I am a Music, Dance and Theater Major. Normally, when people hear that they think that I am this amazing person who is fulfilling all of the requirements for a music major, a dance major and a theater major. Besides the fact that that would be physically impossible, it is a nice thought to think that somebody believes that I could actually be that remarkable. My major is really just a musical theater major.
For the last month I've been a part of a student project. Students who are in their third year of the program must put on 30-50 minutes versions of musicals that are assigned to them by the Professors in charge of the major. I was asked to be in the cast and help out with the Les Miserables group. I was so excited! I had never scene Les Mis, but I had heard and loved the music.
Doing this short project was a blast. It was also a little bit of a challenge for me in a couple different ways. First of all, I haven't been on a stage or really performed in 3 years, so I was really rusty at memorizing lines, lyrics, songs, and choreography. Second, Because we were a small cast, all of us had to play a few different characters. I, myself, had to play four: a foreman, a rich man looking for a prostitute, a homeless beggar, and an energetic student.
This leads to the title of this blog. See, I love studying people and trying to act, or imagine acting like those around me. Though, normally when you are in a show you play one maybe two characters. I like to get very connected with the people I'm trying to play, so changing four times in 50 minutes was a little difficult at first. Every time I have a character, I try to think how they think, I create secrets and a back story for them, and I create objectives and reasons why they are doing all that they are doing.
What I found was that I just needed to spend a lot of time going over these things in my mind while I wasn't on stage. After practicing it enough and setting my mind on certain choices I had a great experience. By the final performance I just had to tell myself "OK, Nate, you're the foreman now. . . OK, Nate you're the student now." As soon as the different scenes would start I would completely change. I would really feel the frustration and disgusting nature of the foreman, or I would really feel like a student deciding to go to war and all that that meant for me and the people I knew.
It was a great experience to see that after putting lots of work in, I just needed to let myself go and forget about everything else, so that all I could think about were my character's thoughts. It really helps in a lot of real life situations to have tried to walk in the shoes of others.
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