We’re coming to the end of Term 2. Just a week to go. I need some perspective on all of this and hope to get an outside eye on it through conversations with other students and a teacher or two between now and the beginning of Term 3. We get a two-week break between terms. Maybe I’ll find a way to get out of town for a few days, too, though even more time by myself isn’t specifically a goal right now. I’m hoping the break will afford me some time and separation to get a better look at things. It’s been a hard term. Quite discouraging at times.
In my “previous life” (back in Minneapolis, in ministry), I had a pretty good sense of what I was good at and what I wasn’t. Much better than here, anyway (though an appreciation of my own gifts and efforts has never been my strong suit). Here, so often, I just can’t tell if I’m doing anything well. Almost all my efforts feel poorly executed, poorly received. If that previous quote from Beckett (Samuel, not Thomas) is a saying to live by, I’m certainly achieving my dose of failure, but I don't feel like I’m “failing better,” whatever that might mean. It’s disheartening, sometimes depressing. Today I took myself aside on the lunch break (literally, finding a place alone way off in a remote corner of Three Mills) just to give myself some distance and avoid conversations for a bit while I tried to work through my reactions to something that happened this morning. Going off alone isn’t always helpful, I’ll admit, but today it helped me get back in touch with an awareness that was helpful last fall: I didn’t come here as an actor, and I won’t leave here as one. (That’s even clearer to me now than it was when I arrived!) Remembering that can help me draw more general learnings from things here rather than getting too down on myself for doing poorly. For example, I rarely choose to put myself in the center of an ensemble improv. I feel better suited to supporting and responding than to leading and proposing. Today I did step into the center with a proposition in a group improv, and apparently did it poorly. Or at least that’s how I understood the feedback, which was all about how nothing held together, with one cryptic comment about how I in particular hadn’t appreciated the impact that one small thing can have. (The feedback I usually get is that I’m doing things too small, too internally. Go figure.) I too could feel that things hadn’t gone well, and the whole thing reinforced my feelings of incompetence. Which made me even less confident about stepping into that kind of role again. Which will probably undermine my ability to do it any better the next time. (Which may not be soon!)
If I can pull my ego out of it a bit, though, and try not to give too much weight to what I see as the repeatedly lukewarm (at best) responses to my efforts, both from teachers and my fellow students, then I can redirect my focus to more constructive learning—about dramatic structure, for example, or storytelling. Otherwise I simply replow the overly tilled ground of my own feelings of inadequacy. This is a really hard discipline for me, trying to redirect my inclinations like that (and it’s yet another thing I haven’t been good at it over the past several weeks!). But it’s certainly a more productive path for me while I’m here.
When creating flows freely
Thursday brought one of the rare occasions when I felt that something I’d done truly found affirmation—and damned if I even knew exactly what it was I did! It would take too long to describe exactly what the exercise in Voice class was, but it put us in a place where we were doing free-form vocalizing, alone and in front of a group. When Simon first described what it was we’d be doing, and then demonstrated it, I thought for sure this was something I’d be just as happy not getting a turn at. But something about the way we went onto it brought me to a place where, when it was my turn, I could hear the surprising quality of what was coming out of me. The problem was I wasn’t in a frame of mind really to take note of exactly what it was I was doing! So how to replicate it?
I asked Simon about it afterward, and he said it has to do with creating an environment where you’re so relaxed that your creating freely flows. And that what you need to figure out, over time—and then demand—are the conditions you need in order to work from that place of trust and safety. I know what some of those conditions are, and I recognized some of them in the build-up to the time of vocal improv—but there’s just not the time (or indulgence) to incorporate those all the time. Still I do recognize that confidence and creativity and … something else—it’s not really comfort, but that’s the word that’s coming to mind now—go hand in hand.
So in the midst of all of this I’m back to trying to figure out what it is I want to create. And how to go about it. And what I need in order to be able to do it.
Quite a task, all in all. But perhaps we each have our own version of it.
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