Student Blog: Playing a Yeast: My Capstone Project

As soon as I got back from New York, we had the first day of rehearsals for a production I’m in at my school called Yeast Nation, and I truly could not be more excited. This also means the beginning of the knitty gritty of my capstone project or as we call it at the Dobbins Conservatory, our BFA project, let me explain a bit about what the heck that is.

Every bachelor of fine arts acting or musical theatre major has to do a bachelor of fine arts project, or BFA project that is required in order to graduate. This simply is a project where you document the entire process you go through when you are playing a character in a play or musical. You can do the BFA project when you are cast in a show as a junior or a senior. The project has 4 components: Research, Script Analysis, Character Analysis, and Journals. Once the show closes, the following week you meet with assigned faculty and they go over your project and ask you questions and essentially grade you on your process and give you feedback. It is a very hefty project and is basically equivalent to your senior thesis paper or something like that.

I am doing my BFA project on being a salt eating yeast in the primordial sea. I’m playing Jan the Famished in Yeast Nation the musical. It is written by the same folks who wrote Urinetown, it is a rock musical, I like it a lot. If you have never heard of the show before, I highly recommend looking it up and listening to the music. It is very silly and goofy and I love it.  I have actually had a lot of fun with my project so far, and I just wanted to talk about it a little bit while I’m in the midst of it all. There are definitely times that I think about my BFA project, and it seems very daunting and large, but once I chunk it up into sections and take my time with it, it isn’t so scary. 

I started out with the research portion of it. I picked a few different topics to research, things like yeast cells, overpopulation-an issue that this yeast colony deals with, salt eating yeasts, how yeasts reproduce, and other things like that, to give me a foundation of knowledge to build off of to then make decisions about my character and things like that. I am almost done with the research portion of the project. The character analysis portion is basically just figuring out different aspects of your character and thinking about the little details that make your character whole. Everyone’s process for this is different. I have a list of questions that I go through and answer to help me figure out who my character is and what she has been through. I am on the brink of starting this section, we just started tablework a few days ago, so I’m currently still investigating and exploring who my version of famished is and who I want her to be. The script analysis section is going through the script and again, figuring out the world of the play and laying the foundation to really play around with the circumstances of the show and figuring out the world your character lives in. I’ve just started digging into that now that we just got done with our first read through, started tablework and are starting to dig into exploration. Something our director did that I absolutely loved, is that during our read through/sing through, she gave us a space in the middle of the room to play around in and interact with the people we were in scenes with and to just have fun. This is the first time we are all ever in the same room singing these songs and reading the lines together and it was nice to have the pressure of it all taken off and given permission to just play and see what happens. This also helped me discover a lot about the script and the world we are inhabiting for 2 hours. Finally, the journals. These are my favorite part of the project. After each rehearsal, we are to write a journal entry about what we did in rehearsal, how we felt and what discoveries we made about ourselves and our character. I love to yap. I love to explain things to death. I love talking about my character and these journals are my chance to do just that. The journals have helped me so much so far because it has given me the chance to reflect and think about what I did in rehearsal and what worked and didn’t work for me, and that has been so so helpful so far and I have learned a lot about myself as a performer so far by doing them. This is a practice I want to continue with other projects and things that I work on.

Overall, this project has really helped me hone in on my own personal process as an actor. I’ve always thought my process was a little all over the place when doing a show and this process has given me more of an outline and a way to organize what I have been doing, which I have found oh so helpful. It definitely has helped me organize my chaos and I am very excited to get more into it and explore some more.

Go do great things my friends!