It’s my last class of the semester and what better way to end it than sharing your work with the class.

We had a table read of everyone’s script, or at least part of it, and it seemed so fitting to finish this studio like this. It was really cool to hear everyone else’s work and get encapsulated by their stories. It was nice how diverse the stories were, like we would go from a romantic one to a sci-fi one. Yet, each was just as good the other in their own rights.

It was also really interesting to read my work out loud. I read my own big print and kindly had the people sitting next to me read for the three characters in the scene. And the scene I chose was where my main character was having an anxiety attack. Writing this particular scene based off what I’ve gone through personally, I was a little nervous to read it out loud because I was basically sharing a piece of my vulnerability to the world (or at least, the people who rocked up to class today).

But anyway, the point of it all was to get some final feedback before our nearing deadline. And I got one that I think is very vital for me as I reread my script and do some final revisions. While during most of the studio, we were told to be very detailed when describing actions and settings in our scene text. However, there is a fine line between being detailed and basically telling the actors how to act.

The piece of feedback that Stayci gave me was to be careful about ‘over-choreographing’. As in, literally stating every movement/action that a character does. While in the excerpt I chose it was important for me to be specific as the character was having an anxiety, reading it back, there were definitely some things that I could have not included, like hand movements that a character makes. Static made a point to ‘let the dancers freestyle’, i.e. let the actors improvise and give them room for interpretation. So this is something I have to watch out for as I go into my final revisions.