Performance

Earlier today I had a thought about what I wanted to blog about tonight.  It was about "Creative Ideas" - how someone comes up with something, that to so many may be inane, but they follow through with it and then it becomes cool, popular, a 'thing', etc.  The idea came to me while I was in rehearsal and I thought that is something to chew on a bit....

Forget that, I'll have to come back to it.  As I said, it came to me in rehearsal, and following the rehearsal, I went on stage and did a reading of the thing I was rehearsing.  I have just travelled home, following that performance, and I am all jazzed.  I wanted to throw my emotional state out on this page with a "sympathetic audience" (a line from the play), because well, I believe that you will understand.  Now although you are not here with me to chat over a coffee and get all existential with me I have a sense of unspoken camaraderie with you my reader, a connection.  It is through the release of emotion and our connection that magic can happen so....

Adrenaline is pumping through my veins.  As I walked down the subway platform I felt elevated, not above anyone there, just different.  I said to myself, "I am fortunate for having found and chosen to follow that which inspires me, that which gives me joy, and that which allows me to feel so alive."  I wanted to run up and down and scream for joy, to dance with glee, to pull a little bit of the old Snoopy shuffle.

If you don't know my reference:  Classic happy Snoopy dance, as depicted in Peanuts cartoon by Charles M. Schultz

Let me be clear that tonight was an extra special night for me.  It has been a slow year, acting has not exactly been on the plate, it has been a down time in career, unlike the past few which have been on the high time.  So when Andrew Lamb, a director I have wanted to work with for a while called, and said would I join him up on stage...well I did a happy dance when I got off the phone.  All of that to say tonight was special because I got to act.  I was up in front of audience for a reading of a new Canadian play.  I was working with other wonderful talent, I had been directed by a director I wanted to work with and most of all I got to have fun doing what I love...for the first time in a long time.  (little fist pump whohoo)

I have a good friend and business partner, Stevie Jay, and we have agreed that good theatre needs a black box (and sometimes not even that), an audience, and good story telling - that is it.  Everything else can add to it, but it is extra.  Tonight at the reading it is all we had.  It was 'just' a reading.  We rehearsed it twice through this afternoon, took a break for dinner and up we went script in hand.  So much fun.

So there I am in a small space reading away, portraying the limited character I have created off of a few reads, telling this story, which by the way is very well written by play wright Adam Bailey, and I look up.  I look out into the audience and use them as the character they are in this piece and all I can see are faces of people who are completely engaged.  People who have been transported to the world we three actors and a playwright have created.  Souls that are so wrapped up in the story that for a brief time they are able to let go of everything else.  Spirits who are living a different reality in this moment which I am helping to create.  There was one particular moment that my character's pride is rising with the story he is recounting, he is stepping out of the mire onto solid land. On a physical level I had been sitting slightly slumped over and as I said this little speech I began to sit more upright.  I was amazed to see several audience members who were slouched in there chairs begin to rise with me, to sit more upright and live that moment simultaneously.

Yes it is my perception, and there could be a million reasons why several people, began to sit more upright in pace with me as I did so.  But I believe they sat up with me because they were engaged, they were transported and for some maybe they felt pride and experienced something as I told my piece of that story.  It is a rush to see the effect I can have on people (we all have that power when we share our feelings - go tell your lover how you really feel and see what happens).  I am so happy that I get to actively tell story and produce that effect on many people, to reach out and touch other humans, to bring something to them, something they may be talking about right now.  All I can say is WOW!  And I know that feeling is understood by every artist out there.  Thanks for letting me share.