Congratulations everybody! We got through it!
Yesterday's performance went much better than I had expected, but, at the same time, I wish we had another chance to do it again and make it even better.
I have this chronic illness called "nerves" and it never hits me until opening night, the nanosecond I am about to go on. Every time I open a show/play/scene/what have you, I usually let my nerves control me. Since we only had one shot at doing "Pig" for an audience, I had to figure out how to overcome my nerves so I could focus on the performance. Every time I started to get nervous, I just told myself that I was committing self-sabotage and pushed it out of my mind. The moment before I walked, rather, galumphed, onto the playing space, my nerves hit and I had this ingenious idea: I just breathed all of that energy and circulated it through my body and down to my pelvis. I wonder where I got that idea from... coughACTINGATCARNEGIEMELLONcough. I also put all of my focus on the people I was talking to in order to forget that the audience was there. This worked out very well. Although I did go up on a line, I think I kept my cool for the most part. Breathing was probably the thing that helped me most during the performance. There was a moment, after I had been fighting Peggy and Santos, that I fell on the floor and watched Dad pick up the gun. I realized that I was holding my breath so that I wouldn't make loud, distracting noises on stage (stupid middle school habits) and so I began to breathe very loudly and appropriately and it helped me live in the scene more than I had before. It's not like Matt tells us the importance of breathing every day or anything.
Something I need to work on is dropping my breath and letting my voice sit lower in my body. I realized after the show that my voice was coming from the neck up and it wasn't connected to my lower body. This is something I really want to focus on next semester.
Another thing I thought went well was the pacing. Seldom did anyone drop a line and everyone was pretty much listening to each other and responding off of that. It can be difficult in a play like this to listen to other people because so much of it consists of overlapping lines and cutting people off, but, at least for me, I don't think we fell into that trap very often, which is good. I think we all put or trust in each other to create a good performance and we were able to work off of each other with a lot of ease.
A big thing I need to work on is getting out of my head. There were many moments where I was just listening to the others around me and living in the world, but there were many moments where I was thinking about what action I was going to play or I would think, "Oh, look, Barbara is sitting right there..." and so on. I think if this were a show where there was multiple runs I would be able to achieve that, because, the first performance with an audience is always the scariest and we all want to do well. This is something else I am going to work on next semester.
Overall, this was an incredible experience and I am so grateful to have been a part of it. I hope this functions as a nice send off to Matt because we all wanted to make you proud. Everyone was so wonderful to work with and I'm glad we have this experience to call our own and share it with each other. Good luck to everyone and see you in the fall!
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