We had both a guest repeater and a substitute teacher last night. Jolene was unable to be there, so Bill Simmons stepped in to teach the class. Jenni White was the guest repeater. One thing that I find really interesting is how different each guest repeater is. It makes sense, but each one has their own energy and each picks up on different things. When Bill asked for feedback afterward, I mentioned how I am not sure if knowing the guest helps the repetition, or works against it. For example, I know Jenni pretty well, and that provided me with an initial sense of ease and familiarity. However once we got into the repetition, some of the behaviors she was picking up on caused me to be even more self-aware than I typically am. It’s as if because I know Jenni, when she says something like, “You’re deflecting,” or “You didn’t like that,” I give it more weight and take it more personally than I do when it is someone who I don’t know as well.
I think it’s the “taking it personally” aspect that I often struggle with. At HB and at Circle Rep, we were trained to listen to our scene partners, and to let what they say land, and take it personally so that our response comes from a place of vulnerability. And while with Meisner, there is still a focus on vulnerability, or availability, the focus is turned on the scene partner’s behavior. I do think that both approaches are valuable, and Meisner has made me more sensitive to some of the non-spoken language in particular. And perhaps it is that both approaches compliment each other (or perhaps they are both saying the same thing but with different language). I’m looking forward to working on The Humans to put this all in a practical framework.
The exercise with Mariah went pretty well. I felt like I was a bit overly focused on my IA and had to remind myself to be sensitive to Mariah’s behavior, but the feedback I got from the class and from Bill was that they didn’t notice this. Bill mentioned that given the IA, I could have actually let the activity absorb me even more. We did discuss how my IA (piecing together instructions to break into a vault) related to my trigger event (discovery of a secret vault), and made a good suggestion that the trigger would have been stronger if it was the discovery that the instructions had been torn apart. This tracked…it definitely was more in line with the frustration that I was feeling while trying to accomplish the IA.
I’m looking forward to the Full Exercise. I’m going to be working with Kenny, and I have a couple of sets of circumstances that I haven’t used yet that I really like. I’m still not sure I fully understand the exercise, but hopefully after reading the pages and doing this first exercise I’ll have a better grasp on it.