An Afternoon with Acting Students

by Catherine Roberts, OSAI PR Counselor

Students’ days at Quartz Mountain are packed with activities, and with upwards of five hours of class per day, they have plenty of time to explore different areas of their discipline.

Acting students receive instruction and individualized attention from two instructors—A. Dean Irby and Rena Cook.  Irby has acted on Broadway, and his television credits include The Cosby Show, Another World, and numerous television commercials. He also served as acting coach for several television shows, including four years with The Cosby Show.  Cook is professor of voice at the University of Oklahoma, and she also serves as voice coach at OSAI.

During the early afternoon of the first full day of class, acting students work on voice. Cook instructs the students to draw a picture of their voices—first, as they are now, and second, as they want their voice to be.

She has them write a poem, addressed to their voices.

A few of the lines:

“You are small, you are sweet, you are mine.”

“I didn’t ask for much but wholesomeness.”

She asks them to read the poems aloud once, then again, this time, in between posing as a group.

“Don’t apologize,” she instructs. “Speak the words as if Shakespeare wrote them.”

“In you, warm comfort and cold temper abound.”

“Make some noise that’s truly profound.”

“You could be so smooth and round, and I wish you would.”

“Open up, show some weakness—at least try.”

The classroom buzzes with energy as the last poem concludes, and Rena prompts them to reflect on the exercise. Several say it’s helpful to articulate the differences between their voices in the present and the ideal. One poem focused on creating vulnerability, and Rena encourages all the students to “find power without effort” in their voices.

Acting instructor A. Dean Irby takes over, and has the students form a circle and lay down on the ground. He leads them in guided meditation. 

Though the room is calm now, it’s still buzzing with as much energy as when the students were discussing their poems. Dean slowly brings them out of meditation and has them begin to repeat a line from their audition monologues—a significant line “that describes who that character is.”

“I won’t survive if you run away from me.”

“But what was a girl to do?”

“And yet for this he’s supposed to go to heaven.”

For the first week of camp, the acting students will workshop the monologues they used to audition for Quartz Mountain. The audition required one humorous and one dramatic monologue; students have chosen one to workshop with Dean and the class.

Irby hasn’t decided yet what the students will do for their presentation during ONSTAGE Weekend. He’s waiting to see how the class evolves and if a theme or motif presents itself.  If you’d like to see the acting students showcase their work, please join us on Saturday, June 29^th at 2:30 p.m. at the Robert M. Kerr Performing Arts Center at Quartz Mountain. Click here for the full performance schedule. Please keep in mind that classes are taught at a collegiate level, and some performances may be inappropriate for children under age 14.