Tapping a Different Resource

Or maybe it's the same resource, but I'm exploring using it in a different way. In any case, it's something new and different, and I'm stretching in a different direction. And so far, it's fun!

So, to back up a bit: New Year's Eve, we're hanging out at a friend's place, and the topic comes up about what we can do together as a group, that would be different and new, and maybe a little outside our comfort zone. And our hostess pulls out a pamphlet from Quest Theatre. They run a theatre school, and offer classes for adults.

After a couple of weeks of thinking it over, five of us have signed up, and our first class was last night. It's held in the old Wesley United Church, which is now the Calgary Opera Centre. Our instructor is Daniel Libman, and we spent much of the evening revealing our backgrounds as far as acting, and other performing talents.

For all of us, it amounted to a few stints in highschool productions. My own notable performances were as the star quarterback/boyfriend back in grade 11, I think, which given my physique at the time, got more laughs than the lead characters.

The other performance was in a production about a scarecrow who is brought to life, a dramatic variation on the Pinocchio story, I suppose. I ran the fireplace. It was a cardboard thing with a red floodlight in the bottom, and given the sophistication of the lighting system in your typical school theatre, there was no way to tie it into the rest of the stage lighting, so my role was to crouch behind this cardboard construction with two ends of electrical cords, and plug and unplug in sync with the rest of the lighting. This was probably the best performance of my career so far.

Anyway, after revealing our meagre experiences, and our surprisingly considerable artistic talents, we did our first exercise. We divided into two groups, and took turns standing on the "stage" facing the other group, who was our audience. What we did was simply stare at each other for a few minutes in uncomfortable silence, observing things about each other. Then we were to count the ceiling tiles, and go sit down.

The purpose was to observe what it is like to stand in front of an audience and be watched, and to observe how it feels physically. It is not a comfortable place to be. I felt my breathing become shallow, with a tension in the chest, tightness in the shoulders and jaw, and a tendency to stand unnaturally straight. What was happening was we were experiencing the complete lack of control over what the audience is thinking. Counting the tiles gave us something to engage in, and something that we could control, as trivial as it was. Letting go of that control, and experiencing that while engaging in something we could control was the lesson.

And behind all of this we had a soundtrack. The Calgary Opera chorus was in rehearsal downstairs for their upcoming production of Dead Man Walking, and at full bore, they can really rattle the windows.