This month I'm asking my own bio questions again, including revisiting what I want from training. As I start to pick up more scheduled activities to complement this blog project, I'm starting to see the year ahead taking form, and it'll be interesting to see if I end up anywhere close to where I think I'm headed.
What are your goals for one month, six months and a year from now?
In a month, I should be signed up and paid up to sit the Bronze Shakespeare Certificate exam at RADA, hopefully will have started doing at least one weekly sports session of some kind, have 2 more development/"around the subject" books read, and have chosen a first modern monologue to start working on. In six months I should be preparing to audition for the performance group at EAS, either prepping for or have done the Silver Certificate, have at least 3 Classical (including one non-Shakespeare) and 2 modern monologues learned, be regularly doing 3 sessions of excersise/sport per week and for the project I should be seeing at least one live show per month (and at least one live or film adaptation per week) and reading at least one development book per month. Also by this point I should have touched on every Shakespeare play at least once. In a year, I should be preparing for Gold, alongside initial auditions for my chosen schools, and have if at all possible read and seen every Shakespeare play (whether live or film - some of these will be trickier to find than others). If I'm physically fit enough (and the nerves in my leg have healed enough to be safe) I'd also like to be back in skating and possibly working on finishing my SkateUK badges. If at all possible sometime in the year I'd like to get some experience playing to a camera.
After all the work and thought that's going into this year, what do you want out of a full time three-year training course?
This year is about finding my way back into studying, and cultivating a work ethic and the curiosity and flexibility I think I'll need. I've always been a bit selfish and cocky about my creative endeavours and this is a chance to spend a year figuring out, of what comes naturally, what works and what doesn't and finding the strength to admit the bits that don't. Training will pretty much definitely work on the bits that don't come so easily, and if I'm conscious beforehand of at least some of those areas they will be easier to work on. So what I'm looking for is, once I've got a grasp of what I can do and convinced a school that it's a solid foundation, the chance to spend a few years being pushed and encouraged to take everything to the next level. I suspect from what I know of myself now, certain priorities are likely to emerge - confidence and trust, which I never thought I'd lose in the context of the theatre or pretty much anywhere in life but which at the moment are big issues; dance and movement may be a slightly problematic area if the nerve damage doesn't heal completely (it may never do so, but if it's going to then I should have complete feeling back in that leg by the time I get to those initial auditions) and learning to work around that is already frustrating. Any camera work is going to still be fairly new (though I'm hoping to address that) and probably slightly nervewracking, but much more important this time round since I'm starting to understand the draw of film work. My first priority is still the stage and specifically Shakespeare, but it's a pretty exciting time for the British film industry at the moment and if it continues to grow then there's a good chance I'll still very much want in on it once I finish training. There's also the increasingly-common filming of larger stage productions for simulcasting (particularly for Shakespeare) so even if I were to stick primarily to the theatre there's far less of a garuntee of avoiding the cameras that way than used to be the case.
How is the caffeine withdrawal going?
Yep, quitting caffeine. Currently not completely cold-turkey, but that's more because I really like the taste of tea and coke than specifically chasing the buzz. It's not every day, and it's usually one or the other. I'm now at a point where I'm often feeling pretty sluggish. I'm convinced that years of waking up with energy drinks (and at the lowest points of my illness in the last couple of years they've been the necessary boost just to be able to get out of bed) has destroyed my already less than perfect metabolism. I sort of feel like my body has just straight up forgotten how to make energy happen (though again, years of illness have made me reasonably good at hiding this fact). I've had people ask why bother getting clean when the addiction itself doesn't really cause any harm, and mostly it comes down to this: three months ago I was relying on at least one can of Monster/Relentless/whatever to get out of bed, and maybe another later in the day if I was up and doing things all day, and still being completely finished after anything more than about ten hours of activity. If I'm in the 14th hour of a tech rehearsal or shoot, I might well be hitting up the caffeine, but I'd rather not already be on the third one by then having started falling over in hour 4. I am mostly hoping that by this time next year I'll have a better handle on how to keep myself energised in a more healthy and sustainable way.
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