Become an Animal
We were told we must do this to become actors. Or, at least we had to do it to pass Voice and Movement class. That was the final, and all the professor said before unleashing us on the unsuspecting world. “Become an animal.”
I’d like to say that she threw her arms forward as though letting slip the dogs of us and that the doors of the theater hurled outward so we might rush out upon the city with our fangs bared and talons extended. But, no, she just read it off a piece of paper, and then we looked at each other kind of annoyed, like, “Oh, alright.”
However, some of the presentations were pretty inspiring. Like Jessica’s.
Jessica Smith, always one to go the extra mile, chose to become a tiger. That crazy kid actually flew out to Nepal, learning some Nepali phrases on the twenty-six-hour plane trip (two stops to refuel) so she could most effectively locate a guide in Kathmandu. She wrote that was her reason for learning bits of a foreign language, anyway. But I suspect she did it for extra credit. That was Jessica for you.
Then, after the guide drove her into the Chitwan jungle, she dismissed him and disappeared into the wild. Or, so she says, but I’m guessing he got annoyed and ditched her. Now look who’s being catty. (My bad, I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.)
Anyway, once she’d shed her human form and slunk away into the woods, she successfully tracked down a tiger and, according to her recovered journal, scrutinized its every movement and mannerism to the unprecedented degree that it may benefit the science of zoology forever. Her writings will, I mean. According to her journal, she smeared stripes on her naked torso with mud from the banks of the Narayani River, and with flint, she chipped her canine teeth into fangs, which was probably unnecessary. To top it off, she used bamboo wedges shoved underneath her finger and toenails to give herself claws.
Ironically, Jessica was a vegan and unwilling to change her diet.
Nevertheless, on her fourth day–her twenty-sixth birthday for chrissakes–she was devoured by a 500 pound Bengal tigress who was very much not vegan. This presumably occurred after Jessica attempted to simulate nursing its cubs, an experience she wrote about in great detail, with accompanying sketches.
Look, I’m only human, and I got a thrill from studying those sketches.
What was left of her was identified from bone bits discovered in tiger scat–along with those broken teeth. I thought it was a shame about her teeth; she had a striking smile. Although, I suspect she had veneers.
For commitment, the professor commended Jessica but awarded her a “D” after Jessica failed to attend the presentation portion of the project. The professor used that as an opportunity to hammer home the importance of an unknown actor’s punctuality in the biz.
More clever and economical was Alex Nathan’s choice to stay within the confines of our city and study the bats at the zoo.
What I admired most about his project, overall, was his willingness to undergo surgery on his vocal cords to achieve a bat’s maximum echolocation of 200kHz. Technically, the doctors could only get him up to 150kHz but close enough. Keep in mind that a human’s echolocation peaks at 20kHz (that’s twenty, Alex amped his echolocation almost ten times a human’s max capacity). Honestly, I’m not even sure what echolocation is. I guess it’s what it sounds like it is. But all of this took two significant operations and drastically, permanently changed his voice.
And that thing those doctors did to his ears. Damn, that was tough to look at.
Now the performance portion of Alex’s project was impressive as hell, even if it relied heavily on stagecraft. It just so happened that a local children’s theater was performing Peter Pan and Alex negotiated to borrow their flight harness. He also orchestrated a soundtrack with a local synth composer titled “Deepest Cave.”
For Alex’s live presentation, he soared through the darkened auditorium to the sounds of a psychedelic water drip echoing eternally from the center of nowhere.
He may have drugged our Diet Cokes.
Afterward, the professor awarded him a C+ for “effective use of space,” but subtracted points for altering his voice; Alex had been a beautiful singer. Some of us grumbled that the professor was angry about the ears: rumors spread that Nathan had had inappropriate relations with the professor. If so, perhaps he better understood the business than the rest of us. Nathan grew furious over what he felt was an unfairly low grade and flew away.
Somehow, I felt I never fully meshed with the acting school. I allowed my insecurities to hold me back, I think, and I couldn’t relate to the younger, beautiful children in the class. I lived paranoid that everyone whispered about me, that they all met in secret to talk behind my back. But when the garbage bag I’d crammed myself into burst open onstage and all my thousand smaller selves overran the class, the professor’s dying words were: “Finally, someone understands: you must entirely dedicate every piece of yourself to your art.”
I gave myself an “A.”