2nd Draft - Joy assignment for website

I edited it a bit:

Think of the kindest, most generous, knowledgeable person you have ever met. That’s Joy Hooper. Joy is a professional actress and acting coach. She recently joined a group of us students in STAC to share her love of acting and to teach us how to work on and perform a monologue of our choice.

Acting. Acting. Acting. Acting doesn’t only involve observable behavior. In fact, there’s a whole universe filled with the other aspects of acting. Subtext is what the character is thinking underneath the spoken lines. We have subtext all the time in our every day lives. Subtext is just as important to an actor, if not more important than the words that come out of his mouth. In the workshop, Joy had us play around with some subtext exercises. We also had the chance to watch each other do the exercise and take note of what was happening: “I noticed a huge difference when she used subtext…The character went through [a journey], rather than just playing the mood of the piece, and it was very honest when she did this.” (One of the students wrote this in her STAC blog.)

Memorizing lines are to an actor what measuring flour is to a baker. It’s the tedious task that has to be completed in order to get to the fun stuff. In acting, the fun stuff is the subtext and what happens to the character when an actor engages in the use of subtext.

On a much simpler level, Joy taught us to breathe. To breathe is to give life to yourself and to the character you are playing. Actors often forget to breathe when they are performing. This only constricts your body and limits how far you can take your performance. Breathing forces you to get the subtext going because you're not saying anything when you’re taking a breath. You're just ‘looking’ at the person you're talking to and you're able to focus on what your little mind is saying behind what the monologue tells you to say. It adds life to the piece. It can also add contrast, but in a simplistic way.

The workshop with Joy required a lot of practice at home, but it was also so much fun. Besides, the extra work that each one of us put into it, made the few weeks that we had with Joy that much more worth while. Let me put it this way, every single one of us that was in Joy’s workshop always looked forward to the end of the day when we would get to play with our characters and our monologues.