Hi!
Been a while...I haven't been blogging because not only have I not been acting, I have been doing relatively little even close to theatre. But then this past weekend I went to see a whole bunch of stuff.
At the festival of this guy:
Good old George Bernard!
I saw four shows and was knocked out by the quality. Four very strong productions. It's rare that I am so consistently impressed. There were parts of each of them that I thought were stronger than others, but on the whole, they each had a vision and it was so clearly communicated. And the vision was, in different cases, beautiful, or unique, or heartbreaking, or epic, and they were all clear, clear, clear in execution. So that was very encouraging.
It's so so exciting to see good theatre.
Feeling not so much a part of acting and theatre right now is kind of both nullified and exacerbated by going and being surrounded by a sect of the Canadian theatre community for a while. On one hand, it's great to go and be inspired and feel like, yes, these are things I'd want to be a part of. Specifically at Shaw, because I have always felt that there was nothing I could ever do there, but watching those shows I saw stuff that I would like and could do. Also, you realize how very very infinitesimally small the community is. I ran into several Tout Comme Elle alumni, and other people I had worked with, and then, onstage, are people I know, or am connected to in some way. It kind of feels possible that I can move forward and get somewhere, at some point.
But....on the other hand, I feel often that my theatrical past comes back to haunt me. I have enemies. I have people in the community who I know don't like me, as an artist or as a person, and there are even more people that dislike me and I don't know about it, due to either duplicity or my own shocking ignorance. And those things make the idea of being successful seem far away. And because I still see the ways in which it is possible, failure is all the more crushing. There's a humiliation factor at this point, because enough people know me that enough people will know that I gave up. Or couldn't hack it. Or whatever. That's the down side to now feeling, on occasion (rare occasion, really) that I am or could be a part of the theatre machine.
So....limbo....As with anything, it seems, the positive and the negative are there side by side and I jump back and forth from one to the other. They're both real, too, I think. I guess it is just learning to live with them both being side by side and not letting that make you crazy. Acceptance. Serenity now!!!
