Phil Gyford

My intention of writing shorter, more frequent, pieces isn’t working. The longer I leave writing, the less I feel like writing. I’ll have turned the topic over in my head too many times. If it’s about acting I’ll have written notes up in my notebook, maybe written a more angry version in my diary, perhaps updated friends and relatives on what I’ve been doing. By which point I’ve had enough thinking about it. But I didn’t want you to think I was still frustrated with the classes.

We’re still sitting through a lot of solo exercises, and while I realise their worth, watching someone perform household tasks for up to half an hour can try one’s patience. Thankfully, a couple of recent improvisation exercises in the Foundation Acting class have been interesting and fun.

Given their nature, one never knows how an improvisation is going to go, but sometimes the group can feel an impending disaster. My group of five for one exercise didn’t have much hope for the performance. We were to play a game of cards with something serious at stake. We could only talk about the game, not the issue we were actually playing for, although it should be obvious the stakes were high. ‘Snap’ was the only game most of us knew and maybe this lead to our lack of confidence