BWW Blog: An Average Week at NYU Tisch NSB

As the Fall speedily approaches college students, the unknown is one of the most scary things. So far, NYU has announced that the school is going back to mostly blended classes. My musical theatre classes will be partially in person and partially online. All other classes so far are mainly online. In the midst of trying to figure out housing (more like figuring out if it's even a possibility), I find myself reminiscing to the joys of my freshmen year. I know everything won't be the same of course, but I figured I would go through what an average musical theatre week was like as a freshman in the New Studio on Broadway at NYU Tisch.

Monday and Wednesday

Writing the Essay: This class is your basic essay writing English class. At Tisch, your academic classes are also geared towards the arts as my essays were about the Met, Jason Robert Brown, and Pretty Woman the Musical. I had such freedom in writing about what I was passionate about in addition to expanding my horizons to other topics.

ITP/ITS: Depending on which semester, I would take intro to theatre production or intro to theatre studies. ITP on one day is a lecture on theatre history from around the world, and on the other is a specialized course that rotates every two weeks. The topics shift from stage management, costumes, set, producing, anything theatre production related under the sun. ITS is an analysis class of theatre spanning from Aristotle to Suzan-Lori Parks.

Private Voice: I would then go to my private voice lesson on Mondays! Afterwards I would get some food, go to the gym and spend my days studying or getting ready for studio.

Tuesday and Thursday aka Studio Days!

Voice: To start off the day, I have my voice class. It is a class to really ground yourself in your breath and body. It helps expand your voice capacity and unlock all different parts of it whether speaking or singing.

Ballet: I jog over to Second Avenue for my ballet class in the black box theatre for NSB. It is a long ballet class but it really starts my day on the right track with moving my body and sweating.

Music Theory: This class pretty much explains itself, it is a music theory class. My teacher, Crystal Monee Hall, is the fiercest person I have ever met. She sings backup vocals for Ben Platt and Kristin Chenoweth and has the voice of the gods. She is the biggest motivator, especially when times are HARD in the class and she is everyone's mother.

Vocal Performance: VP is basically where we get assigned a song and Tony Award winner Michael McElroy coaches us. He teaches us ways to approach songs and how to make them our own for auditions. Michael knows exactly how to push people and make them into better performers. We spent the first semester on songs from the 50's and then moved onto more contemporary songs.

Acting: For the last 2.5 hours of my Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have acting. Tisch is an incredibly acting heavy program so this is my longest class. Through scenes, exercises, crying and auto dramas, I can wholeheartedly say I am a different actor than who I was when I entered into the program. I actually auditioned for my acting teacher and sobbed in my audition.

Friday

Speech: I start my Fridays with coffee and a bagel at 9 am. Speech is a class that teaches us the phonetic alphabet and different accents. My favorite teacher, Raife, would always make me smile on the most awful Friday mornings.

Contemporary: Every few weeks, the class would do a different dance style. We went through Suamba, 60's, Jazz, African, Charleston and that only scratches the surface. It was the class to really expand our styles of dances as Broadway dance is now so versatile and ever changing. My final in May was the Chorus Line opening number which had us all dripping in sweat.

Physical Acting: To close out my week, I go to a class we like to call "cry and crawl on the floor" class. It is a short 35 minute class that is really different every week in just expressing emotions and using your body in every single way possible. Typing this out doesn't do it justice but just know, it is called cry and crawl on the floor class for a reason.

I miss Tisch so freaking much. I know it won't be the same in any way shape or form, but it gives me hope. In a time of unknown, it is the sliver of something concrete that I can hold onto.