A freedom film

In Improv class last night we pretended that we were in an actual acting class and worked on giving our on-stage emotions more depth by portraying them in natural pairs of opposites. The idea is that we almost never feel just one emotion at a time, but rather we feel the tension between opposed states of feeling.

The exercise was to sit on a chair facing the class and recite a nursery rhyme while vacillating between the extremes of two emotions. The teacher demonstrated using fear and excitement in a dramatic reading of Mary Had A Little Lamb, and then each of us took our turn working on pairings like rage & restraint, joy & sadness and lust & innocence.

One woman was tasked with horror & intrigue, which she executed so compellingly that the teacher literally leapt from her seat to tell us about how she had had that exact experience just the other night. She was watching a movie with her husband and he had fallen asleep. The movie, "A Very Young Girl," includes a scene where the entire screen is focused on a woman's vagina and a man has an earthworm and the teacher just had to wake her husband up because what she was seeing was so horrifying and fascinating.

"So you were watching porn?" a classmate ventured.

"No! It wasn't porn, it was French," explained the teacher.

The guy sitting next to me, who is a sketch comedy writer, took out his iphone and made of note of it.

"I like that," he mused. "Not porn, just French."