There is an amazing high that comes when you are on stage… A ‘Performance’ is so unique and beautiful that I am at a loss of words to explain how it feels… Over time you get tuned to the audience and expect them to behave in a particular way, there is the good response(laughter in comedy and being emotionally engrossed in drama) and of course the bad way(lets just say not the good way)… My experience yesterday was quiet different…
In acting class we regularly get to make short performances concentrating on subject of the class, Yesterday was one such day… I don’t want to go into the technical details about what the class was about but we had to do a short monologue of any emotionally heavy experience we had… Now interestingly we were asked not to act… To make it like you were speaking to a friend…
After a few mins of preparation we were asked to perform… My turn came towards the endof the class and people had given a varied bunch of personal accounts till then, everything from comedy to romance to horror to loss to nostalgia… We were asked to interrupt in case of any mistakes based on the things we were told to check in the class. There were regular interruptions for everyone who went on stage. I decided to talk about the squirrel I cannot quiet seem to forget.
I don’t know if it was the way I spoke or my tone, it was like time froze for those few minutes… The audience did not move a muscle, I was on my own emotional high and just spoke… When it was done I realized, nobody had interrupted me… That wasn’t by far the best performance of the day… that honor went to a class mate of mine(wont go into the details as it was a very personal account)… It had gone to the extent of forcing out tears in the eyes of the audience while he stood in front of everyone as calm as possible.
Its hard to explain how it feels to be received well, all I can say is that those few min on stage totally made every pain and dedication for almost 6 months worth while :)