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August 17, 2005
It's Raining!!!! Plus, Natterings about My Life as an Artist
Yesssss... We need this badly badly badly. And it's raining hard. So perhaps, by the end of the day, the fire map of the US won't have 15 fires clustered around central Idaho, with tiny extensions into Washington, Oregon and Montana.
It's cool enough today that I'm wearing pants and a chamois shirt. Still barefoot, but mostly covered up otherwise. I'm not quite ready for it to be fall yet, but that is apparently about to occur without my sayso, so I guess I should just give in. Reminds me... I need to order a whole big bunch of planty-type things.
Because of the rain, I am currently brewing a pot of tea (Tea at the Empress blend from the Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC) and working on a new monologue.
Okay that's clearly a lie. Were I actually working on my monologue, I would not be typing a blog entry. To be honest, what I am doing is avoiding working on a new monologue because it scares the shit out of me.
I feel so inadequate as an actor sometimes. I can have wonderful, honest reactions in rehearsal, and I can also have wonderful, honest reactions onstage. But I cannot have the same wonderful, honest reactions every performance. And I suppose that's actually a testament to the honesty of my reactions. Because they are new and different every time. But when I feel the emotion that seems "right," I always want to make it happen again, and I tend to try to force that choice, rather than being natural and honest.
So I'm trying to find ways to expand my emotional access without losing the power and intensity of my work, while also allowing the emotions to just come. And that's hard. And also scary because I don't always want to access those emotions.
The ones I need to get to for this monologue are not pretty. But to be honest with them, to allow them to come out the way I need them to, I have to be willing to go to those places. Which means a mid-morning of crying and screaming and being ugly and feeling like shit both emotionally and physically. And once I'm there, it's a hard place to get out of.
(Though in real life, I'm not remotely interested in getting my lover to kill my husband. Um... Not that I have a lover... I mean, aside from my husband...)
I couldn't explore these things while I was in school. I never felt safe enough, except for my first semester, and for parts of the animal work semester. So now I have to do them on my own, with help from a wonderful book I discovered last spring. But doing this on my own doesn't make it any less terrifying. Because now I have two options. I can do this work and experience these emotions and deal with the pain and ugliness I'm going to feel while I'm doing it and discover that it doesn't matter, that I still suck, OR, I can refuse to do the work at all, or do it half-heartedly and suck for sure.
Mind you, there's the teenytiny possibility that I might be decent at this stuff, but who are we kidding?
At least I have finally figured out that I have enough time before my OSF audition that I can take this work one step at a time and don't have to do it all today, which is my other failing as an artist. I always think that I have to do it all NOW instead of step-by-step. But this monologue doesn't have to be audition-ready today. Or even this week. It has to be audition-ready by the end of September.
Baby steps, Sal. Baby steps.
Posted by sally at August 17, 2005 10:10 AM
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