"Conceal me what I am and be my aid for such disguise as haply shall become the form of my intent."--Twelfth Night 1.2, William Shakespeare 

During the last few weeks of my journey at LAMDA, I will take on yet another disguise: Viola in Shakespeare's comedic Twelfth Night. However, it's a bit thought-knotting because I'm a girl playing a girl who says she'll pretend to be a eunuch but really just disguises herself as a messenger boy. Typical Shakespeare, right? And who better to direct my peers and me in this puzzling play than Phil, a young and retro-dressing director who graduated from LAMDA.  Phil's approach towards the text is very similar to that of my other directors here: focus on the clarity and meaning of the text. From there we work on movement in the space, relationships between characters, and all the other sparks that add to the ultimate flash of the performance.  His approach is very academic and we often read a scene at least 3 or 4 times through before we get up on our feet with scripts in hand. Before you read through a scene with Phil, you better make sure you know the meaning of everything your character says--or at least by the second read-through! LAMDA will be renovating their building next year due to a lack of room for all of its many courses; in the meantime, this means that we get to rehearse just a tube stop away in a beautiful church with a massive rehearsal space.

We take advantage of this grand space in our warm ups when we play (what I call) "Steal the Bacon," a game we used to play in 7th grade Physical Education with Coach Carlisle--it's much less dangerous now that we're not all armed with field hockey sticks.  However, I did receive quite a mocking from my peers as they exclaimed how Southern "Steal the Bacon" sounded...I shall now be called Miss Katie Maybelle forever.  Phil set our play in the '80s, a flashy and bold time period that meshes well with the three main traits of the play: drunkenness, vanity, and love. Let me begin with the first:

1. Drunkenness: The play is called Twelfth Night because it is the twelfth night after Christmas Day, so basically everybody has been partying for twelve days straight. In this play Viola either magically makes for a good looking girl and boy-in-disguise or everyone around her may be a little too tipsy to be seeing things quite so clearly. It would also seem that in Illyria, the coastal setting of the play, people are of a different breed: they don't just feel emotions, but emotions seem to consume them. This kind of reckless and grandiose emotions we most easily associate with characters who have popped a cork or two.

2. Vanity: Talk about confidence (and that's the nice way of putting it)! Even though the beautiful Olivia refuses to love the handsome Duke Orsino, they are truly a match made in heaven--the two of them could just look in mirrors the entire time and be perfectly content. Meanwhile, Feste is too proud of his continuous puns and pranks, which catches hold of Sir Andrew, Sir Toby, and Maria as they are all too confident in their ability to pull the ultimate and meanest prank on Malvolio (Can you blame them? It works!). Last, Viola doesn't even appear to have any qualms or worries about pretending to be a boy (...has she done this before?) and is extremely confident that she can convince anybody in Illyria that she is in fact a guy.

3. Love: Forget love triangles, in this play we're practically dealing with love any-geometrical-shape-with-many-many-sides. Olivia refuses Orsino but loves Cesario who is really Viola who loves Orsino who loves Olivia who loves Sebastian who she thinks is Cesario but Malvolio thinks Olivia loves him. Yeah, that's what I mean.

Even though most people of my generation may be more acquainted with the teenage girl movie version of the play, "She's the Man" with Amanda Bynes, I've learned that with an energetic time period, a hip director, and getting down to the basics (see #1,2,3 above), this play is timeless for every generation...oh, and also: don't pretend to be something you're not.

It's hard to be a man...when you're not.
--picture from She's the Man

"On Saturday we went to the ballet
The men had abs; 'twere better than okay." 

 --Julie and Katie's Iambic Pentameter Phrase for Applied Voice Class, inspired by the Vienna trip

You may have seen the copious amounts of photos on Facebook, but you have yet to hear the complete story of our journey to Vienna, Austria. Let's be clear: this was a speed round trip. No meandering or lolligagging; when you're in a country for less than 48 hours it's go time! Let me introduce you to my travel companions: Julie, a sassy but caring and loving drama major from NY who sports bright red lipstick almost every day, and Sarah, a blonde-gone-ginger who carries with her the laid-back San Francisco vibe she's grown up with.  Plus me. The ultimate travel posse has been united! One of the amazing parts of a gap year is the speed with which you make decisions. About two weeks ago the three of us had a conversation that sounded something like this:

Hey. Want to travel somewhere?
Yeah, but where?
OMG VIENNA.
I'm in.
Ditto!

That's where we first hatched the plan, and then the hotel booking, airplane tickets, bus tickets, tickets for the ballet came later; as always with teenagers and young adults, the big ideas first, the necessary logistics later.  Our adventure started on Friday at 10:50 AM in Stansted Airport in London (we had woken up 4 hours earlier though to catch a bus to the airport); our flight would take us to Brno, Czech Republic and from there we were to take a 2 hour bus ride to our final destination, Vienna.  Since we're students, we were going cheap for all the transportation, so we decided to roll the dice and put our lives in the hands of Ryanair, a notoriously shoddy Irish airline.  The tickets are super cheap for Ryanair flights since they make all their money off of the fine print fees that nobody reads when they agree to the Terms & Conditions flyer.  So, if you don't print out your boarding pass before you arrive at the airport, Ryanair fines you £70 even though your ticket may only have been £50.  Keeping that in mind, you can be sure we were on top of our printed boarding passes.  Turns out, even though the bus ride from Brno to Vienna didn't cost much, we traveled like royalty! We received the most delicious hot chocolate (I'm ashamed to say the best hot chocolate I've had in Europe was on a bus), free internet, and tons of movies and TV shows (one might say I am hooked on the show Friends--what happens to Rachel and Ross in the end?!?).  Once in Vienna we dropped our luggage off at a surprisingly well-furnished and comfy hotel near the center of downtown Vienna, and adventured out onto the streets of Vienna to find some noms for dinner.  Here's what you must know about restaurants in Vienna: the food is delicious, the servers are modest.  We stumbled upon a cozy, hipster-ish cafe in the center of Vienna and our waiter orally recounted the menu (we tried to read German but failed spectacularly); he recommended small pasta dumplings filled with cheese, meet, or tomato. He didn't describe them too enthusiastically but each of us ordered three of the pasta dumplings.  I don't know why he didn't describe them to us like he was describing a prized and ancient recipe because our dinner was succulent and we savored each bite. The same thing would happen to us at our dinner the next night, when the gnocchi and risotto made our mouths water even after we had polished off the plates, even though the waitress played the dishes off like they were nothing much.  I may as well stay on the food theme and make way to the most important food of all in Austria: STRUDELS.  I demanded of myself the consumption of one apple strudel per day, and I'm proud to say I didn't let myself down.

Saturday morning we forced ourselves to be early risers, even though the hotel mattresses put our rib-poking mattresses back in our London apartment to shame.  We had enough cause to be excited about the day: we were going to hit up the largest flea market in all of Vienna, Naschmarkt. The flea market is situated between two streets, so it's set up with edible, heavenly items on one end and then not so subtly turns into an antiques and clothing fest. The food section was seemingly never ending: vendors enchanted us and other passerbyers with olives, kebabs, fudge, cheeses, breads, seeds, dried fruit, pastries, stir fry, and just about anything else that can be consumed.  Then suddenly, the market turned into the ultimate clothing and random item swap; vendors under tents sold anything from decrepit 90's phones and their fathers' old jackets to more intriguing items like antique door locks, jewelry boxes, traditional Austrian scarves (mixed in with a few made in China), and art.

Julie and me at Naschmarkt

It was pouring rain and I think my umbrella might have done more eye poking than I had anticipated, but until we realized our feet were frozen numb and our coats thoroughly soaked through, we sifted through the immense number of tents. We unanimously decided that our next activity should be indoors (none of us wanted another one of nature's showers) and we chose to head to the Museum quarter where we picked an art museum with some of Klimt's most famous works.  It was almost like all the art history I had studied in AP Euro last year actually was useful! But in all seriousness, the art pieces revealed how determined and hard working the Austrian people are; many of the pictures used dark and depressing colors to describe the landscape of the country, but there were also marvelously bright colors intertwined with the duller ones, showing all that Austrians had done to make use of whatever they were given. After a much needed siesta, the girls and I tried our best to dress up (we had fit everything for the trip into our three backpacks!) for a night at the ballet! Julie had bought us cheap tickets, the equivalent of 12 dollars each, that were in restricted view--we were totally pleased with that, we're going to the ballet for $12 after all! Turns out, our restricted view seats had their own private box and we were located right next to the stage. I could literally see the sweat on the dancers' costumes and see the small smirks that floated onto the ballerinas' lips when they perfected a lift.  The whole experience at the ballet was extravagant: a massive glass chandelier lit the entire theater, red velvet covered our seats, and Austrian mothers photographed their young daughters posing in front of floor to ceiling mirrors.  Not every part of our trip was as relaxing as watching ballerinas twirl and be lifted into the air like feathers, we had an 8 hour trip back home to London and our bags threatened to rip at the seams they were so full of souvenirs, but every part of our Vienna trip was full of memories created by three friends who planned every detail of their Austrian adventure together and enjoyed every second of it.

"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."--Macbeth 4.1, William Shakespeare 

Londoners take Halloween to a whole new level.  This special Halloween edition blog post will feature some wicked and deadly things: murderous Jacobean tragedies from drama class and LAMDA's annual Halloween Sleazy.

For the past 5 weeks I've worked with London short film director William Oldroyd.
He's pretty legit:  http://www.williamoldroyd.com  (Check it out.)

Will employs some unorthodox directing tactics to help us work through Jacobean tragedies, plays from the era of James I that specialize in whoredom, murder, backstabbing, and incest.  How juicy! For example, one group is doing a play called 'Tis Pity She's A Whore (the main woman character leaves her husband for her brother) and my group is performing a piece called Women Beware Women, complete with a big shabang in the ending scene that results in 12 deaths (one character is killed by flaming gold).  These plays were written without the graceful and poetic writing of Shakespeare, yet they attempt to deliver similarly complex thoughts and plots (revolving around some weirder topics).  Many times one might appear more like a pirate instead of a character of the Jacobean era since the playwrights often shortened phrases like "you are" into "y'are."  In context: "Y'are a damned bawd" (that line comes up quite a bit).  There is one specifically extreme example of this shortening of phrases: guess what " 'slid " stands for?

Did you guess "God's eye lid?" I thought so.

Besides the oddness of the writing style and plots, Jacobean theatre grew exciting during rehearsal because of Will's determination that we bring alive the emotions and objectives of the characters through physical work and what's written in the text.  In the ending scene of our play, I find out that my brother has killed my love, Leantio.  Here's what I logged into my personal journal after rehearsing that scene under Will's direction:

"In order to run into the murder scene with fury and surprise, as soon as I entered the scene Will would begin to drop a blue ribbon to the floor from the chair he was standing on.  My objective was to run and catch the ribbon before it hit the floor.  Next, we ditched the ribbon-dropping exercise and I still had to replicate the same rush and intention of hurrying into the scene, this time with the objective of finding out who has been murdered.  Then, in order to get Livia's disappointment and shock when she finds Leantio dead, Will blindfolded me and made me find Leantio in the room, saying my line of text "Leantio? My love's joy?" while I did the activity of searching for him.  Eventually I found him lying on the floor and the connection changed.  Will lifted my blindfold and I felt the burning hurt of losing the one you love after optimistically searching for them for so long.  Then I turned to see Ben, playing my brother, who murdered my love.  Will told me to go get this wooden bat and hit this large green punching bag with the frustration I felt for Ben while saying my lines of text, really putting the energy of the physical activity into the words.  Then I had to convince everyone else in the room to "run for officers" so we could arrest my brother for the murder of my love, but they weren't allowed to leave the room and obey me until they truly felt compelled to do so, and Will made me use the emotion in the text to move them into action.  Will said the connection in that moment was definite, and that now we must transfer that energy into the performance without the punching bag and the ribbon dropping to the floor. I must remember the feeling of those moments."  

Will's strategies follow the foundation we've been given at LAMDA: emotion starts from the body, not the head.  Physically energizing the text does more for your voice and emotion than thinking so hard about it.  

But we can't leave the bloody murders and gore of the Jacobean tragedies yet, since British people don't think of Halloween as the day when you dress up like a movie character or something funny; for them, it's all about the scary fancy dress.  The week leading up to Halloween I kept seeing posters around school saying "wear your fancy dress to the Sleazy" and I was so confused why I was going to get dressed up all nice for Halloween...fancy dress means costume, y'all.   Last night I went to the annual LAMDA Sleazy, a talent show/dance/venue for cheap alcohol.  I planned to go as a hippie, but realizing that the Brits wouldn't accept that as scary enough, I began to come up with titles that would make me sound scary: Hippie from Hell was definitely the winner.  I'll tell you what: I seriously underestimated the scariness factor of my British peers.  Brits must just have a container at home labeled "Halloween Blood" in their medicine cabinets; if I had 50 pence for every fake stitch, wound, and gash I saw last night, I could maybe rent a room in Buckingham Palace.  Somebody went as Mario the video game character, and then of course they had to put a fake knife going through his hat, dripping with blood.  The talent show was amazing, going to school with multitalented drama kids always means you're in for a good performance--where else could you get a dance off between traditional Indian dancing and 1920s dancing and then have the dance off battle resolved with the Thriller dance?  After the performances, the music seemed to last all night and we literally danced the night away.  Even though it was on November 1, it was the best Halloween I've had yet.

Yola and Me! You can catch a glimpse of the fake blood behind us on the left side of the picture.