Acting course at the University of Pannonia

The Hungarian universities provide a lot of unique activities, everybody can choose their own favourite. From the dance clubs and sport clubs, to the book clubs and the artistic clubs, the selection is incredibly wide.

If you think you have the social skills to make the students’ life more comfortable, you can also join the student government. Enthusiastic and diligent job might be honoured with a fair amount of salary and the chance to keep your dormitory place in the following year. If you want to take a role in the dormitory life, you can join your senior by organising and helping in the dormitory programs. They also provide you a big chance of staying in the dorm for the next year.

In the 2022/2023 schoolyear, I had the opportunity to join my university’s acting course. The teacher of the group was a freshly graduated actor, who was really kind and an awesome guy. My group mates were studying as drama teachers, they were really helpful and gave me some advice how to improve my theatrical skills. Personally, I have some theatrical experiences because I was a former member of an acting company in my high school years. We performed musicals, self-made comedies and poem compilations. I also  attended a couple of poetry recitation competitions and got some awards too. Some of the university’s acting group members did not act before but they got into it really fast. During the autumn semester, we got to know the basics of the whole acting thing, and did some practices. We improved our speech, movement and performance skills with mostly easy and fun activities. In the end of the semester, we chose our main theme of the planned play: Antigone. The main tasks of the spring semester was to understand the context of Antigone and the characters’ purposes and desires. We also did activities which referred to Antigone and Ismene’s (the main characters) character traits. During these, we performed the scenes, only in spoken form. We got our own characters, some people got additional roles because there were small roles. (Somebody had 3 small roles). Everyone had a place in the choir, we changed the members of this important group every second scenes. We also got ordered to search for background music. We found a couple of interesting songs and they were perfectly matching to the theme. The performance wouldn’t have been so good without props. We had long staffs, we used for the dancing choreography, and we symbolised the differences between the scene locations with benches.

We received some financial support from the city government and we had the chance to perform it twice. The first play was in the end of June, it was more of an open main rehearsal with audience. It was really great, standing in front of a crowd who wanted to see us performing this old and exciting drama. The second performance was in the end of July, it was on the list of other cultural programs. It was also expected to be good, and we did not deny this statement.

In conclusion, I really liked this little group of ours. I had the chance to meet awesome people and learn from them a thing or two. These experiences also improved my presentation and performance skills which I can use to my advantage. If you are on stage, you can be yourself. We do not need to be ashamed but to stand out and put a little bit of ourselves into the acting.

 

Stróbl Ödön

(Photo: Oláh Júlia)