Cadence

No, I haven't met some drag queen named Cadence...relatively bearable though most of my week was, it would have been far more interesting if I had.

I had my first acting lesson of the new year this afternoon. For the better part of the past year and a half I've been taking private acting instruction once a week. My coach is a gentleman to whom, despite the fact that I've nothing but the most effusively complimentary words for him, I shall refer as Coach K for blog purposes. If you combined the directorial skill of the late Sir John Gielgud, the triple-threat grace and presence of Gene Kelly, and the airy amiability of Douglas Hodge, and put the lot into the person of a fellow with pleasant facial features not unlike those of a young John Ritter, Coach K would be the result.

Since it's one-to-one instruction, we generally work on monologues, and for most of the lessons I've tended toward classical (namely Shakespearean) monologues/soliloquys. This is partly my own doing (as most of the plays I own in print form are works of Shakespeare) and partly Coach K's (he seems to think I have a knack with classical text). 

I love Shakespeare. What I don't love is having to work with iambic pentameter.

For those of you who didn't pay attention in English or Music class, iambic pentameter is a metrical line commonly used in traditional verse. Iambic, in the case of the English speaker, simply means an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, as found in words like before, trapeze, and destroy; pentameter means five pairs of iambic syllables per line. Each pair of iambic syllables is called a foot. When I work with iambic pentameter (that bitch), I'm working with stuff like these lines from Helena's monologue in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act III, Scene 2), wherein she accuses Hermia of conspiring with Demetrius and Lysander to mock her:

Lo, she is one of this confederacy!
Now I perceive they have conjoin'd all three
To fashion this false sport in spite of me.

Notice how the stress is on every second syllable, so in Shakespearean terms, you're supposed to wind up with a rising inflection at the end of every line. This is where it poses a problem for me. When a line ends with a period or an exclamation point, in my mind that means it's probably a statement. When speaking a line that I determine to be a statement -- e.g. the first and third lines of that verse -- even when I stress the syllable itself, my natural modus is to end the line with a falling inflection. This is known as cadencing, and it's a habit that gives me no end of fucking grief during my lessons with Coach K. I swear that man has the patience of a saint, because I cadence at least twice during every goddamn attempt.

So at this point, you're probably wondering what the joke is here, or if there is one at all. Well, there is. I decided to look back over the scripts I kept from the three Shakespeare plays I've acted in (two before I started lessons, one since). Here's what I found:

Comedy of Errors (2007)
Role: Townsfolk
Line Status: None/Improvised. Townsfolk were essentially sound effects and human scenery. (Trivia: This is, however, where I learned how to spin plates.)

Much Ado About Nothing (2008)
Role: Ursula
Line Status: Speaks 19 times, all lines are in prose.

Love's Labour's Lost (2010)
Role: Jaquenetta
Line Status: Speaks 13 times, all one-liners.

The great cosmic joke here is that I haven't even had a role yet where my character's lines were written in iambic pentameter. And IF by some miracle I actually get the role I'm hankering after this year, I won't be using it then either. 

For players of the bit variety,
This structure's moot, a right nonentity.