Reflections

Since I left my Acting Lab session on Friday afternoon, I have been overwhelmed by a feeling I have not felt in years, and never to this extent, as I honestly never thought I would feel it again. The feeling: lost, completely incapable of doing the one thing about which I thought I knew nearly everything there was to know. Ruth Nerken, my Acting Lab teacher and a woman whom I have the utmost confidence is going to change my life drastically, stopped me thirty seconds into my monologue, a monologue I have lived and breathed for nine months now, and attempted to loosen me up. I was too comfortable in my situation. It was not true to the character's circumstance.

Nothing she did worked. Nothing.

Something happened, though. I have never had to work hard at script analysis, I always know exactly what my intention is and what my motivation is and what my tactics are and where every beat changes. As painfully shy as I was as a child, I've grown up living inside of my own head, always watching. The obsession I developed with human behavior and why people do the things that they do is what makes the intellectual side of this art form so easy for me. However, when I found my voice and lost my shyness upon discovering the theatre, my living inside of my own head did not change and still has not. I have a habit of scripting everything that I do, from what I say to what I wear to how I sit or stand; it is all completely purposeful and planned. My goals for this next year:

-Stop thinking so damn hard all the damn time.

-Learn to not ACT vulnerable and available, but actually BE vulnerable and available.

-In short, LOOSEN UP.

P.S.

My room.