Itch scratched

I've just completed this four day acting school, reviewed here. I learned about breathing, presentation, voice control, posture and movement in exercises I've never done before and worked more with people than I have done for years.

Singing: Thanks to Grantley Buck, we sang from 'Some Enchanted Evening' and 'A Cockeyed Optimist ' from South Pacific, we sang 'A Real Nice Clambake' from Carousel. I haven't had singing lessons since I left school, and I'll swear they didn't teach me to open my throat like a foot-long dentist's syringe was coming at it. We all loved the singing classes, coming out buzzing with energy and happiness.

Fighting: we practised punching our partners with sound effects like we'd made contact. That's call a knap and is a method of making the sound without actually touching your partner. We learned strangling, another lesson was fighting with swords. This is how to do team work.

Moving: Marcelle Davies started the first day's movement class with a clapping exercise when we passed a clap around us, between us, across a circle, and extended it to call our names - a new way of learning a classes names. Another movement exercise with Jenni had us falling to the floor to a count of ten, and rising to a count of ten, but then reducing the count to six, to four, to two, to one. You have to be fit to do this course.

We learned to dance and perfected a pavane, enjoyed dancing jazz, & the training was professional for professionals. For instance, in the jazz class, first our teacher had us stand like professionals. "Now" she announced, "you look employable." Like we amateurs, and several would-be professionals, could ever be paid to dance professionally.

And Shakespeare, which was the class where we learned the least, perhaps because at least for the first session, the director was having a bad day. We didn't learn much about Shakespeare, or his work, just watched and listened to each other perform. If we rattled off the words by heart with no meaning to them, we got little help on interpretation - but learned we should have worked harder. If we hadn't learned the lines well enough to say them without more than a couple of prompts, even if too nervous, then we were told we could sit down again. Sometimes the director asked us why we chose to present characters in a particular way, and that usually seemed to mean that we didn't understand the character - like we were acting Cassius young when he was old.

Voice: Clare Davidson had us spouting Shakespeare with our tongues out and our heads between our legs, but it is amazing what a difference the exercise can make to the timbre and clarity of your voice.

Scenes: The director, Jeanette, started us with introductions. We had to pass round a box of matches, light a match and tell the story of our life in the time it took the match to burn. We watched each other, but the drama was in the lighted match. Then we were given a synopsis of the play, and the parts we were to take. Each of the three groups presented scenes from a different play

• 'My mother never told me',
• 'Old Times' by Pinter
• 'Closer' by Patrick Marber
  

In the last hour of the last day, we played our scenes to the other groups, and to the director, Paul Caister. And I finished the course in a love scene from Patrick Marber's 'Closer'.