Milikin Student Blog Post: Characters and Metaphors: Not Just for the Elite
/“Day 6 of our 10 day workshop was when we first encountered an exercise in which we were able to use text as a narration of our stories. Although it was tempting to tell the audience everything, this exercise helped me to find specificity and purpose for everything I did and said. Although these are all important concepts that we have addressed with Kari, I would like to talk about the characters we created.
In today’s exercise, our characters were confined to a small piece of our space in a round shape. Our job was to create a story with a packet (beat, etc) of three that gave us insight to their struggle inside this space. Finally, we were to create a final fourth beat that gave the character hope. Kari discussed the importance of metaphor with a character. A character too stuck in the literal is only going to resinate with a certain number of audience members. But the character that is a metaphor, a character that represents hope, being confined by their surroundings, etc, can and will resinate with a larger audience. She challenged us to find what aspect of humanity our characters represent (in any acting piece we do, in any moment that they live). This had a huge impact on me. I can’t wait to bring this to not only my acting, but also my comedy writing.
Another day, another break through. Thank you, Kari. And thank you class!”