December Topics, performing!
Dec. 6th, 2013 01:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Hee, this is a good topic. This is for the December talking meme, I've still got slots if you want to request one!
(While this is doing wonder for my actually posting and replying to comments on my own DW I'm still not all the way there on replying to my reading page yet. I'll get there? Maybe? I hope? O_o)
I LOVE performing, I have ever since I was little. My mum made friends with a lot of other ex-pats when we lived in Greece, and she found this play group for basically ex-pat/foreign/half-not-Greek kids, called The Little School. They used to also do loads of after school stuff for older kids too, including my drama group and later on, ballet classes. We did shows several times a year, like we did a Christmas show, an Apokries show (in Greece you get Apokries in February, it’s to do with Easter, and it’s kind of tradition for kids with February birthdays to always do fancy dress parties, so it’s important to have a costume. And our Apokries show was basically an excuse for us to do skits and songs in our costumes. One year my sister was a cowboy and sang ‘she can bake a cherry pie Billy boy’), an Easter show, a big summer show, sometimes we did shows for Father’s Day or Halloween. I remember one term I couldn’t go because it clashed with ballet. That SUCKED.
I kind of dropped out of it a bit when I moved to the UK, high school was not my best time, and my secondary school only let years 10 and 11 be in the school play for some reason, of which there was only one a year. So I had small parts in those, and I did some similar stuff in sixth form too. I got quite a lot more into it at uni, and obviously since there’s been choir and Lashings. <3
I am a HUGE show-off, and I think that’s possibly the short answer to why I do it and what I get out of it. ;) When I was little I was always performing. Like I always had a big part in our shows, and at home I was always organising performances of the kids for the grown-ups at big dinner parties. (‘So Long, Farewell’ from the Sound of Music was a real inspiration to me. ;)) I have quite a clear memory of wanting to have stage fright because my best friend did (IDEK, I was about as strange as a kid as I am now) and copying her and one of my drama teachers pulling me aside to explain it’s good if I’m not nervous and I shouldn’t pretend things I don’t feel. (Somewhere, there are tapes of every single performance I was in, from the age of 5 to the age of 12. Highlights include Lucy in our collected Charlie Brown sketches, the narrator in Peter Pan and the Selfish Giant, and the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella. ;))
Like I said above, high school was not my best time ever and I got a lot of my hang-ups about performing around then, including more of a grasp of stage fright (hurray). Lashings really helped me a lot with that, by being SUPER supportive about my nerves and providing an environment where I could learn new stuff, and take risks and grow as a performer, and I’ll always be so grateful for that. <3
I just like being on stage and telling stories and making people feel something about what I’m telling. I’m feeling a little between projects in the performing area ATM and I’d like to figure out what I’m gonna do next soon, but I’m sure whatever it is will be fun.
I used to want to do it professionally (WICKED) but I feel like I’ve never put the work in needed to achieve that. I think it’s not too late, at least to up my performance standard and do more, but yeah, still unsure what direction I want that to take. Lashings, the Mechanisms, CN Lester, the Indelicates, other performers of that ilk, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as a whole have all made me think more about what performing can be, and how there’s more pathways to it than I used to think. That hasn’t actually clarified much for me what *I* want to do but that’s mostly cuz I struggle with decision-making. ;D Like I used to just want to go for the West End and stuff like my weight and lack of training were huge barriers. I now feel more like there’s value in being visible as a fat dancer, for example.
Podfic has been quite fun I’ve found but I think I prefer actually having an audience I can interact with. That said I would like to do more podfic and more collaborative audio work, and maybe even attempt to get paid for some of it.
(While this is doing wonder for my actually posting and replying to comments on my own DW I'm still not all the way there on replying to my reading page yet. I'll get there? Maybe? I hope? O_o)
I LOVE performing, I have ever since I was little. My mum made friends with a lot of other ex-pats when we lived in Greece, and she found this play group for basically ex-pat/foreign/half-not-Greek kids, called The Little School. They used to also do loads of after school stuff for older kids too, including my drama group and later on, ballet classes. We did shows several times a year, like we did a Christmas show, an Apokries show (in Greece you get Apokries in February, it’s to do with Easter, and it’s kind of tradition for kids with February birthdays to always do fancy dress parties, so it’s important to have a costume. And our Apokries show was basically an excuse for us to do skits and songs in our costumes. One year my sister was a cowboy and sang ‘she can bake a cherry pie Billy boy’), an Easter show, a big summer show, sometimes we did shows for Father’s Day or Halloween. I remember one term I couldn’t go because it clashed with ballet. That SUCKED.
I kind of dropped out of it a bit when I moved to the UK, high school was not my best time, and my secondary school only let years 10 and 11 be in the school play for some reason, of which there was only one a year. So I had small parts in those, and I did some similar stuff in sixth form too. I got quite a lot more into it at uni, and obviously since there’s been choir and Lashings. <3
I am a HUGE show-off, and I think that’s possibly the short answer to why I do it and what I get out of it. ;) When I was little I was always performing. Like I always had a big part in our shows, and at home I was always organising performances of the kids for the grown-ups at big dinner parties. (‘So Long, Farewell’ from the Sound of Music was a real inspiration to me. ;)) I have quite a clear memory of wanting to have stage fright because my best friend did (IDEK, I was about as strange as a kid as I am now) and copying her and one of my drama teachers pulling me aside to explain it’s good if I’m not nervous and I shouldn’t pretend things I don’t feel. (Somewhere, there are tapes of every single performance I was in, from the age of 5 to the age of 12. Highlights include Lucy in our collected Charlie Brown sketches, the narrator in Peter Pan and the Selfish Giant, and the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella. ;))
Like I said above, high school was not my best time ever and I got a lot of my hang-ups about performing around then, including more of a grasp of stage fright (hurray). Lashings really helped me a lot with that, by being SUPER supportive about my nerves and providing an environment where I could learn new stuff, and take risks and grow as a performer, and I’ll always be so grateful for that. <3
I just like being on stage and telling stories and making people feel something about what I’m telling. I’m feeling a little between projects in the performing area ATM and I’d like to figure out what I’m gonna do next soon, but I’m sure whatever it is will be fun.
I used to want to do it professionally (WICKED) but I feel like I’ve never put the work in needed to achieve that. I think it’s not too late, at least to up my performance standard and do more, but yeah, still unsure what direction I want that to take. Lashings, the Mechanisms, CN Lester, the Indelicates, other performers of that ilk, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as a whole have all made me think more about what performing can be, and how there’s more pathways to it than I used to think. That hasn’t actually clarified much for me what *I* want to do but that’s mostly cuz I struggle with decision-making. ;D Like I used to just want to go for the West End and stuff like my weight and lack of training were huge barriers. I now feel more like there’s value in being visible as a fat dancer, for example.
Podfic has been quite fun I’ve found but I think I prefer actually having an audience I can interact with. That said I would like to do more podfic and more collaborative audio work, and maybe even attempt to get paid for some of it.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-08 07:45 pm (UTC)