Comparison is the thief of joy. By wishing you are more like your colleagues, by watching their successes and dwelling on your own failures, you are doing nothing to better yourself.
Vulnerability is necessary. It’s scary. You’re going to have to take a leap. But it’ll be worth it.
Don’t make excuses.
Failing an endeavor does not make you a failure. “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” -Samuel Beckett
You are only as good as you dare to be bad.
Bloom where you are planted.
Read more plays, listen to more musicals. You can’t be a competent and intelligent performer without knowing your history. People will want to talk to you about these composers and these playwrights, and if you are able to have intelligent conversations about them, you’re ahead of the game.
Don’t dwell. On the part you didn’t get, on the note you missed, on failure, on success. Don’t dwell.
Your body is your instrument. Take care of it.
Work while they sleep. Or party. Keep working while the rest think they are done. The work is never done. Never let it be done. “The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Talent is not talent. ”Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity, easy vulnerability, high sensory equipment, a vivid imagination , a grip on reality, the desire to communicate one’s own experience and sensations, and a desire to make oneself heard and seen.” -Uta Hagen
Don’t be the second best Meryl Streep, be the best you.
Acting is not learned from books alone.
Know yourself, but don’t overdefine yourself. People change, so can you. So know who you are, but be ready for your world to completely change at any time.
If you try to please everybody, you’ll lose yourself. Making yourself proud is more important than making your professor proud, or making your colleagues proud.
Raise. The. Stakes.
Everything is okay until you ask permission. Follow those impulses. You’ll figure out if it works or not.
Listen as you speak.
Keep your energy always moving forward.
Serve the text. We all want to make wonderfully inventive decisions about characters, but be sure it’s always in service to the text, not service to yourself.
Find your objective.
Build the role on truth, not stereotype.
Comb away all the extra. We’re not striving to complicate things, but rather to simplify things.
Stay in a state of gentle curiosity.
As long as it’s honest and true, it’s perfect.
Play actions. You cannot play attitudes or feelings, only actions.
Before you learn, unlearn. Bad habits die hard.
Particularize. What kind of room are you in? Where’s the window? What does the door look like? The audience won’t know all the details you create, but the details will flesh out each word.
Let all of the play inform your monologue, not just the scene before it.
Live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
The magic “if.” “If” acts as a lever to lift us out of the world of actuality into the realm of imagination.
Research. Research to the point that you know the time period, the lifestyle, the history better than you know your own. Let it inform your character.
Live the part every moment you are playing it, every time.
Nothing is allowed to be general.
Fill the pause. And earn the pause. What did you do to earn that pause in your lines, why are you pausing, and what are you filling it with? What is the purpose?
In order to hold something back, you must have something to hold.
Context is critical. What do you need in this particular moment?
Use your memories. ”Time is a splendid filter for our remembered feelings—besides, it is a great artist. It not only purifies, it also transmutes even painfully realistic memories into poetry.” -Stanislavski
But torturing yourself for an emotional reaction in a scene is not worth it. Be gentle with yourself, because you can drive yourself mad if you aren’t careful.
Leave the work at home. Work hard at home, experience honestly in the room.
Do not run for the sake of running, or suffer for the sake of suffering.
Keep your obstacles in mind. What’s the best/worst that could happen?
Playwrights write plays about the most important days of people’s lives.
one day all the people in this fandom will move on and many will become accomplished writers out in the real world and they’ll be original and unique and never betray their fandom origins, but one day you’ll pick up a book off the shelf at a bookstore and it’ll be written in second person present and you’ll just Know
a book in 2020: “She absconded down t-” me, crying: “I found one”
my favorite part of this post is i didnt even specify which fandom and 1300 people still knew exactly what i meant
The other thing about the word “queer” is that almost everyone I’ve seen opposed to it have been cis, binary gays and lesbians. Not wanting it applied to yourself is fine, but I think people underestimate the appeal of vague, inclusive terminology when they already have language to easily and non-invasively describe themselves.
Saying “I’m gay/lesbian/bi” is pretty simple. Just about everyone knows what you mean, and you quickly establish yourself as a member of a community. Saying “I’m a trans nonbinary bi woman who’s celibate due to dysphoria and possibly on the ace spectrum”… not so much. You’re lucky to find anyone who understands even half of that, and explaining it requires revealing a ton of personal information. The appeal of “queer” is being able to identify yourself without profiling yourself. It’s welcoming and functional terminology to those who do not have the luxury of simplified language and occupy complicated identities. *That’s* why people use it – there are currently not alternatives to express the same sentiment.
It’s not people “oppressing themselves” or naively and irresponsibly using a word with loaded history. It’s easy to dismiss it as bad or unnecessary if you already have the luxury of language to comfortably describe yourself.
There’s another dimension that always, always gets overlooked in contemporary discussions about the word “queer:” class. The last paragraph here reminds me of a old quote: “rich lesbians are ‘sapphic,’ poor lesbians are ‘dykes’.”
The reclaiming of the slur “queer” was an intensely political process, and people who came up during the 90s, or who came up mostly around people who did so, were divided on class and political lines on questions of assimilation into straight capitalist society.
Bourgeois gays and lesbians already had “the luxury of language” to describe themselves – normalized through struggle, thanks to groups like the Gay Liberation Front.
Everyone else, from poor gays and lesbians to bi and trans people and so on, had no such language. These people were the ones for whom social/economic assimilation was not an option.
The only language left, the only word which united this particular underclass, was “queer.” “Queer” came to mean an opposition to assimilation – to straight culture, capitalism, patriarchy, and to upper class gays and lesbians who wanted to throw the rest of us under the bus for a seat at that table – and a solidarity among those marginalized for their sexuality/gender id/presentation.
(Groups which reclaimed “queer,” like Queer Patrol (armed against homophobic violence), (Queers) Bash Back! (action and theory against fascism, homophobia, and transphobia), and Queerbomb (in response to corporate/state co-optation of mainstream Gay Pride), were “ultraleft,” working-class, anti-capitalist, and functioned around solidarity and direct action.)
The contemporary discourse around “queer” as a reclaimed-or-not slur both ignores and reproduces this history. The most marginalized among us, as OP notes, need this language. The ones who have problems with it are, generally, among those who have language – or “community,” or social/economic/political support – of their own.
@vaspider if you hadn’t seen this yet I thought you’d want to
PSA did you guys know there’s an equivalent to the word “phallic” ??
Yonic: resembling of vulva/labia/vagina
Yonic, from from sanskrit word Yoni
flowers are yonic, fruit is yonic, i’m so excited that this word exists i literally have only ever heard the word “phallic” until now. YONIC!!
Signal boosting not least because now you have new insight to what people mean when they describe Lovecraft’s terror of yonic voids.
IM SCREAMING ok I wanted to show you guys Zaha Hadid’s Qatar stadium as an example of something that’s yonic, but if you google “yonic” it’s the FIRST RESULT Please, please go look it up really
i wonder how different fandom is for people depending on the age they found/entered it
bc for me i stumbled into fandom at a very young age. i’ve almost grown up with fandom. it’s been something that’s helped me through mental illness and social isolation, has influenced how i critique media, shaped my worldview. i can’t really imagine the person i would have been very well if i hadn’t found fandom. fandom has in a way shaped me and how i consume and react and think about all media in a very profound way.
i think it was inevitable, too. considering my personality and tastes if i hadn’t found fandom when i did it was only a matter of time.
fandom is almost – a part of me. it’s in my bones, it’s an essential part of my makeup, it’s lead me to so many different things that have affected me and changed me (music, books, other media, politics, social justice, psychology, sexuality, relationships, gender, cultures, language) at a very young age for a very long time.
what’s it like for people who entered fandom when they were older? when they had already developed a lot as a person? i grew up with fandom, but what is someone’s experience with fandom when they found it at an older age? how does it feel? what is different?
fandom is…not easy, but there, for me. it’s almost always existed for me and i can’t imagine what it would be like without it. i’ve grown with it. we’ve grown together.
what’s it like to experience fandom in a way other than that?
