Last weekend before I left for Kuala Lumpur I finally managed to do the journal writing experience based on the frameworks of Reid and Moon. I know I’m a little late but I haven’t had a chance to do a post on it until now and it’s time I caught up.
I had spent a long time wondering what event I wanted to journal about and then an amazing experience presented itself to me. A really good friend of mine who I have worked with before and who is completely inspiring is doing her PhD at Central School of Speech and Drama. Her PhD is based around interactive theatre and she asked me if I would help her out by being involved in two part devised, part improvised performances in front of Central staff, other PhD students and a paying audience. At first the idea made me feel physically sick because it was so far removed from what I usually do or what I know myself to be good at. However, I decided to do it because I am always saying I want to do more acting and this was the perfect opportunity. I then thought what better thing to journal about because it was such a new experience for me. So I did.
The first thing that I want to say is that I have never written so much in a journal in my life!! What a wordy experience. Having said that I found some of the sections more useful than others so probably wouldn’t use all of them in the future.
The section that I found most useful was ‘Initial Reflection’ and to honest I wasn’t at all surprised by this. I always find it so relevant to describe the way I felt about a situation or event not just what happened. I think it is through doing this that you discover why you do the things you do. For example, then second of the two performances was not as successful for me as the first. I was not as adventurous and my energy levels were lower. I didn’t take the risks that I took in the first performance. Noting these things on there own is informative but not particularly useful because it doesn’t explain why this happened. If I then look into the way I was feeling, things are immediately clarified and it begins to be something a person can learn from. For example, after the first performance I was feeling almost euphoric because it had gone so well. The audience had been so responsive all the way through. At the beginning of the second performance I felt that this audience was much more reserved and judgemental. I felt myself inwardly cringing and retreating. I was continually comparing the two performances in my mind and I felt I was much worse and therefore failing my friend Helen. This made my retreat even more pronounced. Becoming aware of how my feelings impacted my performance was really useful because it means that I can hopefully put things in place to prevent such an extreme reaction in the future.
Another section that I found useful was writing a list. This really surprised me. I started writing the list saying to myself, “How on earth is this going to help. Surely I am only going to write words relating to things that I have already thought about. Nothing new is going to come form this.” How wrong I was. At first I did just write words that had already featured in my initial reflection such as ‘dread’, ‘exhilaration’, ‘retreat’, ‘excited’. Then suddenly I started writing words that seemed to come from nowhere but had such unexpected relevance to the day I’d had. Words such as ‘trust’, ‘power’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’.
These words made me realise things about the day that previously hadn’t occurred to me. The word ‘trust’ made me appreciate how important it is to put your trust in the people you are working with. Trust in the director you have, your fellow actors and yourself. This is something I have known in principle for a long time. For years its been said to me and right back when I was a child at drama classes we used to play trust games where one person would fall back and get caught by the other. However, this experience made me appreciate trust in such a new way. I think because most of the performance was improvised you really needed to have faith that your fellow actors knew where they were taking something and a belief that you were able enough to follow them and take over when necessary. It also became apparent the amount of trust I needed to have in Helen whose concept it was and who partly directed us. It is so lucky it was her piece because there are not many people who I have enough trust in to put myself through such a stressful situation. I will definitely be using the list again because it was such a quick way of unveiling hidden ideas.
In contrast to writing a list I was surprised how little writing form another view helped me. It was an interesting experience and actually quite fun but nothing new came to light. I decided to write from the perspective of one of the audience members coming in to the performance but what I wrote was so informed but my own perceptions of events. I don’t think in this circumstance that I moved away from my own feelings of what happened enough. I think this is a real shame because I really believe (as I have previously said on Stephie’s blog) that it can be so helpful to see something from another perspective. It can help you see why people are acting the way they are and how the way you are behaving has an impact on that. I am definitely going to try writing from other perspectives again because in principle I think it should work. Perhaps I’m just not very good at it yet.
Finally I think writing about the overall themes is a really good way of summarising and giving order to everything you have experienced. After sitting and writing so much about the day (twenty pages to be precise) it was really useful to collate all the information into a meaningful, digestible form. These are some of the things I wrote under the heading of ‘themes’.
“I valued the chance to act and solidifying the idea of the of the importance of trust in a performing environment.”
“I loved the idea that there is no right and wrong when it comes to improvisations within interactive theatre. It is just an evolutionary process. This idea seems to have great relevance to this course. When you improvise you follow different, often unplanned but always insightful paths before you arrive at the end of the performance. In this course we also experiment and go down blind paths but it is part of the learning experience.”
“Next time I would try and not let the outcome of the first performance impact the second. In interactive theatre the audience will always affect the performance but in future I would like to try and stop them from affecting my feelings about myself. I would hopefully be less critical of myself in the moment because it is not useful.”
“It interested me that I felt apologetic for being a musical theatre performer in amongst actors. It makes me cross when musical theatre performers are looked down on, so why did I look down on myself? It is also interesting however, that I noted how much more involved my process was when preparing my character for this acting piece than it ever is when I perform in musical theatre.”
“I am glad I pushed myself. It made me feel really sick at times but I learnt so much from it. You have to go outside of your comfort zone to progress.”
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