I was very impressed by the work my students achieved for their final scenes for the course. They had one, and truly only one criteria for choosing their scenes: they had to believe they could fail. While this criteria seems ridiculous and absurd it produced some amazing results.
This, of course, points to greater truths about life in general. The decision to do something completely knowing that you could fail is, I think, an attribute. Something truly great has been achieved even in making the attempt. This is not an easy thing to do.
Sometimes I think about how truly insane it was for my wife and I to get married and immediately move 1000 miles away from any family to a new part of the country to enter a grad program: for theatre. People thought we were crazy then and I presume they still think we are crazy now. We did it, though, and we are much better off because of it. I'll refrain from listing the practical and life skills I've learned over the past three years but lets just say that they aren't all in theatre.
Life is encountering and experiencing the unexpected. People simply surprise you. The course I just finished teaching focused on Stanislavski, a man who arguably created the larger style of acting we popularly recognize and encounter in America today. This man sought truth on stage in the theatre. This unexpected encounter and experience are part of that process. To choose to do something you could fail at, in front of your peers, is a marvelously crazy decision.
And yet, we learn. We become more human. We identify with new or more powerful emotions in a strong way. We also learn to trust ourselves a bit more than we used to.
Trust yourself. Try. Work. Do.
This is funny because at Dell' Arte you have to KNOW you are going to fail. You have to know you are trying to do the impossible. That the work is never done done done. There is always something that could make it better and closer to the impossible.
ReplyDeleteHow inspirational. And yes, that is how we learn.