Rachel Corrie Update

Okay, so I haven't been updating on my senior project nearly as much as I should be.

Mostly, it's going well!

Partly because of senioritis, I think (which I mentioned in my previous post), I have not been nearly as proactive with Rachel Corrie stuff this semester as I was last semester.

We have, however, had a couple of rehearsals. My fabulous stage manager and I had a pick-up rehearsal a couple/few weeks after classes started again in which we just ran lines. After having not worked on it really at all for several weeks, I was worried I would have lost a lot of it. But I didn't struggle too much. It's still there!

Then, a couple weeks ago, we actually got the first 1/3 of the play back up on its feet with props (no costume though). And my director and I have been working pieces as well--changing some things here and there. I'm excited I get to do it again. A couple of the things we're re-working in the play will be the "February 7" section, or the part where Rachel talks about us all being kids, and the poem in which she talks about the mental health clients. We're hoping to make them clearer, easier to follow, and more visually striking. I think it's safe to say that we won't be changing the majority of the staging, however.

A couple of weeks ago, some people from the intercultural student services department held an evening lecture in the Century Dining Room entitled something like "God, Peace, and the Middle East," so naturally I went. It was pretty good, and I'm glad I was there. I even met someone who had seen Rachel Corrie first semester who talked with me about it for a while. Unfortunately, I didn't get to talk to everyone I wanted to, and I left without meeting an Armenian professor I didn't know who has a unique, personal perspective on happenings in the Middle East. I did get to sit down with him and have coffee last week, however, and we had a great conversation. I think we both left feeling encouraged by each other, and I had a little bit of a broader view of some happenings in countries other than Israel and Palestine.

Also, one of the professors who had her classes see Rachel Corrie last semester gave me written responses from some of her students. They were fascinating, enlightening, and encouraging for various reasons, and I was thrilled to get feedback in that way. I've never experienced that before. Things like:

“I liked how [the Sojourn review] mentioned Emmett’s fight for performing this play at IWU. It reminded me of... Rachel Corrie’s struggle to make a difference... I really enjoyed this performance.”

© Greg Fiebig 2012

I'm also very excited to get to perform this play in the Black Box this semester--I think the atmosphere will be very conducive to this particular play.

I still have some reading I would like to do, and there are still details to iron out, but we'll get there.

I have a feeling April 4 and 5 will be here before I know it.

Senior Life: Continued

I'm planning on two posts today.

This one: I will talk about senioritis, about options, and also about wanting something so bad you can taste it but not wanting to get your hopes up.

The next post: I will give a progress update on my senior showcase My Name is Rachel Corrie.

But firstly.

I always thought senioritis was a myth. All through school. High school. College. Whatever. I never thought it was actually a real thing. I thought it was some lame excuse people made up so they could skip through the hallways throwing papers around, refusing to give a flying flip.

Then I got to this semester. I was fine right up until this last semester of my undergraduate career. And then it hit, and I found out senioritis was real.

Oh, and it doesn't feel anything like I thought it would, either. I thought, if it did exist, it would be this blissful, beautiful place where I just stopped caring. But no. Oh no no. I still care. I still hit panic mode when it's the night before and I still haven't started that assignment that's due at 8 a.m. I still get ulcers worrying that everything won't get done.

I just don't do it. I can't make myself! It's awful.

Fortunately (and this actually might be part of the problem), I really do have a very easy semester. The easiest semester I've ever had, actually. I've worked hard to get here, it feels fantastic, and I'm just coasting on my way out.

Speaking of which, let's now talk about options.

About this time last year, my greatest fear was of getting to the end of senior year and having zero options and no place to go. Which would then lead me to just spontaneously up and move to a big city where, resourceless, I would probably crash and burn and end up eking out an existence from a glorified cardboard box.

Or worse, an actual cardboard box.

Well, those fears have been mostly alleviated.

I have options!

Which is a lot more than many seniors in college can say before they graduate.
What I didn't realize is that, when you have options, the options don't always play well together and then you have to make decisions.

So this week, I've had to wrestle with which options I will or won't give up, based on what might or could happen. Fortunately, I found out I can delay actually making a decision for a couple of months which helps immensely.

Which brings me to:

Have you ever wanted something really badly?

I'm not talking about really wanting a popsicle on a hot day. I'm talking about, like, if you get this thing, it would simultaneously affirm your life choices up to that point, fulfill you, and give you hope for your future. And you know you shouldn't put so much stock into it, because when you step back it doesn't sound like much. But you know that, now that you've built it up in your mind, you'll be devastated if you don't get it?

That's this job I've applied for.

And I know, if I don't get it, I'll probably be able to look back and be okay with it. And that there will probably be other opportunities. And I'll probably be at peace with wherever I end up this fall.

It's just weird because most things I've wanted this badly I've usually had some measure of control over whether or not they come to be. It's usually something that, if I work hard enough, or practice enough self-control, or save up enough, or think through enough, I can get it. But not this. I've done everything I can and now it's out of my hands and I don't even know what my odds are of it actually happening.

I REALLY WANT THIS JOB.

So anyway. To get my mind off of it, I'll move on and talk about my senior project. Next post!

Character ≠ Actor

First, an extremely hilarious video.
Please, PLEASE, for your own sake, view this video of Sir Ian McKellen sharing his bountiful wisdom on the art of acting. You won't regret it--

http://www.wimp.com/goodactor/

Isn't he wonderful? I know. Okay. Now. Let's talk a little bit about acting.

As the wonderful Sir Ian says (multiple times) in this video, "I pretend..."

This video is hysterical because of how obvious that is. Of course he's pretending to be Gandalf. That's what he does. He's an actor. Duh.

So why is it so difficult for some of the people I've encountered to comprehend that I am not the person I pretend to be when I'm on stage?

My senior project, which I've written about before, is a production of the one-woman show My Name is Rachel Corrie--a choice I knew would be controversial on my evangelical Christian university campus. While it broaches the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it first and foremost tells the story of a twenty-three-year-old who looked at what was happening in the world, saw injustice, left her home to go live in the midst of it and help in the only way she knew how, and was killed while protecting the home of a civilian Palestinian family. The problem, for my community? Rachel Corrie happens to have held a very pro-Palestinian view--a perspective not widely held or accepted by many Christians, who are largely pro-Israel. I was worried that this would be problematic from the beginning, and I was afraid that I might not be permitted to perform the play for reasons having to do with politics. To my surprise, however, the politics of the play were not the biggest problem. The language was.

There are 22 words that might be considered "vulgar" in the script (depending, of course, on your definition of "vulgar"). Believe me, I know, because I had to count them up and justify them when I wrote the two different proposals I had to submit. My justification for performing the script unedited was simple: this script is different. The story isn't fictional--Rachel Corrie was a real person who really lived, but the script is also actually comprised of several of Rachel's letters, journals, and emails that were compiled and edited into script form. So if you were to ask, "Who wrote the script?" Well, in a sense, Rachel did. And to ask to edit the script? It seemed disrespectful, flat-out wrong, in some way, to try to censor and sanitize Rachel. To "clean up" her language would be to misrepresent who she was, to belie her memory. For what? To make a few people a little more... comfortable?

Really?

Fortunately, I was allowed to present the play in its unedited form, albeit privately. Which was what I'd been trying to do in the first place. I couldn't have been more pleased.

But there are people who have struggled with my performing this play. My pastor, who was opposed to the play even being read on campus, said that he was "disturbed" by the thought of the words coming out of my mouth.

But that's just it.
With all due respect, don't you see? When I am on the stage, my mouth is not truly my own. These aren't my words. They're Rachel's. That's why I have to keep them. I'm telling her story, and I'm telling it her way.

A wise theatre artist I know put it this way:

These are not your words. And this is not your play. This is the playwright's play. And she had every right to write what she wrote. Don't hide from it. Tell the truth of this story.

Last semester's performances went better than I ever could have predicted. Everything went off (mostly) without a hitch (except for that one performance when an audience member's GPS began giving rather loud directions in the middle of the play). And I've gotten more positive feedback than I could have imagined possible. People got it. They were challenged by what they saw. It made them think. And they even enjoyed it. But the one thing I've probably heard the most, even from people who know me, is that they forgot it was me. They forgot my name is Kendra. They forgot that I'm a college student. They forgot I wasn't Rachel. They willfully suspended their disbelief enough to forget, for a while, that they were sitting in a recital hall in the Midwest watching a play and, somehow, the story--and Rachel--came to life. And that means I did my job.

But then the play ends. The lights come up, I walk off the stage, the audience walks out of the theatre, and my name is Kendra Emmett.

CHARACTER    ≠    ACTOR

When people can't separate these two things, it can become dangerous. Don't believe me? There are tragedy/horror stories of what has happened when actors get too intertwined with their characters. It can be extremely psychologically damaging, for actor and audience alike. There was a lot of speculation about Heath Ledger's accidental drug overdose after what many would call unhealthy immersion in the mind of his character, the Joker, in The Dark Knight. In her book The Friendly Shakespeare, Norrie Epstein tells the story of an audience member in the Old West who stood up in the middle of a performance of Othello, pulled out his pistol, and shot the actor playing Iago. And don't even get me started on the disconcerting stories about Twilight fans. A girl once asked Robert Pattinson if he would bite her. She was completely serious.

That's a little extreme, but it's exactly what I'm talking about.

Robert Pattinson is not a sparkly vampire.

Ian McKellen isn't actually a wizard.

I could probably not be described as a "messy, articulate, Salvador Dali–loving chain-smoking" political activist.

And please don't misread that as some sort of judgment. In fact, a rule of acting is to never judge your character. When I've actively been trying to learn about and better understand Rachel so I can portray her more effectively, it would have been hard not to come to appreciate and admire her. Was she a saint? No. God knows I'm not either. She was a real person with powerful convictions and beliefs, who happened to occasionally use language that my university and people in my community happen to disapprove of, and who I will do my very best to bring to life for you.

Herein lies the actor's paradox. We desperately want the audience to forget, but not to forget.
I am telling you a lie. And I want desperately for you to believe that lie. While simultaneously remembering the truth.
This is why we say we make believe.

And so, in conversations about my performance as Rachel Corrie, I've been asked by at least three different people, "So... do you swear?" and, from what I understand, quite a few people thought I smoked real cigarettes.

Neither of which are inherently bad things. For some people, however, these would be indictments. Which is a whole other post in itself. But that's for another time.

So, for now, I'll just smile and say, "Have you ever heard of Sir Ian McKellen...?"

Updates from a Senior Theatre Major

Well. I daresay it's about time there was a blog update having something to do with theatre. I should be doing some homework but eehh.

The last semester of my senior year has gotten off to a smashing start. It's going to be a good one, I'm hoping. I have a pretty lax schedule, which is nice. (And necessary--but I'll get to that later.) I'm only taking 12 credit hours - the bare minimum to be a full-time student.

I'm in:
- Voice Lessons (1 credit - 1/2 hr/week + practice time)
- Shakespeare in Performance (3 credits - meets once a week on Mondays + Spring Break trip to the American Shakespeare Center!)
- Stage Design I - Lighting & Set Design (3 credits - Tuesday/Thursdays)
- Senior Project (3 credits - meets every other Wednesday + outside work on project, AND all my senior project hours are actually already completed, I just have two more performances of Rachel Corrie to go!)
- Radio ComLab (1 credit - 1-3 live radio shift every Wednesday + weekly meeting)
- Theatre ComLab (1 credit - no regular meetings, using hours from Secret Garden)

Then I'm auditing a Voice and Movement class, and am a Teaching Assistant for the Symbols & Imaging class. I'm also still working as Publicity Coordinator for the IWU Theatre Guild, and have two small, non-singing roles in The Secret Garden, playing March 14-16 and 21-23.

Oh, and then the outside things.

Right after classes started again, I got the chance to attend KC-ACTF and compete as a partner in the Irene Ryans. I got to attend and compete in the Ryans all four years of college, so that was pretty spectacular. It meant that my partner and I missed almost three days of the first week of school, but it was totally worth it.

And now, pretty much every single weekend from here on out is packed full with something.

February 3rd - may be headed up to Chicago for a private grad school audition

February 8-10 - made my very first hotel reservation by myself, for myself. It was nerve-wracking, but I'll be in Memphis for UPTAs!

February 14-16 - House Managing for IWU's production of Steel Magnolias. I'm excited to see it!

February 23-25 - MidWest Auditions in St. Louis, Missouri. I did these last year and I'm going back again this year - we'll see what happens.

March 2-9 - Spring Break trip at the American Shakespeare Center! SO excited. (Also doing some grad school-related campus visit stuff while I'm there.)

March 14-16 and 21-23 - Performances for IWU's production of The Secret Garden

March 29-April 1 - Easter Break

April 4 & 5 - Round 2 of performances for my senior project, My Name is Rachel Corrie

Thankfully, the last two weekends of the school year are (so far) unoccupied and, considering what the rest of my semester looks like and the fact that I'm already tired and stressed just thinking about all the traveling I'm going to be doing, I'm kind of hoping they stay that way.

Monday-Wednesday, April 22-24 are final exams,

Saturday, April 27 is Baccalaureate, and

Sunday, April 28 is Commencement!

Holy yikes. I'm graduating from college.

After that?

Well, my summer plans, at the moment, consist of auditing a May Term Travel Writing class, May 1-21, followed by a few weeks of down time, before starting a five-week summer study program at Oxford in June and July.

And after that?

Sometimes I Scare Myself

During the semester I don't have the time to myself to just sit and think. So you know it's got to be dangerous when I do.

I scare myself sometimes.

I just came through a semester where I performed the character of Rachel Corrie, who left her life of privilege to go live with and try to understand the world from the perspective of people without rights, let alone privileges. 

She was scared of herself too, you know. Her words are still in my head; I can tell you. She was terrified of the complacency she knew she was capable of. 

That I know I'm capable of. That I have.

"I'm scared of people. Particularly people in the greater Olympia area. This is another place where progressive white people escaped a few decades ago." "If I lived in Bosnia or Rwanda or who know where else, needless death wouldn't be a distant symbol to me. It wouldn't be a metaphor. It would be a reality. And I have no right to this metaphor. But I use it. To console myself." "For a long time I've been operating from a certain core assumption that we are all essentially the same inside, and that our differences are by and large situational... I understand there's a good chance that this assumption is actually false. But it's convenient. Because it always leads to questions about the way privilege shelters people from the consequences of their actions. It's also convenient because it leads to some level of forgiveness, whether justified or not. It is my own selfishness and will to optimism that wants to believe that even people with a great deal of privilege don't just sit idly by and watch." "And I won't be afraid to come back, like I've always been afraid before." 

I say I want to make a difference.

I say I want to be selfless.

And here I sit, enrolled at a private university I'm not even paying tuition for. Planning to spend twelve weeks in Europe over the summer and hoping to attend graduate school after that. Shopping for shoes and dresses I'm not even paying for, sitting in the mall eating $5 ice cream I shouldn't have bought silently hating myself. Sitting on the couch and binge-watching a TV show about a privileged upper class English family, not even bothering to read about the violence and horror and atrocities that are happening in other parts of the world as I type that we never hear about unless we make the effort to search for it, and certainly not lifting a finger to help. Not even bothering to volunteer in my own community. Walking through the parking lot and noticing a pile of trash someone must have carelessly shoved out of their car and thinking, "I'll pick that stuff up and throw in in a trash can when I come out of the store," then walking straight past it, getting in my car and driving away. Shedding tears for complete strangers as I read reports of what happened at an elementary school hundreds of miles away but hesitant to even turn around and shake hands with the people I've never met sitting behind me in church. Shake hands. My God. Who am I?

An Irish Blessing to Warm your Heart

My grandmother sent me this Irish blessing today, and it warmed my heart, so I thought I'd share it.

May the blessing of light be upon you. Light on the outside, light on the inside. With God's sunlight shining on you, may your heart glow with warmth like a turf fire that welcomes friends and strangers alike. May the light of the Lord shine from your eyes like a candle in the window, welcoming the weary traveler. May the blessing of God's soft rain be on you, falling gently on your head, refreshing your soul with the sweetness of little flowers newly blooming. May the strength of the winds of heaven bless you, carrying the rain to wash your spirit clean, sparkling after in the sunlight. May the blessing of God's earth be on you. And as you walk the roads, may you always have a kind word for those you meet. May you understand the strength and power of God in a thunderstorm in winter, and the quiet beauty of creation in the calm of a summer sunset. And may you come to realize that, insignificant as you may seem in this great universe, you are an important part of God's plan. May he watch over you, and keep you safe from harm.  

It's Not Fair

It's not fair. That's all I can think about sometimes when I come out of rehearsal.

Rehearsing a show is a long, complicated, tiring, and sometimes tedious process. It's intensive, and it takes a lot out of you. But sometimes I walk out of rehearsals and I can't shake how unfair it is.

Unfair that the audiences who come see the show will, in a sense, see only the tip of the iceberg.

Before you accuse me of not understanding my job, I do know that it IS my job to do all the legwork of rehearsal and do all the intricate, tedious, intensive work to bring the character to life so that the things that are latent in the text come to life and are apparent to the audience--I know that. But that's not exactly what I mean.

I mean the discoveries I make--both in rehearsal and in research. I don't know if there's a way for me to get everything that I'm discovering and understanding across to an audience. Some of it, sure. But there are moments and discoveries and little understandings that no one besides me (and sometimes my director) will ever know.

It's not fair!

I wish I could show people--bring them along with me. But usually that's pretty impossible. And they probably wouldn't be half as excited about it as I am anyway.

And then I start to wonder...

does this make me selfish?

That I want to do this for a living because of moments like that, because of how excited they make me? To want to do something for a living because of how much I love it and how much I get out of it? That's the nature of an acting career, right? Actors don't act for the money, most of the time. They act because they love it, because it makes them come to life. That's certainly true for me.

But is that where my life and my purpose are supposed to stop?

Every once in a while, the doubts creep back. And I reach to justify it again, and I do, and I'm satisfied.
For the moment.
Until I start reveling in those moments again and I wonder,

does this make me selfish?