Thought for the day

I'm thinking that I need to do some packing.  Not the kind of packing that you might be thinking of.  This goes back to my acting training at UNCG.  John Gulley's classes, to be specific.  Every character we portrayed for him, whether it in scene work, monologue work or in realized productions had to be packed.  In other words, we had to create the character from the ground up.  Yes, we would use the obvious characteristics given to us by the author of whatever play it was, but we would build upon that with our own choices.  Many times, he made us do the packing for a character, we'd spend hours and weeks on it, then he'd tell us to throw it all away and go from there.  Well, I want to do a variation of that on myself.

I keep thinking about the things I want from life, both external and internal.  I have things I want to do and things I want to be.  There are parts of me that need desperate work and I usually just ignore them.  So, basically, I am looking at creating a character of myself.  I want to create the best version of myself that I can and bring that into my world.  Playing oneself as a character might sound like something I am already doing.  To a degree, yes I am.  But I'm not playing a whole person right now.  I am picking and choosing the things I know are easy and not challenging myself.  I just want to bring out the best in myself and if I look at it like I would any other character I might play one day, then it will give me a different perspective on how I perceive myself.

I may not do it today, but I will definitely start on this idea soon.  Who knows what I might discover about myself that I had forgotten.  I haven't done any theatre in years and I think of this as kind of a therapeutic venture for myself.  After all, I don't want to waste all of those years of training.  I might as well put some of it to use.  We shall see.

Cheers