Tonight was an incredible journey for me. A small group of people from the department and I gathered for all that we knew was a Midnight Viewpoints session that involved character and a loose storyline. I won't go too much into detail about what the story consisted of, but as an ensemble we experienced sibling relationships, accepting new family members, inevitable loss of home and of loved ones, and the ultimate acceptance and journey forward through tough times. To be short, it struck me hard, in both a cathartic and an incredibly eye-opening way.
To those of you who might not know what Viewpoints are, it's kind of hard to explain simply through words on a screen. Basically, these two women named Tina Landau and Anne Bogart explored what makes for good moments on stage in performance, and broke it down into nine elements - Viewpoints - to follow. These Viewpoints are disciplines of movement that performers can use at their disposal to help create character, conflict, story, and tone, as well as make in-the-moment discoveries. These Viewpoints consist of Tempo, Duration, Spacial Relationship, Architecture, Shape, Topography, Gesture, Kinesthetic Response, and Repetition. All of these mean different things; tempo is the speed at which you move, duration is the amount of time in which this movement happens, spacial relationship refers to your physical distance between other bodies, and so on and so forth. All of us have worked intensely with these nine Viewpoints in classes and can use them at our will to help make discoveries.
That is what I thought was going to be about. I was prepared to Viewpoint while keeping in mind that I was a little kid and blah blah blah. That's not what ended up happening. An entire story evolved, and this room of people connected and interacted in ways I never thought possible.
Through tonight's journey through innocence, I was reminded of the importance of sibling bonds. Many already know this, but I lost my older sister as a senior in high school, in November of 2010. Since then, my life has not been the same. At all. It's fallen apart and it's been a steady building back-up since then. I'm at a good place now, and I have processed most of the grief and I can readily use the experience of losing my sister as a time of growth. Yes, I still miss her in incredible amounts, but I am constantly reminded that I haven't lost her really. In our story, our oldest brother was taken by Death, and everything we knew, our home, the place we were growing up in, was gone. Tears streamed down my face, because it was incredibly real for me. Being an eight year old going through parallel experiences brought me to the realization that I needed to protect and love my remaining siblings in the story. They were vulnerable. I was vulnerable. Death was on the hunt again and we weren't about to let him take another of our own.
Luckily, the story didn't go in that direction. Death was intimidated by our togetherness, our love, and our constant diligence to stay a family, and Death instead brought back our eldest brother. Although my sister in real life obviously won't be physically coming back anytime soon, or ever really, this taught me something. My sister has come back to me, in what I'm choosing to do with my life as a career.
My sister was so supportive of my love of theatre. She saw every performance she could and was so mesmerized at what I helped create. She died before I'd finalized my college decisions, but I like to think she has so much to do with it. Her love and support gave me the courage to go into theatre in college. Her love fuels my passion for this art form, and there is nothing that will stop me from pursuing this crazy dream of mine because if I do, I will have let her down. I can't do that; she never let me down. I let her down many times when she was alive, and I can't let myself do that anymore.
Just last night, I remembered how much she said she loved watching the old movie version of Les Miserables and knew there was a musical version of it, and I told her they were in the very early stages of creating a movie version of the musical. She was so excited for it.
She never got to see it.
Listening to that music brought me back to such specific memories of her. I remember, her sitting on the couch as I got ready for another dumb day of school, and she told me about how she wanted to see the musical.
Listening to that music last night brought me to tears because she never got to experience it. And I did. I wanted nothing more than to bring her back to me, and let her listen to the beautiful music with me. But there was no way. There is no way to bring back what is gone.
At least I thought. Tonight, when we in those imaginary circumstances, lost our sibling and experienced grief and everything that comes with it, along with the ultimate acceptance of death, then the surprise of his return, my sister's spirit returned to me. I felt her presence, it was almost like she was speaking to me. I felt a message of what you are doing is right. You chose to major in theatre for a reason. Doing anything else would make life miserable for you. You have a voice and this world needs to hear it through your writing and the theatre you help create.
And I felt validated. I felt right, and I felt amazing. I was committed to the work we were doing, I was present, with all of this in the back of my mind, and it was one of the most freeing experiences of my life post-November-2010.
I will never forget this night and the people that I shared it with.
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