[Insert creative title that I can’t think of]

Over the past semester I have gained a lot more acting experience. While in the past I had done all of the school musicals and plays, I had never really gotten any real instruction, or done anything outside of that. At the beginning of the semester, I wrote that I wanted to work on getting more comfortable on stage and feeling less self conscious. And, honestly, I still felt that self consciousness throughout the whole term, up until my final project. Previously, I couldn’t stop comparing myself to the other people in the class, wondering what I was doing there and why I always felt so awkward. But somehow, my final project managed to overcome that. I was much more comfortable with it than any of the other things we did all year, and I already was familiar with it beforehand so it only took a couple of tries to memorize. But it might also have been because I related to Evan more than the other characters I’ve played this semester - the girl complaining about guys and bad pickup lines, the angry candy shop customer, or the random sick person from the poetry project were all people that I didn’t know very well.

    This is not to say that the final project was just meant to keep me in my comfort zone and be an easy project. The hardest part was between the two monologues - I had to show how Evan changed from the beginning to the end, without any words. I didn’t get to practice it much before the final draft, so it was the part I was most nervous about. I hadn’t had much feedback, so I wasn’t sure what I could be doing to get it the best it could be.

    Towards the end of the year I felt that I was gaining more confidence. When we were doing more serious works I felt a lot more comfortable, like I knew how to express my character much better. During the comedic scenes the characters were more loud and over the top, and everything I was doing felt forced. I didn’t naturally fall into that category. In the future I’d like to work on being more expressive with characters like that. I’d like to build on versatility, because playing characters who are different than you is the entire concept of acting.

    Another thing I learned was how to work better on my own, and how to work better with other people. There are pros and cons of each. One one hand, working alone allowed me to take the project in whatever direction I wanted. My ideas didn’t have to be accepted by the rest of the group, I could just go with what I had. In group projects we had to mix and match ideas, so that everyone got a little of what they wanted but also might have had to work with things they might not have been envisioning. On the other hand, performing alone could be more difficult sometimes because it was just me onstage, while working with others gave me something to play off of - especially in the candy shop scene. Over the course of the class I learned to work with each of these things - getting comfortable being on my own, while also getting better at collaborating with the group so that everyone’s ideas ended up in the final draft.