*ing Rathish as Juliet!

My acting class is getting reallly interesting right now - After having spent a week or two in games, understanding ourselves, opening our senses (!), we have finally started doing some real acting. Every class, we are given a situation (sometimes we pick our own), are given 10 minutes to decide what we are going to do and end up doing a 5 minute "impromptu" act for which we are graded. And for every role, we have to bring in new mannerisms, accents etc. The emphasis is more on comedy than on any form of serious story telling.

My roles are getting interesting by the day - the first day, I played a man who visits a psychiatrist coz every time he tries to have sex with his wife, he thinks of his grandma. The psychiatrist incidentally is interested in old women and is more interested in his fantasies of his grand mom than his patient. That came out quite well.

Yesterday, I played Juliet :) We are practising pantomime now and each pair is given a situation that he's to enact using signs. We, my partner and I, were given "Romeo and Juliet". We decided it would look funnier if she plays Romeo and I play Juliet. The thing is, people have to guess exactly what the situation is - thankfully for us people remembered (and more importantly recognized) the last scene of the "tragedy" (while our act was anything but that!). To quote the words of the audience - "it looked like two really bad actors playing Romeo and Juliet" :)

In an effort to find more characters to ape, I am taking a special interest in everyone I meet to see if there's any mannerisms of theirs that I can use. The auto drivers, shop vendors are already giving me curious looks! Usually my victims end up being my own colleagues - yesterday, I was so close to miming a colleague back at his face, as he was talking to me. Dangerous!

Ok - now work!