Hedgehog is Talking

A week from today I'll be at the airport in Toronto, an hour away from boarding my flight to London Heathrow. From there it's a mini van ride to Stratford, where I'll be living for three weeks. Here, specifically. Did I mention that Liz, Amanda and I have a NINE HOUR layover in Toronto? Well, we do. We have to leave Houston at 6:30 in the morning, we get to Toronto around 10:30 AM, and then our flight to London doesn't leave until 7:30 that evening. I'm not sure what exactly we're going to do in Canda for nine hours. I'm not even sure that we'll be able to leave the airport, but I sure hope we will 'cause then I could add Toronto to the list of Places I Have Been.
(I have very specific rules about when I can add states/countries to my list. If I drive through a state/country and see a significant amount of it that counts, even if we don't actually stop anywhere other than gas stations. For example, I was able to add Utah to my list of states because I drove across a significant portion of it on my way from Colorado to Las Vegas when I was 16. However, layovers in airports don't count if you don't actually leave the airport since the airport is a neutral space. If airports counted, Ohio, Washington D.C., and Georgia would be on my list, but they're not. I can't add Canada to my list if I don't actually leave the airport, but if we do get to leave and, say, have lunch somewhere or even just walk around outside for a while off airport property, then it counts.)

Anyway, I'm getting really, really excited. I can't wait to feel that London energy, and I can't wait to get to Stratford, to meet all the renowned people that are going to be giving our workshops, and to see all the shows. The Royal Shakespeare Company is doing a complete works festival. It began in April, and over the course of the next year every single work ever written by Shakespeare (sonnets, etc.) is going to be performed in Stratford. Some of it is being done by the RSC company, and then they're bringing in different groups from arond the world to perform as well. Like, the Midsummer we're seeing is being performed by a company from India (apparently it's being performed in both English and various Indian dialects), and the Titus we're seeing is done by a Japanese company (and will be performed in Japanese, or so I hear). We're seeing Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus Andronicus, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus (although I think we're seeing Coriolanus at the Globe in London). Anyway, I think (I hope) it's going to be awesome.

The class itself is going really well, too. I like it so much more than I thought I would. Today after class Dr. C asked to talk to me privately. I was wondering what I might have done wrong, but it turns out she just wanted to tell me that both she and Patricia think I'm doing really well. That was totally not what I was expecting to hear. It's common knowledge that I'm the person in the class with the least acting/voice/movement experience, but I actually feel like I'm holding my own okay. I mean, I'm certainly not the best in the class, but I don't think you'd automatically pick me out as the least experienced, either. Dr. C. was saying that she admired the fact that I'm not afraid to try everything and that I just jump right in, and she also asked if I had dance training (apparently it still shows...who knew?!) and said that in terms of being comfortable in my body I'm actually one of the better ones in the class.
Both of those comments really surprised me. For one thing, I never used to be a "jump-on-in" kind of person. I'm not typically the type that throws my hand up and volunteers to be first. It used to be that if we got through an entire acting class without it getting to be my turn, I was relieved. But now I'm disappointed if I don't get a turn. And I also never used to be someone who could fully use my body, or could be considered "comfortable" in my body. I've always had a pretty good amount of body confidence, but I also often felt a certain amount of awkwardness when it came to actual body movement and it's fascinating to discover that suddenly that awkwardness isn't really a factor anymore (or not nearly as much as it once was, at any rate).

So I've been wondering...what has changed between this acting/voice/movement class and the ones I took at TCU a few years ago?
I think that part of it is just a matter of coming into my own. I progressively get more confident as I get older. I've always been like that. Maybe everybody is. All I know is that I was a much more confident person at 18 than I was at 15, a much more confident person at 21 than I was at 18. So it makes sense that I've just naturally grown and gotten to know myself more in the past few years and I'm more confident overall now at 23 than I was when I took acting at the age of 19 and 20.
But more importantly than that, I think I feel safer in this class than I ever have in any other acting class. At TCU I always knew the people in my classes very well. I was in acting class with my best friends. You'd think that would be a benefit, that it would make for a safer environment. And true, it made for a fun environment most of the time. But actually, in terms of work and growth, I'm finding that I'm liking taking this class with (mostly) near-strangers a lot more. I think in my acting classes at TCU there was always a certain amount of pressure. True, most of it was self-imposed, but I could never quite escape that feeling of wanting to impress people. I wanted to do really well in the classes so that my professors would want to cast me in shows. I wanted to do well in the classes so that I didn't have to worry that my friends were pitying me behind my back over my lack of talent (not that I think that ever actually happened, but that was sort of my thought process at the time). Needless to say, that constant feeling in the back of my mind of wanting to be "good" totally backfired.
Now, if there's any feeling of wanting to impress people at all, it's just me wanting to impress myself. I don't feel like I'm competing with anyone in this class. I don't feel the need to be good at this in comparison to the entire group, I just feel the need to make an overall improvement over where I started on Tuesday. I don't audition here so I don't feel like I need to be "better" than Jenn or Mindy or whoever. Everybody in this group knows that I'm a scholar before I'm an actor, so nobody expects me to be able to do this as well as Chris or Alex or the self-proclaimed actors in the group. I know that nobody expected these things of me before, in my old classes, but I did.
But now I'm truly just worried about improving myself, and that's such a freeing feeling. It's like I've finally grasped the mindset I should have had all along, and as a result I'm not nearly as intimidated by it all as I used to be.

Of course, this only counts right now. I may very well have a heart attack when I have to do workshops with the people in Stratford. But for right now, it's mostly just a lot of fun.