BWW Blog: Doing Theatre Even Though Our Season is Cancelled

I recently moved back into my dorm at William Peace University, and even though our sister schools are reverting back to online only after the semester started, we are still blessed with the opportunity to learn on campus and in person. I'm ecstatic to have the opportunity to still be on campus, especially with all of our steps taken to safety.

Sadly, one of those steps is postponing all of our shows to the Spring (at least!) so I have to patiently wait an entire semester to do a proper play again.

Sensing the impeding sense of Doom radiating all of the theatre majors (or more likely, wanting a way to allow us to get at least one performance credit and not delay our graduation), our theatre advisors came up with a 'Performance Project', and I couldn't be more excited!

Essentially, we were told to think of a part of theatre that we wanted to learn how to do, but previously were too intimidated to attempt. The examples we were given is if you were afraid of attempting accents, you could create a small scene of just you being characters in outrageous accents.

That's also the thing: we have five minutes to do anything that comes to our mind. We are given (almost) free reign to attempt anything that we are terrified of attempting but secretly, deep down, really want to just try.

We were told this slightly before we moved back in, and in those few weeks my mind went wild with possibilities. The hardest part was not me thinking of things that intimated me, but rather things that were more alike the field I want to go into.

Singing and dancing are both terrifying for me, but since I don't have an interest in going into musical theatre, a part of me feels like that's the easy choice out. Like, sure, I could learn a song and just grit my way through singing at least 16-bars in front of an entire room of talented musical theatre performers, but I don't plan on picking up that skill routinely for my career. It's a useful skill to have, even for as a straight-play actor, but I don't think I should be anticipating to be getting a 'useful skill'.

You know what really does interest me? Dramaturgy. It's a complicated field that I could not even find a single, agreed upon definition but to sum it up if you've never heard it before: A dramaturg is the person that works very close to the playwright and director to provide historical context, needed information, a fresh pair of eyes, or to try and see it from the audience's perspective.

A complicated field that is really vague? Intimidating. Having to do basically teach myself what to do? Intimidating. Having to figure out what a dramaturgy-based performance really entails? Really intimidating.

That's one good thing about spending all that time in quarantine away from theatre - I'm ready to cannonball into something terrifying.

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