pipistrellafelix (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pipistrellafelix) wrote2007-12-14 07:54 pm
pipistrellafelix) wrote2007-12-14 07:54 pm
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Goodbye, Dublin.
You've been good to me. I'll be back.
(And for anyone who's interested--since theater was most of the point of coming to Ireland--here's the reflection I did for Donal, for my acting class. It certainly doesn't say everything I want to say, & it feels a little pretentious and, well, like a reflection paper. But there are some thoughts in there that I like.
It would be fair to say that theater changed my life. I have been doing theater of some kind, taking classes, being in school plays, and putting on small shows of my own, since I began elementary school. It wasn't until I reached highschool that acting really took me over, when I began to understand how important it was to me. I was a painfully shy girl, who had only just begun to open up and gain friends when I was twelve or thirteen. A few years later, I found the theater that was to become my second home, began to work with Shakespeare, and exploded into someone far more confident, social, and devoted than I had been before.
It was during my highschool years that I pinned down one reason I kept coming back to the theater. I said that I was never more myself than when I was on stage pretending to be someone else. What I meant was that when I put so much effort into creating another person(s) and another world, I stopped worrying about who I was and what I was doing; and the minute I stopped worrying about who I was, I was free to be myself. I'm not sure that's strictly true anymore; I've grown past the tortured angst of being a teenager, and I find myself worrying less about who I am. I never grew out of acting, however; that only became more and more important to me (so much so that if I haven't acted in a long time I become stressed, irritable and frustrated, just like going through withdrawal). One of the things that I hope to accomplish with my theater career—on stage or off—is to give other people the experience that my teachers and acting heroes gave me: namely, to show other budding actors incredible theater, and then help them to get there themselves. It's not one day, or one person, necessarily; but if I can know that one person found what they wanted to do because of something I was a part of, then I can be happy.
Obviously, how I might go about that, what kind of theater I do, what my acting is like, will all change, as it has been for several years. Each time I do theater I learn something, although many times I don't realize it until later. The most recent transformation of my acting was during one of the most intense theater experiences of my life: playing Irina in Chekhov's Three Sisters, which was a kind of emotional realism that I'd never really done before. I'd done plenty of Shakespeare, but there is a more heightened quality to his verse that gave it just enough of a break from reality to not lose myself in it entirely. Not so with Chekhov; I lost myself in Chekhov. It took me a good deal of time to get to the point where I could; the journey to find Irina was one of the strangest I'd ever done in character development. To be true, Irina had to be everything that I am not: impulsive, impetuous, childish, wearing her emotions on her face and saying exactly what she thinks, often not caring about the feelings of others. I do none of these things; usually I think about what I say before I speak, often to the point of not speaking at all. What I needed to do was what I always admired in actors and always had the hardest time doing myself: stop thinking too much, stop being afraid of what might happen, and just let go. I ended up letting go so much that at some points I couldn't figure out whether I was feeling an emotional wreck because I was, or because Irina was. At one point I was measuring how well a rehearsal went by how much I had successfully cried on stage, and how many tissues I needed afterwards. But that helped to break down the safety barrier I had always put up between myself and the character, the one that always tells me not to go too far, for fear I'll fail. I didn't fail; I learned. I went all the way through the emotional catastrophe that is a Chekhov heroine, and, near the very end of the work, started to discover the balance between the reality you lose yourself to and the one you've got to re-find afterwards.
I can't possibly analyze what Three Sisters meant to anyone who came to see it, whether I made an impact on anyone; I can only write about my own very subjective experience. But I do know, from watching other actors in that state of total commitment that I hope I touched as Irina, that it makes for theater that is captivating, a play that stays with you. That's the kind of theater I want to do. It's the kind of theater that made me fall in love with the art form in the first place, that changed me from an awkward, shy child into a more confident teenager, and then into a young adult who knows, without a doubt, that she wants to continue that tradition. This is also why I need theater, rather than film: film can be admired, but theater can, and does, inspire. The closeness of live theater, the knowledge that the reality you're seeing is being created, now, by people breathing the exact same air you are at the exact same moment, is an experience that no other kind of art can give you. I admire film stars; often I am vaguely jealous that so-and-so gets to wear fabulous period costumes and work with such-and-such an actor or director that I like. But all of that disappears in a moment when I get to work in live theater, with an ensemble of actors and an audience that can make or break a performance. Or when I stand outside the stage door, and I see an actor walk out who half an hour ago changed my life for a moment, made the universe brighter or darker, made me think something I had never thought before, and now is an ordinary human like me. If have a chance to be that for someone else, I want to take it.
My own role as an actor, in terms of a larger picture, is something I still don't know, and I'm not sure that I will until I'm at the end of my career looking back, and analyzing what it was that I did. Of course a large part of it is being an entertainer; that can't be denied, nor would I try to. Occasionally, I know, I will end up doing a play that has no redeeming value besides entertaining people and making them laugh. I also don't think that ought to be frowned upon; sometimes that is exactly what is needed. However, it's not all that acting is about. It's also teaching, though a different kind of teaching than in the classroom; anytime someone goes to a play, if the play is any good, they learn something, or they think about things in a new way. I don't think of myself as an actor for social or political activism, at least not under that label. At least in my experience, theater which tends to label itself as directly activist often comes across as uncomfortably pointed, postmodern, boring, or difficult to watch, all of which turn audiences off. It never helps a cause to not have an audience. That being said, I have found an enormous amount of theater that one wouldn't necessarily tag as political to have some very pertinent things to say. Much of the time this happens with Shakespeare; plays such as Macbeth or Julius Caesar, while they are not about politics in our time, can certainly have (sometimes disturbing) echoes to current events, and make people think. That is the kind of political theater that works, that sends shivers up people's spines.
What I want is to do theater that captures people's imaginations, theater that resonates to people in the audience, theater that teaches something (whether it be artistic or scientific or social or simply teaching the play itself): theater that feels necessary. All of that is, on one level, purely selfish. I need to do it, for the sake of my own happiness in life. But I think—perhaps I hope—that by committing myself to this selfish need to act, I will be helping to create art that becomes an important part of other people's lives, art that can enrich and change lives. It happened to me; I have full faith, and hope, that I can make it happen for someone else.
(And for anyone who's interested--since theater was most of the point of coming to Ireland--here's the reflection I did for Donal, for my acting class. It certainly doesn't say everything I want to say, & it feels a little pretentious and, well, like a reflection paper. But there are some thoughts in there that I like.
It would be fair to say that theater changed my life. I have been doing theater of some kind, taking classes, being in school plays, and putting on small shows of my own, since I began elementary school. It wasn't until I reached highschool that acting really took me over, when I began to understand how important it was to me. I was a painfully shy girl, who had only just begun to open up and gain friends when I was twelve or thirteen. A few years later, I found the theater that was to become my second home, began to work with Shakespeare, and exploded into someone far more confident, social, and devoted than I had been before.
It was during my highschool years that I pinned down one reason I kept coming back to the theater. I said that I was never more myself than when I was on stage pretending to be someone else. What I meant was that when I put so much effort into creating another person(s) and another world, I stopped worrying about who I was and what I was doing; and the minute I stopped worrying about who I was, I was free to be myself. I'm not sure that's strictly true anymore; I've grown past the tortured angst of being a teenager, and I find myself worrying less about who I am. I never grew out of acting, however; that only became more and more important to me (so much so that if I haven't acted in a long time I become stressed, irritable and frustrated, just like going through withdrawal). One of the things that I hope to accomplish with my theater career—on stage or off—is to give other people the experience that my teachers and acting heroes gave me: namely, to show other budding actors incredible theater, and then help them to get there themselves. It's not one day, or one person, necessarily; but if I can know that one person found what they wanted to do because of something I was a part of, then I can be happy.
Obviously, how I might go about that, what kind of theater I do, what my acting is like, will all change, as it has been for several years. Each time I do theater I learn something, although many times I don't realize it until later. The most recent transformation of my acting was during one of the most intense theater experiences of my life: playing Irina in Chekhov's Three Sisters, which was a kind of emotional realism that I'd never really done before. I'd done plenty of Shakespeare, but there is a more heightened quality to his verse that gave it just enough of a break from reality to not lose myself in it entirely. Not so with Chekhov; I lost myself in Chekhov. It took me a good deal of time to get to the point where I could; the journey to find Irina was one of the strangest I'd ever done in character development. To be true, Irina had to be everything that I am not: impulsive, impetuous, childish, wearing her emotions on her face and saying exactly what she thinks, often not caring about the feelings of others. I do none of these things; usually I think about what I say before I speak, often to the point of not speaking at all. What I needed to do was what I always admired in actors and always had the hardest time doing myself: stop thinking too much, stop being afraid of what might happen, and just let go. I ended up letting go so much that at some points I couldn't figure out whether I was feeling an emotional wreck because I was, or because Irina was. At one point I was measuring how well a rehearsal went by how much I had successfully cried on stage, and how many tissues I needed afterwards. But that helped to break down the safety barrier I had always put up between myself and the character, the one that always tells me not to go too far, for fear I'll fail. I didn't fail; I learned. I went all the way through the emotional catastrophe that is a Chekhov heroine, and, near the very end of the work, started to discover the balance between the reality you lose yourself to and the one you've got to re-find afterwards.
I can't possibly analyze what Three Sisters meant to anyone who came to see it, whether I made an impact on anyone; I can only write about my own very subjective experience. But I do know, from watching other actors in that state of total commitment that I hope I touched as Irina, that it makes for theater that is captivating, a play that stays with you. That's the kind of theater I want to do. It's the kind of theater that made me fall in love with the art form in the first place, that changed me from an awkward, shy child into a more confident teenager, and then into a young adult who knows, without a doubt, that she wants to continue that tradition. This is also why I need theater, rather than film: film can be admired, but theater can, and does, inspire. The closeness of live theater, the knowledge that the reality you're seeing is being created, now, by people breathing the exact same air you are at the exact same moment, is an experience that no other kind of art can give you. I admire film stars; often I am vaguely jealous that so-and-so gets to wear fabulous period costumes and work with such-and-such an actor or director that I like. But all of that disappears in a moment when I get to work in live theater, with an ensemble of actors and an audience that can make or break a performance. Or when I stand outside the stage door, and I see an actor walk out who half an hour ago changed my life for a moment, made the universe brighter or darker, made me think something I had never thought before, and now is an ordinary human like me. If have a chance to be that for someone else, I want to take it.
My own role as an actor, in terms of a larger picture, is something I still don't know, and I'm not sure that I will until I'm at the end of my career looking back, and analyzing what it was that I did. Of course a large part of it is being an entertainer; that can't be denied, nor would I try to. Occasionally, I know, I will end up doing a play that has no redeeming value besides entertaining people and making them laugh. I also don't think that ought to be frowned upon; sometimes that is exactly what is needed. However, it's not all that acting is about. It's also teaching, though a different kind of teaching than in the classroom; anytime someone goes to a play, if the play is any good, they learn something, or they think about things in a new way. I don't think of myself as an actor for social or political activism, at least not under that label. At least in my experience, theater which tends to label itself as directly activist often comes across as uncomfortably pointed, postmodern, boring, or difficult to watch, all of which turn audiences off. It never helps a cause to not have an audience. That being said, I have found an enormous amount of theater that one wouldn't necessarily tag as political to have some very pertinent things to say. Much of the time this happens with Shakespeare; plays such as Macbeth or Julius Caesar, while they are not about politics in our time, can certainly have (sometimes disturbing) echoes to current events, and make people think. That is the kind of political theater that works, that sends shivers up people's spines.
What I want is to do theater that captures people's imaginations, theater that resonates to people in the audience, theater that teaches something (whether it be artistic or scientific or social or simply teaching the play itself): theater that feels necessary. All of that is, on one level, purely selfish. I need to do it, for the sake of my own happiness in life. But I think—perhaps I hope—that by committing myself to this selfish need to act, I will be helping to create art that becomes an important part of other people's lives, art that can enrich and change lives. It happened to me; I have full faith, and hope, that I can make it happen for someone else.