Ok that's a moot point, because for the next while I will be teaching...thing is, I am not sure if I am really cut out for it! I just can't get past the bit where you have to be comfortable with your students thinking you are an idiot and that it is a waste of time doing your class because they are not getting what they expected out of territory that was previously foreign to them.
Ok that doesn't make sense...what is the balance between pressing on with teaching them necessary skills that will allow them to interact as a group, access their physicalities and think outside the box, and allowing them immediate gratification of "doing scenes" and "being directed" and "playing parts" - simply because they have paid me to teach them "Acting for Fun", they are not professional actors and they just want to see what it is about?
But I don't think they realise that what I am showing them is what it is about! And I don't think they realise how much they are learning...And they are learning. They are a talented, imaginative group...But I need to get the balance between teaching them and pleasing them, even more so that they are not professionals. especially if I want to keep them as customers and continue with my teaching work. And I now know that what I think is fun about acting may not be fun for them...
I know my classes are well-planned and quite integrative, if that's a word, in that all the Chekhov exercises we start with feed into the games we play later on and each class has a strong theme and goal...But I think all that I hold dear is lost on them, perhaps because I find it so hard to communicate. I find communicating my ideas and feelings very difficult in general - so perhaps I am not cut out to teach. And I hate undergoing the necessary resentment, resistance and separation from the group that a teacher has to undergo. I feel so awful to think that they may be regretting spending money on my class. And I am so longing to teach professional actors this stuff and get right into it, BUT professional actors never have the money to do classes!
Hey, but tis still a nice way of getting on top of my debts and earning the freedom for the next stage of my life. And I know from before that teaching has bad days and wonderful days for everybody concerned.
I noticed something about myself yesterday too, in a brief exchange I had with an aquaintance of mine who is my age and has had quite a successful acting career in Ireland - a lovely girl. Part of me is humiliated by the idea that I am teaching acting classes. And it shouldn't be. I don't always feel like that, at times the idea of teaching fills me with joy. But when she said, quite innocently, "Maybe this is the start of a school!" I suddenly came out with "NO! No..." Out of nowhere.
And I know what it was, I couldn't bear the thought of this being my life, stuck here in my home town, committed to my own acting school. I don't know why.
And I started into the exercises on "Entering the Castle" last night - I've been working very slowly and steadily and finally got to the first room...and God the amount of questions in that room are exhausting! They'd keep you going for a month! Well I didn't write cause I was quite tired, but I resolutely pondered some of them for a while, and I'd start and I couldn't get clear answers and then I'd drift off and try to come back...some of the questions just don't hit me but I want to honour them anyway...but I tried and tried this contemplation thing and then I finally asked my soul "Just say something!" Because it sounded like my mind just babbling away in answer to the questions, truths I could grasp but could I live them? Ya dee Ya dee YA!
And then...something new filtered through the mess...I don't know if it was my frazzled mind...something like...the question had been "In what way does your fear of being humiliated control your life?"...well I realised that my fear of committing to anything, anything may have to do with the fear of the humiliation of living a normal life...a life I would perceive as not having infinite possibility, which is nonsense, I know."If I do this, then this closes this off, but I can't do this cause I've no money because I haven't committed to anything. But at least I don't have the humiliation of having an identity that I don't want. Cause I've done that. Bank Worker, ha!"
Ok when I write this down it doesn't make sense. I think it is quite healthy to work towards the life you dream of, but not when you are doing it to avoid humiliation, the inner voice that says mockingly "Oh look there's Seralu. Yeah she never lived up to her potential."
My head is scrambled. There's tinges of shadow in the good isn't there...why am I doing this (whatever it is) ? To "fill my potential" so I don't have to feel guilty and humiliated, or because I just want/need to do it. Seralu, methinks you are still a bit of a phoney m'dear!
Thursday 23 October 2008
Saturday 4 October 2008
Will You Go?
I had a dream the other night and for the first time in my life I woke up and realised that this was not a dream, it was a vision. It seemed to come from beyond the mess of my subconscious, its content was so much bigger than me like something bigger than me was speaking through me.
I don't know where to begin with describing it, it was a synthesis of so many big things that made sense and yet when I woke up I knew exactly what was being said to me. It was a question being asked of me, a big question set so perfectly in the context of all that I have been preoccupied lately.
I'm not going to go into all the details, I'll just try to put the most important points. I wonder is it right of me to communicate a vision here, but maybe putting it into words will lead me into it again...
Before this part of the dream, I was dreaming normal dreams, there was something about the novel "War and Peace" and being stuck around two difficult men staying in my home who hated and were cruel to me and yet I was being forced (perhaps by my family or mum, I can't recall) to put up with them and suppress increasing violent rage...none of it really stuck out, it was one of those dreams that you knew was processing some emotion or other, I don't know and I don't know where the novel came in anyway...
It was a new sequence, the start of which is really really vague for me and makes no logical sense but yes has a kinaesthetic feeling of rightness. I was at the cinema watching one of the "Three Colours" movies, but there seemed to be some confusion about which one it was. The movie was over, but there seemed to be a bit at the end which I was compelled to stay on for. (Actually that is the case with that particular trilogy, a sequence at the end which ties together all three movies)
I was watching it, but suddenly I was in it...I was one of the extras and though the main female role was being played by Julie Delpy (the heroine of Three Colours White which is my favourite of the three) by the end of it, it was me.
I went through a post office to a garden where a man was waiting for something. (There had been something about a train station too which I couldn't recall.) He had been waiting there for some time and a crowd had joined him. I wasn't sure if the thing he was waiting for had already arrived and recurred on a regular basis or if it hadn't arrived yet.
It was night and we were waiting for the coming of something, we didn't know what it was and he didn't say what it was. He was an older man, like an older version of Jean-Marc Barr out of "The Big Blue", a man I think is really beautiful looking. He just played with children but he was waiting for the heroine too. She didn't know why she was there. It was an uneasy wait, people were jostling, someone fell into a pond and she fished them out. We were looking up into the sky. There was a sense of "What are we waiting for? Why are we here? Will it even come?"
The sky was grey with wispy clouds, the garden was dark. "Ah" I thought, wanting to make sense, wanting to know what I was expecting before it even came. "We are waiting for the dawn. Perhaps we are all waiting for the dawn to come so that we can see the new day together and realise how beautiful it is so we can all live new lives." This comforted me.
And then the dawn came and I was the heroine. Yes the dawn was beautiful, the sky illuminated with colour beyond anything that you can ordinarily conceive. Here I began to realise that this was coming from somewhere so far beyond me that it was so much BIGGER than what I had been expecting. And it was a terrible frightening beauty because suddenly the earth began to shake, things fell from the sky and the world as we knew it began to be destroyed.
The man drew me to him, he alone had known that this would happen, and that there was hope in this, it needed to be. As I drew close I lost my fear. "I have loved you forever and ever" he said to me (or something to that effect but MORE, the feeling was more than the words) "I have been waiting for you. Will you go?"
"Will you go?" I woke up with this question blazed at the forefront of my mind and a distinct certainty that "This is no mere dream."
A small postscript which could be my fancy and means nothing but strikes me as amusing and hindsightful...two days later I met an man who looked like an older Jean-Marc Barr!
I don't know where to begin with describing it, it was a synthesis of so many big things that made sense and yet when I woke up I knew exactly what was being said to me. It was a question being asked of me, a big question set so perfectly in the context of all that I have been preoccupied lately.
I'm not going to go into all the details, I'll just try to put the most important points. I wonder is it right of me to communicate a vision here, but maybe putting it into words will lead me into it again...
Before this part of the dream, I was dreaming normal dreams, there was something about the novel "War and Peace" and being stuck around two difficult men staying in my home who hated and were cruel to me and yet I was being forced (perhaps by my family or mum, I can't recall) to put up with them and suppress increasing violent rage...none of it really stuck out, it was one of those dreams that you knew was processing some emotion or other, I don't know and I don't know where the novel came in anyway...
It was a new sequence, the start of which is really really vague for me and makes no logical sense but yes has a kinaesthetic feeling of rightness. I was at the cinema watching one of the "Three Colours" movies, but there seemed to be some confusion about which one it was. The movie was over, but there seemed to be a bit at the end which I was compelled to stay on for. (Actually that is the case with that particular trilogy, a sequence at the end which ties together all three movies)
I was watching it, but suddenly I was in it...I was one of the extras and though the main female role was being played by Julie Delpy (the heroine of Three Colours White which is my favourite of the three) by the end of it, it was me.
I went through a post office to a garden where a man was waiting for something. (There had been something about a train station too which I couldn't recall.) He had been waiting there for some time and a crowd had joined him. I wasn't sure if the thing he was waiting for had already arrived and recurred on a regular basis or if it hadn't arrived yet.
It was night and we were waiting for the coming of something, we didn't know what it was and he didn't say what it was. He was an older man, like an older version of Jean-Marc Barr out of "The Big Blue", a man I think is really beautiful looking. He just played with children but he was waiting for the heroine too. She didn't know why she was there. It was an uneasy wait, people were jostling, someone fell into a pond and she fished them out. We were looking up into the sky. There was a sense of "What are we waiting for? Why are we here? Will it even come?"
The sky was grey with wispy clouds, the garden was dark. "Ah" I thought, wanting to make sense, wanting to know what I was expecting before it even came. "We are waiting for the dawn. Perhaps we are all waiting for the dawn to come so that we can see the new day together and realise how beautiful it is so we can all live new lives." This comforted me.
And then the dawn came and I was the heroine. Yes the dawn was beautiful, the sky illuminated with colour beyond anything that you can ordinarily conceive. Here I began to realise that this was coming from somewhere so far beyond me that it was so much BIGGER than what I had been expecting. And it was a terrible frightening beauty because suddenly the earth began to shake, things fell from the sky and the world as we knew it began to be destroyed.
The man drew me to him, he alone had known that this would happen, and that there was hope in this, it needed to be. As I drew close I lost my fear. "I have loved you forever and ever" he said to me (or something to that effect but MORE, the feeling was more than the words) "I have been waiting for you. Will you go?"
"Will you go?" I woke up with this question blazed at the forefront of my mind and a distinct certainty that "This is no mere dream."
A small postscript which could be my fancy and means nothing but strikes me as amusing and hindsightful...two days later I met an man who looked like an older Jean-Marc Barr!
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