BWW Blog: Virtual Finals at U of I

It's no surprise that being a theatre major, our finals will look a little bit different this year due to the pandemic. While I have a few gen-eds, a lot of my finals were already done in person while I was on campus. For example, in my Lyric Studio class, this semester we filmed scenes in our iconic Tryon Festival Theatre at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Now that that is over, we've spent the last two weeks of classes doing somatic work (movement/yoga) and working on Shakespeare over Zoom. We spent a lot of time last week talking about the rhythm of Shakespeare and what certain old English words meant. I was assigned to do a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, playing Hermia. This is not the first time I've done acting work over Zoom this year. In late September, we had a two week masterclass with Marc Kudisch on acting for film. While it is difficult to do scene work with someone else over Zoom, I found it was easier for me to do monologue work for the camera because it didn't feel so presentational. He gave us sides to work with from TV shows and movies like Sex and the City, Billions and even House of Cards. My main takeaway from Marc's class was you have to strip away all the "fluff" of acting and get down to the real truth and intention of what you're saying. Everytime we had a line, whether it was Shakespeare or Sex and the City, he would ask us "Okay, what are you saying?" You have to come to your character with the perspective that they are the hero of their own story. A character only seems like a villain when you look at it from a place of judgement. There are some characters in stories that do bad things merely for the sake of doing bad things, but there is still intention behind it. Why did they do that? Do they dislike the person they did something to? Why do they dislike them?

Going back to last semester (Spring 2020), I had the task of creating a video for my tap class final. Our prompt was we had to use and find rhythm in a creative way that could relate to not only tap, but other forms around us. For example, someone in my class took up pen tapping and made a video of her doing that. Because I had been binge watching Netflix, I decided to take lines from my favorite shows and movies, find a standard rhythm for it, and translate into tap. It was interesting to see how much speaking does relate to singing in that singing is just speaking on pitch. Once I got into the project, I started tapping to rap music like Yeah! by Usher. One of my favorite lines I used was the Spanish rap from the show Community by Troy and Abed. I had just started watching the show and couldn't pass up that opportunity.

As artists, this season of artistry has been nothing short of a rollercoaster but it has required all of us to take a step back and ask ourselves what kind of artists we want to be and how we can contribute art during this time. While the pandemic has definitely made creating art in person more difficult, it has reminded me that it is in our nature as musical theatre artists and performers to adapt to any situation and are stronger and more resilient artists because of it.