The Young Actor, the Philosopher, and the Personal Trainer

As some of you may have guessed, my life has been extraordinarily busy this past week, hence my lapse in writing. My apologies dear readers, I hope you can forgive me in time!

I was assigned a particularly interesting task by my main acting teacher, Rob Nagle. The name of the game was observation, and our subjects could be any passing human we took interest in. Specifically we were supposed to find a person going about their daily life and watch them, watch how the walk, how they talk, what body part they lead from, ask questions such as, "why is he angry?", or "why does his leg twitch?". After asking all these questions we were told to come up with a back story for our subjects, just make up reasons for why they behaved the way they did. We were to do all of this, and upon our next class session be able to impersonate our targets for the rest of the class (now consisting only of my friend Jorge and my teacher Rob). And so with this task in mind, I set out for a place I knew would be crawling with interesting characters to observe: my new gym!

When I arrived at the gym I immediately took interest in one of the personal trainers working there, he was about 5'10" and looked to weigh about 200lbs, a well built, stocky sort of chap in his forties (had I to guess) with a salt and pepper goatee upon his chin. When I spotted him I instantly assigned him 'mark' status and spent the next hour spying on him out the corner of my eye in between sets. As it turned out, luck was on my side that day, for only moments after I decided to make him my target, he took his client right over to the adjacent bench from me! When he and his client moved on, I causally left my post and followed them, watching carefully for how my subject walked (I named him Bruce), and soon I started mimicking Bruce as we strolled confidently around the gym, Bruce and client in front, mini-Bruce/Keshava behind. I spent the next hour in the most humorous dance I have ever participated in; I would follow Bruce, mimic him, try and move like him as I worked out, and every time his glance would fall on me, SNAP! I was back to being Keshava! By the time I left the gym that day I could strut right out the door just like my dear friend Bruce.....

When I brought Bruce in for show-and-tell the next day, my teacher was very pleased with my work, and told me to continue my observations, and to go deeper, so naturally later that day I hunted down my prey Bruce at the gym and once again stalked him like some devilish predator, copying his every move, until he looked at me and then I was just minding my own iron. Once again, I almost found my job to be too easy, for Bruce and his client again came to rest at the adjacent station to me. I was ecstatic. This time I began to hear him speak, how he dealt with the clients, I was really starting to go deep, when out of the blue he cracked a joke that broke my calm like a boulder crashing into a placid pool, my cover was blown! Sheepishly I glanced over at him, as if to say, "Yeah, I've been eavesdropping, but that was funny!", when he just smiled back at me I knew that now was the time to make my entrance in to the life of Bruce. When he told his client to go get some water, and our chuckles faded away, I asked him,
"So how long have you been training?"
"All my life," was his reply, and without missing a beat he popped a completely unexpected question on me, "Hey, you wanna be a personal trainer?" Totally taken aback that this man could have such insight to the inner workings of my mind (that thought had been milling about in my head for a few weeks), I told him that, yes I did in fact want to be a trainer! He spent the next thirty seconds telling me that I would be a great personal trainer, how awesome it was, and that we should talk, but his client came back and ended our first conversation, but just as we were about to part, he extended his hand and said that his name was George and that he was 100% Greek. Gah! How confusing, Bruce is now George, and George is Greek! I learned so much about my dear subject/new friend Bruce/George that day, and my teacher was exceedingly happy with my observations at our next class. (I have yet to talk with George about becoming a PT, we have set a time to talk on Tuesday, so I'll keep you all posted on that....)

Now, you are probably thinking, "Wait a minute, the title of this posting is the young actor, the philosopher, and the personal trainer, we've seen the young actor and the personal trainer, but where is the philosopher?" Well, dear reader, stick with me and I'll tell you!

My teacher, Rob Nagle has proven himself to be an amazing acting teacher (as well as an amazing actor himself), and in one of our classes he said, "you must remove yourself", when you act. The less of you that gets in the way, the better your performance will be, you must never let your ego drive you on stage, always remember that you are serving not only the other actors, but you are also serving the story, serving the playwrite, you are serving, serving, serving, serving!" When I heard this I was blown away, to hear something so close to Master's teachings coming from the lips of my acting teacher was amazing! He also said things like, "Acting is Truth, truth in every sense, and you must be true to yourself before you can be true to any other aspect of human existence." My teacher is showing me a way of acting that I identify with completely, a sort of spiritual approach, and I am extremely grateful for that, because as they say, "There are as many techniques to acting as there are actors", and I have been shown the beginnings of a technique that I know will take me far, spiritually and artistically.

P.S
Sorry for the lack of pictures, I tried, I really did, I even took a few, but my phone is acting all funky and is refusing to upload them to my computer..... So pictures will have to wait until next time.

Until next time my dearest readers and friends,

Keshava Betts

New Beginnings

Welcome readers to the blog about me, Keshava Betts.  I cannot claim to be even remotely interested in writing about my entire life, so I'll just skip to the part where I moved to Los Angeles and started training to pursue my passion of acting at a fantastic conservatory, Theatre of Arts. I've only been here for six days, and an impressively large amount has already happened, so I'll do my best to recount my adventures in the most interesting fashion and cut out the filler. Here we go!

I moved into the Ananda Ashram on Saturday and spent Sunday trying to get settled in before school on Monday. As anticipated, getting all moved in took much longer than a single afternoon. Luckily I had my mother with me to assist in the whole process (she actually stayed until Wednesday morning). Monday, and my first day of classes came much quicker than I thought it would.

Monday!

I awoke at 5:45am so I could snag a quick shower before group meditation (chanting starts at 6:10, so I energize at about 6:00). After the meditation and breakfast my mother and I hopped on our bikes and rode to my first day of class. It turned out to be a very easy bike ride, about 15 minutes of relatively stress free cardio, whoo-hoo! As it turned out I only had one class on Monday, Acting 1, so I was only there from 9:00-11:00. But those two hours were like gold! The teacher, Rob Nagle, was an absolute character (it turns out that the majority of my teachers are, go figure!) and I just loved his class! Interestingly enough, the first day of school there were only two other fellows in my class, Gorge (from south Texas), and Toshi (Japan).
(A side note on class sizes: The sizes of each class varies, for some classes different "bundles" of students from further along in the program will join us, so for example, in my improvisation class there are a total of 7 students) After School I went to my new gym which was absolutely fantastic! I got one of the narliest chest workouts I've ever gotten and I had the delight of finishing my workout with a good sweat in the gyms steam-room. mmmmmmmmmh. After gym, it was dinner and shopping (things like clothes, toothpaste etc)
Note on Rob Nagle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bzHKRvKgBQ
Check out this commercial, the dude running from the "red tape" is Rob, my teacher, he's pretty awesome. Also note, this is not his "proudest" piece of work, just something I could find on youtube.

Tuesday:

Tuesday I have three classes, all back to back. From 9-11 I have Movement for Actors with Yvette Tucker. I thoroughly enjoyed her class, we mostly worked on moving in character, but she said that in the future we'd spend the first hour of the class doing Yoga and Pilates before moving into the character movement. Next up after movement was Theatre History; unfortunately this was a little bit dull. We talked about the fathers of drama (the greeks) for the most part. I do realize however, that the things I will learn in Theatre History will be very useful, so I gave it my all. After History was Script analysis, as it turned out, the teacher who would normally teach us was out at an audition, so the lady who did history with us subbed in for him, that class was also a bit dull (but never fear dear reader, for I just had a real Script Analysis class with the real teacher just a few hours ago, and I absolutely loved it, but I'll get to that later). After all my school time I hit the gym, ate some fantastic dinner (prepared by Durga) and once again went shopping for all the odds and ends that I needed before my mother went back to the ranch.


I'll write about Wednesday and Thursday later this evening, but the dinner bell is chiming, and I must answer!

Thanks for reading, and I hope I get the hang of this blogging business soon (bear with me),

Keshava Betts