It's been a while again.
Since the last time I wrote here, I have finished a short film, Connection in Letterkenny, the town where I first lived when I moved to Ireland. It brought back good memories, especially about the An Grianán Theatre and the acting group I was a member of more than a year ago. I didn't meet old friends unfortunately, but I got to know a lot of cool people during the filming, and I enjoyed the whole thing.
I started a new acting course, a Stanislavski workshop series lead by Tom Finlay, our director from Belfast Tempest. The group is more or less the same from BT, with a couple of new members, and it's fun. I remember learning about Stanislavski in the university; I had to read An Actor Prepares for a theoretical course a couple of years ago, but I couldn't really make any sense of it. I think Stanislavski can't really be understood unless you try the method in practice when you act.
Also, I'll attend a stage combat course in less than one month – something I've been dreaming of doing for a long time! I used to do fencing in secondary school for a few years, and I always enjoyed it. Hopefully stage combat is something similar; I was sent the course desrciption and we're going to use a rapier amongst other stuff, so it's super exciting for me.
I keep auditioning all the time, and I've had tons of good experiences so far. For example, at first I thought that I'd have no chance at all with my weird native accent, but I realised that people actually enjoy listening to my accent. I always get positive feedback on auditions; last month I read for a character with Southern Irish accent, and I wasn't really able to do it. But the casting director was like "actually it's not that important for your character to have Southern Irish accent" and I was asked for a callback this week. Wow. The auditions are held in Derry, and I love taking the train from Belfast to Derry because of this:
And this:
And did I mention this?
And it seems that Shakespeare just won't leave me alone (I'll be the next Kenneth Branagh, ha ha ha); I was recently cast in a stage adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. It's not a big role, but an important one, and considering that English is not my first language and I didn't go to drama school, it is a huge thing indeed. Besides, it is acting, and I haven't done acting for weeks now, and I hate having breaks, so I'm happy to play any part, no matter how small it is.
