Acting Forever!

            These last two weeks have been very emotional for me!!! After a year doing a part-time acting course at Mountview, last week, we had our last class and final performance on Thursday. Everyone was sad, nervous, anxious, excited or happy, a mixture of emotions which resulted in a very exiting play. The Chamber of Curiosities, directed by Tom Hescott and written by Tom Morton-Smith was warmly received and, thanks to the amazing audience, keeping the energy, the rhythm and the adrenaline of the play, ended up being automatic and simple. It's amazing to notice the effect an audience has in this moment of sharing, making theatre so unpredictable and scary as well. Same play, same actors same stage but a different room, different people, different energies and atmospheres. Thank you everyone for helping us, our group, our team, giving our best with your empathy and interest.

          

               The course finished, but not the acting part! That will never stop. So me and my friend Ruth, we were shooting two scenes from plays and movies that we've being studying. It was an amazing exercise especially because we didn't have a big crew, just me, Ruth and my boyfriend who shot and directed us. This means that we have to find our characters clothing, the places to shoot, we have to pray not to be kicked out by any security, (for shooting without a permit against a public building), fight against the public noise and the unpredictable weather, light conditions, listen the technical advice regarding the positions, cameras and sound, and after that, just after that, we try to give a believable performance, which is hard considering that things don't really flow from the beginning to the end naturally. And even if they are flowing, even if you are really concentrating, believing and feeling, somehow you have to stop, because something completely external, like a dog barking for instance, demanded so.

               I do everything with pleasure and I feel completely alive when I am doing camera work. What I love the most about cameras is the intimacy of the relationship with them, how honest they can be, how simple and humble an actor needs to be to make peace with them. Cameras show you everything, things that we don't want to know, that we hate about us and love about us, it can kill us by making us self-conscious, they're dangerous in this aspect, but, how can we learn? Just facing the truth about us and accept it. Then things will become unconscious again, eventually.

Lots of Love, Lilly