i won today

Today was the greatest day of my grad school experience so far.

Madison and I nailed our All's Well scene for Alex's class. To be honest, it wouldn't have been hard to do better than we did last time.... but I think we both felt like we had something to prove, and we did. We've made great strides as a duo. The energy exercises last week really motivated us, as well as our Globe experience. I think Madison and I are getting closer as peers as well, and starting to trust each other, which obviously affects our scene. We went last of the scenes and in a small way, it was like a micro version of those performances when you know you have the entire audience in the palm of your hand. The class felt very engaged with us and we were very engaged with each other. It paid off.

Alex had some great notes for us afterward, namely that he was incredibly impressed by how "on the line" we deliver the verse. The whole class got notes this week and during our first performances about acting on the line and it doesn't seem to be clicking with most of the class. In fact, if we step back and look at the scope of all of our classes, every class where we have looked at Shakespeare text has been lessons in acting on the line and not between lines or in the middle of the line. That's the whole point-- to stop taking the time to think, frankly. And even though we've heard it literally one million times between classes and the reading we're supposed to be doing, today was the first time it started to click with most of the cohort what it means that "Shakespeare is not psychological realism." I like to think our performance in class had a little bit of an illustrative effect as well.

I need to work on my physicality, but of course I do. That's typically what my acting notes come back to. But we had a great connection and everyone had very complimentary things to say. Alex said it was the first time today that he just wanted to know what was going to happen next. I feel very accomplished in that.

Acting isn't about "winning" and neither is grad school, particularly in a cohort situation, but it feels really nice to have won my own day.