New Class and New Play

Hello again, everyone.  Just a quick shout-out to tell you that I'm almost done with my Improv 201 class at The Institution Theater (our showcase, "The New Guard," is this Sunday, May 6th at 6 pm.  More info here: http://www.theinstitutiontheater.com/shows)  Also, I have been cast in The Last Act Theatre Company's July production of "Conscience Hesitatus" as Dr. Wolfe!  Our first rehearsal is tomorrow night and the show runs July 16-28, Mondays-Saturdays at 8 pm.  (More info here: http://www.lastacttheater.com/)

I'm back!

I know it's been a while, but I'm back!  So much has taken place since I last posted.  I could write a novel, but I'll try to keep things short and sweet.

We wrapped up the run of "Little Women" at The EmilyAnn Theatre at the end of February.  My accent was well-received, but I felt I had a hard time connecting with the girl who played Jo.  I think I just get in my own way by thinking too much.  I realize my future performances will improve if I decide to make stronger choices and committ more to them. 

Last week found me being sent out for auditions three days in a row!  Two commercial auditions and one for a music video for a local country artist.  I haven't been that busy auditioning in a while, so it felt nice, even if it was a little hectic.  Thanks to everybody at TAG Talent for submitting me and getting me seen!

I'm going to the hometown screening of "Ruth's Locket" tonight in San Marcos.  I've seen it already and I really enjoyed it.  It has a beautiful, meaningful story and message; great performances; excellent cinematography; and a very sweet director (Gene Burns) that I'm proud to call a friend.  Check the film out at: http://www.scotbrinkley.com/dwp/ruths_locket/main.htm

As of Saturday, I'm now enrolled in Justin Davis' Improv 201 class at The Institution Theater!  I really need to stretch my creativity muscles again and this class will be perfect for that...and will, hopefully, help me book a commercial (please cross your fingers for me!)

Finally, I have come to the realization that I need to start watching "Mad Men."  It has a lot of subtle dialogue that would be engaging and challenging to chew up, takes place in a very interesting time in American history, has a gorgeous look to it, and wonderful costumes (I love Brooks Brothers!)  Luckily, my buddy Heath is willing to let me borrow Seasons 1-4.

That's it for now!  Goodbye!

Update

Hello, all!  I'll try to keep this short and snappy (thank you, Marco Perella, for your suggestions!  He's a great acting coach, here in Austin, that I've had the pleasure of training with.  Check his site out here: http://www.actorworkshop.com/) 

I went to the 5th Annual Alliance Austin Town Hall Meeting last week and received a lot of motivation from listening to local coaches, agents, and casting directors speak about the craft and the business of acting.  I also ran into some familiar faces, much to my delight.  I'm not too keen on networking, but when I do go to mixers, I find them as motivational as they are informative and motivation goes a long way.  You need that in this business.

I also went to the scriptreading of "The Legends of Robin Hood" that's being developed by my good friend, Heath Thompson (check out his IMDb page, here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3333062/maindetails.)  It was full of action and drama, but was also very funny.  I had a really good time there.  Everyone knocked it out of the park, but Bobby DiPasquale as Pip (check out his IMDb page, here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2787789/) really bowled me over with laughter. 

"Little Women" rehearsals have been going really well, too.  We're all pounding out the scenes and having plenty of laughs at the same time.  It's really apparent to me that I need to get my lines memorized (quickly!) so that I'm freed up enough, mentally, to concentrate on subtleties and movement and connecting with my fellow actors.  Luckily, I don't have a billion lines to churn through, so it should be fairly quick. 

Back to work for me!  I'm out!

My website and upcoming events

Hello again, everyone.  It's been a long time since I last worked on it, but I'm back at it, building my website, DerekVandi.com (hosted by FatCow.)  It's not live yet because I want it to be visible to everyone only when it's ready and polished.  Even then, as with anything in its maiden form, there will be plenty of things I'll want or need to change about it.  I think I have the basics covered, so far - home page, resume, headshots/photos.  I also have a page for testimonials about my work and a contact page with links to my Facebook page, Actors Access and Casting Networks profiles, my LinkedIn account, and so on.

My main concern (aside from the fees going up after my first year of service) is the video portion of the website.  Having an acting website without a lot of video is kind of a futile enterprise.  Don't get me wrong - I do have footage of my work, but a lot of it is from plays I've been in or film student projects.  But you know what?  I'm just gonna find my best stuff and put it up.  You gotta work with what you got.  As long as visitors to my site have some sort of idea of what I'm capable of and what roles I can fit, I'm happy.  My hope is to one day have union commercial and studio film/TV footage to put on there.

Aside from working on my acting website, I'm staying busy in other acting-related ways.  Wednesday night, the 11th, I will be at 5th Annual Alliance Austin Town Hall Meeting at Baby A's (more info here: http://theallianceaustin.com/page3.php)  I'm not the best or most willing networker on the planet, truth be told, but everyone is a stranger until you make them a friend.  You can't make everyone into a friend or even a colleague, but you don't have to.  A wonderful artist, Misty Poe (check out her work here) reminded me that until I auditioned for my friend, Bridget Farias, for the role of Aslan in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," she didn't know me from Adam.  Not only did I get the role, but I started a wonderful friendship with Bridget that has given me plenty of wonderful memories and has lead to me being cast in a variety of film and theater roles (the most recent of which are those of Mr. Davis and Professor Bhaer in the EmilyAnn Theatre's production of "Little Women," in case you didn't know.)   

Friday night, the 13th (spooooooooky!), I will be in rehearsal for "Little Women."  We're getting down to the wire, so it's time that I start incorporating my German accent into rehearsals, however embarassing and mechanical it may be at first.  I consider it an honor to be given the challenge of what I consider to be the most technically difficult role in the play, in addition to another role!
Saturday, the 20th, will be my first day of class in Improv 201 at The Institution Theater (http://www.theinstitutiontheater.com/improv_classes.)  I'm really looking forward to this.  I've known for a long time that improv training is essential to landing commercial roles and I took a commercial audition workshop with Donise Hardy (http://www.acastingplace.net/) and an Improv 101 class with Shana Merlin (http://www.merlin-works.com/) years ago, but I never really sank my teeth into landing a commercial.  I'm on the attack, now, though.  So far, at The Institution Theater, I've taken Improv 101 and Tom Booker's Commercial Audition Workshop, but Improv 201 will be new territory for me.  The 101 class was a lot of fun and really showed me what I have to unleash (and exposed my remaining challenges), so I hope 201 will help me build my revealed strengths and break through my current expressive barriers.  Another thing I really like about The Institution Theater is the fact that they always have shows/networking events going on.  I really need to go to more of those to mingle and just loosen up and have a good time. 

Next Monday, the 16th, I will be at a script reading for a Robin Hood project that my friend and fellow actor, D. Heath Thompson is arranging.  It will be interesting to see what this project turns into.  I know the reading will be a somewhat familiar experience because I played the role of Robin Hood in a children's production of the same name that was written and directed by Heath for the Scottish Rite Children's Theatre (http://www.scottishritechildrenstheatre.org/) a couple of years ago.  

The next night and Friday will be filled with more rehearsal.  Saturday, the 20th, will be another afternoon of Improv 201. 

In the meantime, I am proud to announce that I have "Germanized" and rewritten all of my Professor Bhaer lines, accordingly.  I am going to contact a real German professor at UT Austin in hopes of them helping me finetune my accent.  I really want to sound authentic up there and know in my heart that I've done my best to give the EmilyAnn's audience a quality performance.  Aside from that, as I mentioned in my last blog, I need to develop backstories for Mr. Davis and Professor Bhaer, dissect beats and so on, but I think the most fundamental thing I need to do is figure out: why am I saying what I'm saying to other characters?  If I don't know that, I'm just opening my mouth and making noise, being an "actor" just to be on stage and get attention.  Nuts to that!

Goodbye, for now.  Back to work!

My First Acting MonoBlogue!

     Hello, all!  Welcome to my first acting monoblogue!  I've known for a while now that "writing" your thoughts down is good for you emotionally and creatively and allows you to express yourself in ways that you might never express yourself otherwise, but I also recently discovered that it's a great way to network in your chosen field.  With this blog, I hope to reap both the personal and professional benefits I just mentioned.  Anyway, on with the acting part!

Last night, I went to rehearsal for "Little Women."  We start the show February 3rd at The EmilyAnn Theatre out in Wimberley, Texas (more information can be found here: http://www.emilyann.org/productions_nowplaying.cfm) and I will be playing not one, but two roles.  I will first play the role of Mr. Davis, the strict teacher who orders Amy to toss out her pickled limes and disciplines her in front of the entire class.  My second role, and by far the most demanding, will be that of Professor Bhaer, the German scholar who inspires Jo to be a better writer and, eventually, his wife.  This is not to say that Mr. Davis will be a cake walk.  Sure, I can play him as the big, bad, mean teacher who humiliates poor little Amy in front of her friends and get a decent enough response from the audience.  But I believe in subtlety and playing opposites.  Yes, I will be angry with her for violating my rules and bringing contriband into my classroom but just working with pure anger and apparent malice is one-dimensional and flat and not very engaging for the audience.  If the audience can see that the anger comes from somewhere deep within Mr. Davis, perhaps from a time in his past when he was scarred by the negative effects of a lack of order and discipline or from a long-ago-formed belief that social anarchy leads to the degeneration of society, even if they can't pin exactly what the source of the anger is, they will be drawn in and feel like they can relate to Mr. Davis on some level as a human being.  That's because human beings constantly behave in terms of opposites.  A man can be completely head-over-heels in love with a woman but not call her after they make love for the first time (usually, a sign that a man has lost interest), not because he has lost interest, but because his last girlfriend broke up with him shortly after they first made love and he's afraid of that happening again when he calls his current lover.  In the case of Mr. Davis, outward anger over Amy's cache of pickled limes can come from a place of inner love and concern for the upbringing of the current generation.  Human beings in real life are complex and non-linear and confusing, like Mr. Davis, and if you're doing your job as an actor, your characters will be just as enigmatic.  I think the best way, perhaps the only way, to mirror reality in this fashion is to make the choices on paper so that you have something concrete from which to act upon.  Improvisation and in-the-moment choices are very useful and natural and the audience eats them up, but you have to do your homework and have a plan before you go up on stage.  You can't just "wing it" and not write anything down because at that point, you just have thoughts, nothing you've committed to in a hard and fast physical form.

As wonderfully challenging as playing Mr. Davis will be, it will be trumped in terms of difficulty by the portrayal of Professor Bhaer.  The girl playing Jo is not even 18 yet and I am well past that age, so I not only have to become comfortable getting all lovey-dovey with jailbait, but I will have to convince the audience that there's plenty of reason for an ingenue to be in love with a man who's so much older and larger (and bearded!)  Also, I have to find a way to physically differentiate Professor Bhaer from Mr. Davis enough so that audience members won't mutter to their friends, "That's just Mr. Davis with a different coat on."  I think I should age my way of movement and walking, but not too much (I'm supposed to be in my 40s).  Just adding movement of any kind to a character is always a challenge for me.  I think the biggest challenge, though, will be speaking all of my lines, both those to my fellow actors and those directly to the audience, with a credible German accent!  I emphasize the word "credible" because you can go up on stage and spit out a half-ass German-ish accent that some people might buy.  Even that's a gamble.  I imagine most people would think they were at a crappy elementary school play where all the kids just say "dahk" instead of "dark" a few times and then expect you to believe they were born in London and eat fish and chips every day.  In an effort to keep eye-rolls at a minimum, I have researched common German accent patterns (here: http://www.learntheaccent.com/how-to-do-a-german-accent and here: http://www.howtodothings.com/education/how-to-talk-with-a-german-accent) and marked my dialogue accordingly.  At this point, it seems like I'll be breaking my jaw up on stage with all the necessary speech alterations, but I hope that, with practice, the actual performance will be much more fluid and natural and, most importantly, believable!  

I still have a TON of work to do before opening, such as backstories for both characters, beat dissection and the associated break down of strongest emotion, the moment before, what the problem is, etc.  I hate to admit that it's been a while since I've done that kind of work for a role, but I really want to do well up there and satisfy myself that I've done what I can to put out a quality performance.  Stage acting is not improv.  It is preparation and analysis and disassembly and making decisions, beforehand.  Once all of that has been done and you're on stage, then you can flavor your performance with improvised choices and spontaneous inspiration.  This is not to bash improv - I have a lot of respect for the art and the people who are able to perform it skillfully and I believe actors who apply improv skills to stage acting are usually more spontaneous, comfortable, and believeable.  This is also not to say there isn't room for improv in stage acting.  There is, but it has to be a garnish, not the main course.  If you just slack off and go up on stage without any choices made or homework done previously and expect to improv your way through a performance, it will come across as vague and a lazy toss-off.  (Speaking of improv, I will be taking the 201 class at The Institution Theater starting January, 14th.  Visit their website here: http://www.theinstitutiontheater.com/) 

At the end of the day, no matter how much work I'll have to do for these parts, I am honored that someone at The EmilyAnn thought so highly of my previous work that they hand-picked me for these very different, challenging roles.  I am very grateful for that and it gave me a shot in the arm that I needed.

Back to work for me!  Until next time...