Saturday Night Thoughts

So I've had a couple of days to mull over what Saturday Night's performance was to me, and have let the jarring nature of it being our last performance of Twelfth Night settle in my body. These are my thoughts:

What a blast. We went up there, and we had ourselves a great time.
In Friday afternoon's performance I was more nervous than I've ever been, and it took a toll on my breathing/voice as well as my connection to the text/other actors on stage. Saturday Night's performance, however, I was relaxed, not really that nervous, but kind of riding a sort of calm wave. It struck me as odd that I wasn't nervous, and I started to get nervous about why I wasn't nervous, if you can believe that. When the audience started in, I told myself "these people love me, and I love them. I'm going to relish and endulge in that positive energy" and I think that made all the difference. Somehow telling myself that it was gonna go really well made it go really well. I think. Either way, my body and mind seemed to be on some sort of auto-pilot, in that I wasn't thinking about what I was doing, I was just doing it. My spirit, I suppose, knew what was going to happen, and how to make it work. It was a frightening and incredible experience at the same time, because I wasn!
't thinking to control what was going on, I was just, well, living. That is a very scary place for me to be because I have struggled with turning my brain off and just letting my instincts and work that I've done take me wherever they are going to take me. But it was in that span of "brain-dead" time that I was freed up to live, because I wasn't second guessing. The few times I was aware of what was going on, I fell out of it, and forgot my lines, or reverted back to old techniques. But it was by far the most comfortable and at ease I've ever felt on stage.

In short, it felt wonderful. I'm sad that I've had to let the play go, but the memories of the process of assembling Twelfth Night and working with you guys will stay with me forever. I learned more about myself and how I work in the last 6 weeks than most of the first 2 years of my training at CMU. I'm ever-grateful that I was privileged to enjoy such a rewarding, though at times challenging, experience.

What also felt really good was feeling like WE were doing something. WE were TELLING THE STORY. It wasn't about individual performances, it was about how WE could best come together to tell the best, most vivid, and most exciting story we could. And we succeeded. In a HUMONGOUS way.

I have tried, but still cannot drill the hole into my heart where the words live to express how I feel about these last few weeks so that I may share them with you.

All I can say is that we are all blessed.

Thanks, Thanks...and ever oft good terms.

-Nicolas Ducassi