I've always had difficulty describing the way that my creative mind works to others.
I come from a family of doctors, lawyers and accountants where logic reigns supreme. So, as a deeply emotional person I was lacking a vocabulary adequate enough to encompass the breadth and depth of my feelings about the world. Theatre has always been my way of connecting to a world that I felt outside of. Making meaning through rehearsal and performance has been an invaluable navigational tool. The disguise of characters, music, and the scenery of other places became a shelter from my reality; which in turn, allowed me the ability to discover both the power of narrative and of my own voice.
The irony of discovering my voice through the voices and characters of others has not been lost on me. However, in navigating my way through scenes and songs, I was able to connect on a deeply personal level to the characters and stories that I had become a part of. I was able to see myself in my work and therefore I felt my existence was valid.
It wasn't until I took ‘Acting Chekhov’, a class in my senior year in college when a character’s voice so beautifully resembled a pattern of thinking that I thought I was alone in. I had never fallen in love with a piece of text as deeply or as quickly as when I first read Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. More specifically, I felt that I was reading my own thoughts on the page when I first encountered Trigorin’s monologue in the second act. Trigorin is a central character to the play and he is a writer; one who fulfills many of the archetypes of the Russian intellect as a brooding and troubled person. Trigorin’s monologue speaks of the nature of creativity as a compulsion. He discusses the white noise that is relentless in the back of his mind; he cannot escape it, and knows that no matter what he does, it will manifest in one way or another. For him, it is the need to write. He thinks about writing in every encounter that he has, the words he exchanges in life have to make their way onto the page. At night, when he looks up and sees the moon ahead of him, he has to write about that very moon. For me, this is the need to perform. It is the white noise in the back of my head that forces me to examine every situation and event that I encounter through the eyes of a storyteller.
This idea of craft as compulsory, like the static background noise of the mental movie that never shuts off, can feel both empowering and incredibly daunting. But I believe this accurately represents the vacillation inherent in the creative process. I had never heard anyone or anything that was so aligned with my own experiences before Trigorin’s speech. Sometimes, I feel that Chekhov wrote this as a prophetic nod to my existence, aware of my feelings of disconnect from the world around me in an attempt to pull me into the realization of connectedness. These words linger with me, all of the time, in my practices as artist, teacher, and human.
I’m not one who believes that everything happens for a reason, but we can experience miraculous moments when we hear and see exactly what we need to at the right time.
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