Student Blogger: Sydney Emerson

I’m about to make a big change in my life, one that I have planned and dreamed about for as long as I can remember. In a little over a week, I’m moving to England for six months to study at a different university. I’m excited. I’m scared.

When somebody creates something so magnificent, so beautiful, so full of emotion and humor and, yes, color and light, there is never enough time. Whether your hero is 35 or 91, their passing will come far too soon for everybody’s taste.

Everybody—whether they were involved in theatre on campus or not—was hungry for a sense of community. They wanted somewhere they could congregate, somewhere they could be loud and support their peers. Finally, after what felt like ages, I finally saw the live performance that I love return: raucous, joyful, loud, and spectacular.

Vonnegut proposed that every story ever told followed a graphable shape. The stories are graphed on two axes: the vertical “good fortune-ill fortune” axis and the horizontal “beginning-end” axis. Perhaps stories aren’t as unique as we think they are—and perhaps that isn’t a bad thing.

The sharp contrast in perspective between the young performers and those behind the scenes—the professors and technicians who remember 9/11 well—has kidnapped my attention. I find it fascinating and meaningful in a layered way that I’m not entirely sure I’ll ever understand.

When it comes to video specials, the game has changed. The rules are different. It’s no longer acceptable for comedians to have a few cameras in the audience and call it good. There is now a heightened sense of performance, and endless possibilities to make comedy more than a man pacing the stage asking “Have you ever noticed…?”

To me, running isn’t about seeing if you can beat your previous time. It’s about listening to music, moving your body because you can, looking at flowers, petting dogs, breathing in the misty air of a summer morning in the mountains. It's about seeing the world differently. I'm not a runner. I've never claimed to be one-I'm anything but fast, I have chronic knee problems, and the prospect of doing anything remotely athletic makes me want to cower in fear. And yet, in March of 2020, I found myself lacing up my sneakers every morning and heading out onto the trail.

To live in a place where defunding has already happened—to not have a marching band to turn to when you can’t imagine yourself possibly going to one more soccer practice—is not only a less beautiful position, it’s a dangerous one. Defunding the arts is not merely a matter of crushing dreams, it’s a matter of destroying lives.

The truth is, I don’t know what makes a good musical anymore—and I’m not sure Broadway does, either. Is a good musical a safe bet that keeps the lights on? One that sweeps the Tonys? Or is a good musical a life-altering event that leaves audiences forever changed, head in the clouds as they ride the train back to their apartments and hotels?

Much like the characters struggling to piece together their identities in In The Heights, and much like—I suspect—Miranda himself at the time of writing this story, I have never felt more pride in my hometown than now, in my young adulthood.

When purity culture devotees suggest that the author must spoon-feed the moral status of every single character to the audience, they undermine both the intelligence of the viewers as well as the skill of the author.

A future in the arts is precarious. It involves overwhelming self-motivation and internal strength. It means that you must constantly advocate for yourself. It means being okay with the fact that you may not succeed right off the bat—and if you’re a worrier like me, existing in this world can sometimes feel like running a marathon with a blindfold on.

This is a plea to all of the writers out there-the introverted, hiding-behind-a-laptop, don't-look-at-me writers. Do improv. Join a troupe. Do it with your friends. Do it by yourself. (Robin Williams did!) There's the obvious benefit that everybody points to with improv-an increased ability to think and speak on the fly, growing more comfortable with public speaking.

I’ve been burnt out before (and I’m sure I’ll be burnt out again) but this time feels different. This time is sluggish, self-aware, and brutal. This time is stealing a nap wherever I can find one. This time is wearing the same outfit two days in a row. This time is writing a too-long blog post to work through my own thoughts. (Welcome!)

I never thought I would miss the bottom halves of my friends’ faces as much as I have this past year. And yet, there isn’t a button we can push or a switch we can flip to send it all back.

They make this our entire identity. All you hear in high school is how each class you take will look on your college application; how every award and activity you do will look on a resume. We put ourselves onto these pieces of paper, distill our very beings into easy-to-read bullet points, and then send them out into the world for judgment. For acceptance or rejection, quite literally.

I had never laid witness (let alone been a part of) a doomed show. It felt like being in the band on the Titanic. We had already hit the iceberg, the ship was about to split in two, and all we could do now was play our song like our lives depended on it. Watch our magnificent ship for as long as we could before it was submerged.

With all of this time in a room by myself, I’ve turned to the old  standby, dream castings, to occupy my time. And let me tell you—I would pay good  money to see any of these shows. So, without further ado, here are just a few of the  castings I’ve dreamt up during quarantine.

It wasn’t until I started taking a course in puppetry for my college’s January  term, where I began learning about more esoteric methods and philosophies of  puppetry, that I was able to fully appreciate the amount of puppetry that happened  nightly in Ferguson’s studio.

So, what’s it like being a theatre fan far away from most theatre? We take it  where we can get it—whether it be at school, at church, or in our community theatre.