Imogen Sage

The end of a chapter of: Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Animal studies. Age studies. Neutral Mask. Narrative Poetry. Actioning. Tai Chi. Contact Improvisation. Received Pronunciation (Standard British English). Voice (breath capacity and resonance). Phonetics. Singing. Sensory Imagination. Circuit Training.

It’s almost impossible to find the brain space to reflect on everything while I’m in the middle of it all. So much of my energy when not in class goes into making sure I eat enough good food, sleep enough good sleep, and get to school on time. It almost hurts my head to think about anything that is not the course because the course consumes me in  every way. But at the same time, life doesn’t feel busy, because I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. Life just feels very FULL!

I really feel like I am in centre of the work now. I’ve got my bearings and I am beginning to understand what being at drama school is all about. But at drama school things ebb and flow as quickly as a scene change, so I won’t be surprised if those bearings fall apart again. That’s the nature of the learning. You think you’ve grasped something, and then you’re in a muddle of confusion again. It sounds terrible but soon you just come to terms with the fact that you are in the unknown, things are changing without you even realising, your body, your voice, your acting, your relationship to the space and to the group, and when you surrender to that, it’s quite a lot of fun!

So what’s a day in the life of a drama student like? Well, all days are quite different but each day is a little like this…

6am – Wake up. Shower. Eat.

6.45am – Leave home.

7.30am – Get to school. Warm up until 8am.

8am – Circuit training – push ups, sit ups, skipping, dancing etc (STAMINA!)

9am – 1pm – Movement and Voice classes.

1pm – 2pm – Lunch.

2pm – 8pm – Rehearsal for Chekhov.

8pm – 9pm – Travel home.

9pm – 10pm – Shower. Eat. Go over things from the day.

10pm – Sleep.

This term a lot of our energy went towards rehearsing for our first class performance; Three Sisters, by Chekhov. Our audience consisted of our voice teacher, our movement teacher, and our head of acting, and that was daunting enough! (We do not give public productions until third year, and I am very grateful to have the time to explore, discover, and learn, without needing to share it with a public audience so soon.)

Three sisters is about a gentry family living in rural Russia at the turn of the 19^th century who battle to escape the mundanity of provincial life and struggle to hold on to their dreams and their sense of meaning, but slowly their dreams fall apart and they are forced to look life in the face and let go of their illusions. It’s a beautiful and tragic play, full of the usual Chekhovian subtext. So much of the drama is seething underneath what is actually said, and it was our job to find those moments and thoughts. I played the older sister, Olga. She is responsible, organised, grounded, and has everything under control. Her journey throughout the third act, (her crisis act), is that she is losing control as her family falls apart and life crumbles around her.

For me, the only way to experience and find the totality of the rise and fall of the play was to be in my character’s thoughts constantly. If I left Olga’s mind for a second, it was extremely hard to jump back on to the arc of the drama. That might sound completely obvious – of course you have to think as your character for anything to sound or seem honest – but it’s funny how many times I have caught myself trying to say a line ‘the right way’, or the way I want it to sound. But truth has a voice of its own, and that’s what I’m learning.

Apart from Three Sisters, our other main performance this term was something a little less obvious, where instead of playing complex characters who struggle to accept their present lives and spend their days dreaming about another time, we played animals! Our movement teacher each gave us an animal to observe at the London Zoo, research, and learn to embody. The project was not so much about the end result, but about learning the process of character transformation, both physically and mentally, and, as animals are less complex than humans, they’re a good place to start the learning.

Animals live in the now. They have to to survive. If a zebra is dreaming about buying a ten million dollar beach house, he’s going to be easy prey for a hunting lioness. I think in this age of technological distraction it is very hard to live in the now, but actors have to. If they lose the moment, they lose the relationship with the other actors, and they lose the audience.

I loved Animal Studies. My animal was a Madagascan Jumping Rat, and my group animal was a lioness. The more we observed our animals the more information we could gather of how they live, how they see the world, how they relate to their space, how they move, how they breathe, and the rhythm in which they go about their daily business.

I’ve been observing humans too. It’s funny how similar we are in many ways, even though we like to think we’re not! We all have our own little rhythms, our own way we see the world, our own movements, some are personal, some are general, and we are, all of us, in some way, simply trying to survive. And that’s why I love acting, because it is a way of reflecting this beautiful and bizarre thing called the human condition.

This term has been a blast, full to the brim of new insight, new skills, and new challenges, and I was very surprised by my end of term feedback from the teachers. They were very positive and encouraging of my work and my learning and I feel like I’m on a good track! I wish this training went on for ever, but I am so lucky to have it now.

Next term we are starting Shakespearean Comedy, Moliere, sonnets, and solo dance! I am so excited!! Central doesn’t muck around. We’re all being thrown in the deep end – and that’s exactly the way I like it!

I feel very lucky to have The Bouddi Society and John Bell, Artistic Director of the Bell Shakespeare Company organising a benefit concert to help fundraise for my course fees at Central.

The concert will take place at Wagstaffe Hall in the small tucked away coastal community of Wagstaffe. Wagstaffe area is an hour and a half north of Sydney, Australia, and is one of the most beautiful places on earth, with a strong-sense of community, a bunch of very talented artists, and a feeling of home. I grew up in the area and the community has always been very supportive of me. Wagstaffe hall was where I went to drama classes, attended my Year 6 formal and performed in a number of things over the years, so it’s very special to have The Bouddi Society put the concert on there.

For those of you who don’t know John Bell he is an Australian actor and theatre director who has had a huge influence on Australian theatre. He spent five years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in fact, when I was looking around at which drama school I wanted to train at, I read in John Bell’s autobiography The Time of my Life that he went to London to train, and this inspired me to look into the possibility of training in the UK. In 1990 (the year I was born!) he founded the Bell Shakespeare Company with his wife Anna Volska, who is also a well-known director and actor has been as involved in Australian theatre, film and television for as long as John Bell has.

Bell Shakespeare was really the first Australian Shakespeare company who aimed to create Australian Shakespeare, performed by Australians for Australian audiences, in contemporary costume and set, so that Australian people could relate to it. They are the biggest Shakespeare company in Australia and are very respected by Australia’s theatre community. I am very grateful that John and Anna are supporting me, especially because Shakespeare is so important to me and why I am training at Central.

John Bell, Anna Volska, Greig Pickhaver and Graeme Blundell will all be talking about their starts in show biz!

Graeme Blundell is best known playing the title role of the 70′s sex-comedy film Alvin Purple. He’s been involved in the theatre industry for years and is also a producer, writer and biographer.

Greig Pickhaver, also known as HG Nelson, is one half of the award-winning Australian sports comedy duo Roy and HG. He’s an actor, writer, comedian and a very funny man.

Beverley Callow is a theatre and film director and an emerging producer. Her most recent project is the film The Salt Maiden written by Donna Cameron and partially funded by the Queensland Regional Arts Development Fund. Beverley will be showing a 17min silent film Love Buttons she made in 2010 featuring local Central Coast actors. Beverley trained as an actor and taught me acting since I was aged 7. She is also my mum!

Philosopher poet and influential figure in the Bouddi area, David Dufty will be reading some poems. David is a community grower and a founding member of The Bouddi Society, who directed me, as well as almost the entire performing community ten years ago in The Place Where the World Turns Around, a concert celebrating our area.

Saxophonist Philip Johnston and the local Half Tide Rocks Choir will be performing some songs, and there will be a little film of me saying hello as well.

Unfortunately, after that big shout out the event is completely sold out! It will be a great day for the people that will be there. I wish I was!

Thank you to The Bouddi Society for continuing to be such a support to me. You do a great job in protecting and growing the cultural wealth of our area.

And the message in all of this is never underestimate the power of community!

My Ode to Bouddi

A piano may play the sky away,

may play the moon, may play the waifed wind’s rapture,

may play the clouds, may play the starry bay

yet with but wanton words I cannot capture.

For as I look upon the face of life

I cannot, with the language of but men,

or with my beating breast suffice

the beauty of this Eucalyptus glen.

For it be beauty true and brassed it be,

its leafage stained with golden ochre rouge,

its branches yawning to the waking sea,

and yet with pen I’ll never beat a fugue.

But let this silence be my victory,

for surely silence plays the winning key.

Well it’s been a while since my last post. London is a busy place and I’ve got the busy disease! Almost everyone’s got it here, which is what makes it so exciting and also makes it absolutely crazy. It’s an interesting place to undergo intensive acting training. Our whole course is about learning to be relaxed in our body on stage, and London is definitely not the most relaxing place! And THIS is the strange ironic challenge.

In many other ways it is the perfect place to train. It is a melting pot of people, societies, religions, ethnic communities, all with different circumstances, walks and talks. And London is filled with history! You could walk around for days and still have years of history to discover. Of course theatre is everywhere, London breathes theatre. It is inspiring to see how much theatre is embedded into the city’s culture.

It’s all new to me.

I’ve finished my first term of Central. I’m learning so much at such a rapid pace that it has taken a few weeks for it all to sink in. We’ve definitely been getting our money’s worth, that’s for sure!

Our term has consisted of lessons in: script analysis, scene development, improvisation, storytelling, voice fundamentals (mainly learning breath technique and vocal resonance), phonetics, voice classes in diction, speaking verse, group development, sensory imagination (which is about exploring the 5 senses and learning to recreate a sensory experience in the body, such as learning to recreate the experience of walking on a rough surface or having a cold shower etc), neutral mask, movement fundamentals, pilates, object exercises and  many more.

I was very happy with my end of term assessments. I think I managed to bring what I’ve been learning to the work. We were assessed on a scene from the play Handbag by Mark Ravenhill, a choreographed movement sequence using techniques and physical exercises we have learnt in class, and a poem. We have been learning how to speak verse FOR the audience, rather than for ourselves, to give each word to the audience, and to allow the words to do the work, and affect us, rather than to play a mood on top of them.

Our voice teacher gave us each a poem that challenged us to explore new parts of ourselves. My poem was about a mother saying goodbye to her daughter as she moves away from home (quite poignant really). It is High School Senior, from The Wellspring, by Sharon Olds. I was given the role of a mother because I am working on becoming a more grounded actor. I am quite a light person, I don’t have much weight to hold me down! And so they are giving me roles with physical weight. It’s very fun because I am usually cast as the young girl role – the Juliet or the Ophelia, and drama school is the perfect place to expand one’s range.

I’ve been cast as Olga from Chekhov’s Three Sisters next term! Another older role. We are doing Russians! I am so excited – I have been reading about Russian cultural history, reading Pushkin, looking at Russian paintings, listening to Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich, eating Pelmeni, watching old Russian films, and generally Russifying my life. It’s a fun way to learn. They told us to immerse ourselves in Russia over the break and to do as much research as we like. I don’t know what it is about Russia for me, it is such an odd place with such a broad history and land mass. There are many Russias within Russia, each struggling for identity. I had classes in Russian language when I was young so maybe it’s just a part of my childhood.

Well, that’s all for now. Chekhov says, “Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.” Thank you for reading.

С Новым Годом! (Happy New Year!)

It has been a month since I stepped onto a plane, out of the first week of Melbourne’s springtime sunshine, and stepped into this new life of full-time acting training as London’s days shorten into winter.

Now that I have passed through that surreal in-between period, of saying goodbye to friends, family and familiarity, and jumping into ‘the unfamiliar’, I have the space to reflect on the last six months. What a crazy and exciting journey it has been.

When I first read I had a place at Central, I was completely shocked. The UK University Admissions Centre had made a mistake two weeks earlier and had tagged my application ‘unsuccessful’. I had been slightly disappointed but also relieved. How was I going to pay for the course fees anyway? I put it behind me and was ready to move on to the next thing – looking for work, looking at other drama schools to audition for, contemplating travel. Then Central emailed me saying, “We are extremely sorry, somehow UCAS made a mistake, we actually want to offer you a place in our course”. What? Something in my brain did not understand but when it did I was VERY excited. I was over the moon. It was the only thing I wanted to do. In some ways I wanted to train as an actor more than I wanted to work as an actor. When you are training all you are required to do is: completely commit to learning, develop skills, push yourself to new limits, explore, be courageous, take risks and even ‘fail’ in a place, separate from the industry, where failure is a positive and enlightening way to learn. To me, training meant I would have more to bring to my roles, more to bring to productions, more to bring to the arts community, and indeed, more to bring to the world in some way.

I had no idea how I was going to pull together $30, 000 to start the course but I knew I just had to try, and commit to trying. For weeks I researched grants but there were hardly any that I was eligible for. I was someone in the arts, who required funding, to train overseas. ARTS. TRAINING. OVERSEAS. Those three words in one sentence did not leave me with much hope in the grants arena.

I began fundraising on pozible.com, an online crowd-funding website that enables people to fundraise for their projects and dreams within their immediate community. Publicly asking for support from friends was nerve-racking and humbling and I feel extremely grateful for the generosity and support I have received from my community. It has taught me to never underestimate the power of community. There were times I felt silly and embarrassed for trying to achieve something that was far beyond my own financial limitations but I knew that if I gave up trying I would be forever wondering what would have happened if I kept going. So I kept going.

I wrote letters to people, some who I knew and some who I did not, expressing my situation, my dream, and my need for assistance, and I am eternally grateful to have received such encouragement and support from those who have responded to my call for help. Thank you.

I also have to say a huge thank you to the people of the Pretty Beach area for all your help. I feel very lucky to have grown up in such a close-knit community and I look forward to giving back to the area in some way in the future.

Somehow, from the help of many, and from much persistence, I am here. It was worth it all. Of course every day is not glorious and brilliant. It is a challenging course and there are days that I am frustrated and confused and just do not get ‘it’ and my voice teacher says, “Celebrate your confusion. From confusion comes creativity”, and there are days where things just click into place and I learn a lot all of a sudden, and it is exciting and fresh. The challenges are worth it.

At Central we are working in many different ways such as; through movement, storytelling, script analysis, poetry, phonetics, sensory imagination and voice. The first year is mainly about exploration and freeing the body and voice from habitual ways of being, and becoming aware of the stories we tell with our bodies, so that when we play characters, our body and voice is free to tell the character’s story, rather than our own.

I intended for this blog entry to be about my life since being here, but I will have to leave that for next time. I have to learn my lines! Thank you for taking the time to read!

Imogen

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After four months of fundraising and working hard to save my money it is quite surreal and very exciting to finally be in London. I’ve had very little time to settle in to my new life, having only a day to meet my new housemates, wander around the area I live, and catch up on sleep before starting my acting course at the Central School of Speech and Drama. I’ve just finished my first week of classes, and what a week it’s been. My head is full to the brim with new information that I have not yet quite digested.

To even try to explain what I am learning is difficult and perhaps irrelevant, but to give you a taste of what we are currently working on; we have begun voice classes with a very brilliant and inspiring voice teacher who is working on poetry with us and teaching us ways to ‘free the voice’ by releasing tension in the body that blocks the voice from being as resonant and full as it can be, we are doing movement work with a dancer/actor who is also teaching us in great depth about the human skeleton and how it works so that we can get to know our bodies (our instruments) in a very practical way, we have acting classes with a teacher who is training us mainly in acting methods originating from Russia, ie Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov, and with him we have been learning exercises that require a high level of imagination and focus, and we have just begun working on the play Closer, by Patrick Marber, which I am very excited about. I will be playing Anna. It is a good play to work on because it is based in London, and I look forward to visiting the sights where various scenes of the play are set.

It is a very full course and the next three years will no doubt be extremely challenging. We are at school five days a week. An average day begins at 8.30am and finishes after 6pm, sometimes even after 9pm. I am eager to learn every single thing I can and can only hope that further grants will see me through to the end of the three years.

London itself is beautiful. Autumn leaves everywhere, sky blue, air crisp. I’m getting to know the city in a very new way than I have when I previously visited here. I already love it like it’s home. I’m living in Stoke Newington which almost feels like a village, rather than a city, and is full of fresh food, surprisingly good coffee (mostly from Australian cafe owners), lots of art and rich history. I’m living in a very cute terrace house with two lovely illustrators and a contemporary dancer. Could life get much better?

Thank you to the huge amount of people that have helped me get here. It really is a dream come true to be here, training with 15 other students that are as passionate about acting as I am. Regardless of where this training takes me, I know it will give me a wealth of skills which I look forward to bringing to my work in the industry, and sharing in whatever way I can in both Australia and internationally.