At first, spending an entire class falling sounded like a really stupid idea to me. I warmed up to it, though.
It was strange, the most interesting class so far is actually the one I have the least experience in: acting/performance. In high school, I was very self conscious of myself as an actor. The culture of theater and how much students competed with one another made me shy away from it. I acted in only a couple of shows, none of which I felt like I did a good job in. But something hit a chord in me when I was asked to commit to the class. So my initial reactions to a class on falling were shortly betrayed by this strange urge to give it my best.
From the get-go I started experimenting with how flat I could fall down. The inspiration was drunk people, and though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, I was trying to imitate the standing-up pass-out. I got a big kick out of it. Come to find out that both of the assigned videos were about Chaplin (or Downey jr. as Chaplin) being completely smashed, I reveled in the irony afterward.
As we transitioned into introducing motivations, I tried to keep that same energy up. While I started to fall a lot more gracefully, I was starting to feel how emotions become a full body experience. By the last fall I had what it felt like internally down. I didn’t see my face, but I imagined I did a good job.
The first performance class for me made me feel unanimously good about acting for the first time in a long time. I feel like the only thing holding me back is my self-doubt. That seems to be a pretty common occurrence now-a-days.
