Student Blog: On Multitudes

Prepare yourselves for waves of nostalgia and sentimentality to crash in the fair shores of your mind. We’re going back in time to the awkward yet wonderful preteen and teenage years. Today on this blog we’re gonna trek down memory lane hand in hand side by side and maybe do a musical number (we will not be doing a musical number, but let’s just pretend it’s an option, life is too short not to take the road more whimsical). 

For me high school might as well have been a musical. I’ve been thinking a lot about the people and the programs that have made me into the performer and theater maker I am today. I’ve come up with the idea that every performer contains a dramatic and intricate tapestry of every actor they’ve ever known and seen. You don’t slap your thighs to punctuate every line because your professor in college gave you the note during tech week, you sing from your diaphragm because in high school your teacher had you do exercises every day during class. We are who we have learned from and who we have seen. 

It's the staple of every canonical high school movie and show. The theme and message at large reads “Don’t you forget about me.” We will always “remember” and “always have high school.” We are encouraged to pay homage and tribute to our pasts because they made us who we are. You have to be able to clearly see the path you’ve trodden as it lays behind you, if you are going to attempt to forge a new one ahead of you. Knowing where you’ve been doesn’t mean you accept or reject the person who was there in your stead, we all contain multitudes. We contain within us who we have been, will be, and want to be (wow suddenly all the voices in my head don’t seem so scary after all). 

Children are maps of their parents, theater makers are maps of every show they have ever done, every person the have ever worked with, and without a doubt are the absolute antithesis or carbon copy of their high school theater teacher. There is no in between I fear, the unavoidable brain chemistry changing figure that is your high school theater teacher either is your life long friend, or the instigator of your villain origin story. The adults who guided you on your journey informed the adult you eventually turned into, for better or for worse but most definitely for good. 

From every conversation I’ve ever had with another theater person, it becomes super clear how formative high school theater is. Whether it was a drama club, thespian troupe, or just the one musical your school did a year, a theatrical outlet at the adolescent academic level changes lives. It forces you to grow up faster because suddenly you’re pulling your weight in a theatrical machine made up of so many moving pieces. Your brain suddenly is trained to lock in faster and focus harder than it ever has. A lot is expected of the average high school theater kid. This shaped our work ethic and our understanding of commitment. 

The theater kids of the world are immediately identifiable. We’re a bit too loud, a bit too loyal, and a bit too eager to help. Whether the journey of life drops you on a Broadway stage or at a survival job pit stop or an alternative passion, theater kid-ness is within you….embrace it! There’s nothing wrong with being special, with being different.

My musings on this topic have come from my interstate shufflings this past winter break, where I have been forced to confront the person I have been as well as the person I’m trying to be. College students are perpetually in flux, our belongings are strewn in a Hansel and Gretel like bread crumb jail from our childhood bedroom to our dorm room. We are transformers, we are shapeshifters, we are constantly warping between who we are now  and who we were at 17. Rather than spin out from that revelation I have chosen to embrace it, analyze it, and make my peace with it. 

You can be a million things at once and still be a singular unique unit of a human on this planet. You are not Actor. Dancer. Theater Kid. You are you who contains all those things alongside an epic myriad of others unlike any other person on this earth. Go out there and contain some multitudes!!!