Student Blogger: Lauren Lakra

Before I ever developed a distinct taste in art, a favor for certain aesthetics or genres or even method of delivery, I was still deeply and inextinguishably drawn to it.

I am a part of a studio of 18 actors. We have class three times a week, follow each other from teacher to teacher, room to room, and we bare our souls. These classmates know about my toxic relationships, my deepest insecurities, they know that when I cry I ball my hands into fists and cover my face. They know details about me that some of my oldest friends don't even know, and I know the same about them. I've seen them burst into tears, break things, scream at the wall. I've also seen them dance on tables and barf on the side of the street on a night out.

Three days a week at 8am, I wake up and prepare myself for my 9am movement class. I take off my shoes and stand in a line across the floor with my other classmates. I put one foot in front of the other and slowly push myself across the room. I lift my arms into an outreached position, open, yearning, eager, a position individual from those of my classmates beside me. I laser my eyes on the emptiness before me, in the space between focusing on one point and nothing at all. Until I reach the other side of the room and halt my movement, waiting for the rest of my classmates to complete their journeys and stand alongside me. We are engaging in an exercise called a 'slow ten', we are engaging our skills of discipline, focus, and stamina, utilizing our body's articulation and expressiveness, exploring our imaginative impulses. But I can't get past the fact that I'm just waving my arms and walking across the room.

'What makes a successful actor?' is a question I hear all too often at workshops and intensives, questionnaires, and even in classes. A question with no defined answer, open to perspective and experience to guide it. A question that prompts me to raise another, much more important question that I find somewhat synonymous; 'what makes an educated actor?'