It's been a wild ride so far and has only, in the past two weeks, started to calm down a bit for me. As my Classical Studio teacher Scott Whitehurst says, (and I'm paraphrasing) "Be grateful for when it's crazy because that means the phone is ringing, that means you're working." As opposed to the opposite. Silent phone, discouragement, too much time alone with you and your thoughts to bring you down.
I'm grateful the first seven weeks of second year were insane for me. They were boot camp. Preparation for next semester, really. I wanted to take a moment to take stock of all the amazing characters I've gotten to inhabit thus far:
- Hanna in Christopher Chen's Mutt (Peter J. Kuo's Director Thesis)
- Esther in Lloyd Suh's Hwangap (Scene Study)
- Mrs. Alving in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (Dialects, Classical American)
- Antigone in Sophocles' Antigone, translated by H. D. F. Kitto (Scene Study)
- A reading of Virginia Woolf's essay Shakespeare's Sister from her book of essays A Room of One's Own (Dialects, Standard British)
- Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare (Classical Studio)
- Juliet in William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (Nurse/Juliet scene for Classical Adaptation)
- Helena in Williams Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well (Classical Studio)
- Hal in William Shakespeare's Henry 4, Part 1 (Classical Adaptation)
- Ruth in Rebecca Etzine's adaptation of Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan written by Ruth Gilligan (Co-Lab, Director Adaptation)
- Johanna in Caitlin Moran's How to Build a Girl (Dialects, Cockney)
As you can see, it's been a lively eight weeks of scene studies and monologues. Grateful for every crazy second of it!
Oh! Footnote: I sangβnay, I belted in front of an audience (admittedly just my fellow classmates) and for the first time, I feel like I communicated a story with a point of view and used singing technique at the same time. Small wins!