course. I’ll have to fully describe it another time, because I have a lot of other things to say in this post. But after the intro, we started on our first ensemble number… “Oklahoma”. Personally, I find that really exciting because we were working on the beautiful choral number at the end of the show; it is one of my favourite parts. Then we went to grammar, which is boring, but necessary.

After lunch we had Music Theatre Vocal Performance, which is so far my favourite class. I love it. The whole class gets to watch Marie work with one of the other kids in class. She is an incredible teacher and a wonder to watch. I can’t wait till I get to sing, but I still haven’t had a chance yet. I really want to go next Thursday, so I’ll tell you next week how it goes.

Our last class of the day was our Dance Performance class. We did a lot of broadway style jazz music. We started a routine to a Kristen Chenoweth song, that I don’t remember the name of. I had a blast in that dance class. It was so much fun. I really liked the teacher; he was very…. Energetic.

Then came Wednesday, which started with Level 1 Jazz for me. It was quite a fun dance class. It was a lot more fluid and lyrical than I imagined, but I had a great time. We also did a routine to “Man in the Mirror”. After that we had an Independent study period, which is pretty self explanatory.

We had lunch and then went straight to improv class. The teacher was really hilarious. She basically told us that everyone is crazy on some level and then we proceeded to trash the classroom during a very eye opening exercise. We did have to clean it up afterwards, but it was totally worth it.

After that was Pop class. I don’t want to go into details for Pop class until next week, so you’ll just have to wait until then. The day ended with Voice and Text class, which was interesting, but we didn’t learn very much in the first class. There was a lot of introduction. I’ll tell you guys more about it when I know more about it. So that was our Wednesday. I think it was fun, but so far Tuesday is still my favourite.

Thursday was the longest day so far. History of Western Theatre was our first class and I found the first hour pretty boring. Then after we had a little break in the class the teachers showed us a clip from a play known as Marat/Sade, if you’ve heard of it. It was a really intense clip that showed a lot of insane asylum patients started up a riot. It was pretty graphic and extreme. Then we had one of the most incredible class discussions I’ve ever had. Everyone had different feelings and opinions on the clip and the play itself, which is meant to be a study of the sexual pleasure of pain and carnage. It was pretty intense and it definitely made the class a lot more interesting.

After that crazy class I went to Stagecraft, which seems like a pretty easy course. It’s only an hour long, so the teacher didn’t get to say much. Then we had dance performance with an amazing Jazz teacher. She has the more amazing hardcore warm-up that still has my abs hurting. We also did a really lyrical routine to a song called, “Jar of Hearts”

Then there was Friday. It was kind of a nice and easy day today. Ballet was this morning and it was nothing more than your standard ballet class, complete with bar and center work. The teacher, Gillian, doesn’t do any specific style, she kind of likes to do a mix of them and I found that I really like that. After ballet we had Ear Training, which seems like another easy course. I’ll tell you more about that after Monday, when I’ve had my second Ear Training course. Computer Skills was right after that and I found that it didn’t seem too complicated. We didn’t get into the details of the course really and the teacher made us all do a powerpoint presentation of ourselves…which I thought was a little juvenile, but I still had fun doing it and looking at other peoples presentations.

The last class of the day was Acting Technique, which I was the most interested in. Unfortunately for me, we didn’t spend a lot of our first class doing much acting. We all introduced ourselves to each other and the teacher. Then we basically just told everyone a little bit about ourselves and that took an hour and a half. It was still a lot of fun. I learned some things about my new friends that I didn’t know before and that was really exciting. The teacher, Greg Peterson, is amazing so far and I can’t wait to learn more from him.

So that was my week, in the smallest amount of words possible. My brain is about to explode. I think that next week I might do an update on Tuesday and Friday. Then I can fit in all the stuff that I do this weekend and a lot more of the things we do in class. Thanks to you all for reading. I’m so happy to have all your support and I’ll write again on Tuesday!!