Blogs - Challenger Blog
Passion over Ratings
It’s Saturday just past 11am. My heart rate has reached lightning speed, my hands are restless and clattering against my pant seam and I’m taking deep breaths to try to relax myself. This is nothing new to me; it’s how I always get when anything of meaning in my life is about to take place. I repeatedly tell myself to stop freaking out, but the nerves take over as I enter a room with three judges, a small audience and a stage.
The journey to state speech contest had started about six weeks earlier when the IHSSA speech contest groups had been posted on the drama board. I eagerly peered through the rows of names looking for my name to appear. It appeared along with three others, Kayleigh Wren, Drew Davis and Cassie Tant. We were paired together as an ensemble group, performing a scene called He Said and She Said.
Rehearsals soon began, and we quickly realized how twisted the plot of our scene was. Just reading through the script made me stop to try and comprehend what was going on. The scene was centered on a friendship between two women, Enid and Diana that was manipulated by an older woman, Mrs. Packard, who spent her days gossiping about others’ personal affairs. The scene gets twisted when Mrs. Packard accuses Enid’s husband, Felix, of secretly having an affair with Diana. From there it becomes a story of exactly what the title says- he said, she said.
I began rehearsals thinking that it would be a piece of cake- I would read through the script, get an understanding of what kind of person my character was and add some emotion to fit that character. I soon realized that I was 100 percent wrong with my outlook.
One of our first tasks was to map out our character’s life, even before the script began. I had to know Diana’s past, her relationships and her outlook on life. In other words, I had to become Diana. I spent 3 hours reading through the script, looking for hints of why she said every word she spoke- where it was coming from.
As we were discovering our characters, my group, along with our coach, Chelsea Cunningham was starting to bond as well. I didn’t really know my group members before this experience, but I came out of it with three people I can call good friends. We would spend more time talking about the scene than we would actually run it. We would get caught up in our characters and have continued dialogues, past the written script. As we came close to districts, our characters had been shaped and as a group we had a connection that showed during our performance.
I remember leaving our districts center so ecstatic and just overwhelmed after one of our best performances to date. The icing on the cake was our perfect score of one. We were on our way to state, with two weeks left to paginate our scene.
The two weeks I spent at rehearsals after districts, I think I learned more about acting than ever before. Cunningham had pages full of notes after repeatedly watching our scene. We were now focusing on the details that would separate our performance between good and pure quality. We had to build to a climax and we had to actually listen to each other, like living the scene instead having it memorized in our head. As we became more aware of what we, as real people would do in that situation, we brought life to the scene. I could feel the intensity rise in the room as the highest point in our arguments was expelled.
There was a point in which it really hit me that we, as a group, were truly committed to this scene. There was a point in the scene in which Enid and Diana (Kayleigh and I) had a final, desperate plea to save their friendship. We had run the scene dozens and dozens of times, but this time there were tears in Kayleigh’s eyes during that moment. That’s the moment that I realized that we had taken a script, written 90 years ago, and made it ours. After running the scene for what seemed like the millionth time, we still found a new emotion that came from our character.
The day of state started at 4 am for me, and I could not stop thinking about our performance until the moment we were set to perform, 11:15.
It had to come to us naturally, because once we hit that stage, everything went blank, and it was up to us to have the instinct to know what our character would do. What we would do.
We spent the next fifteen minutes giving a performance that had been dissected and analyzed, and had been turned into our own. The script only gave us the dialogue, but we added the pain, the confusion, the innocence and we were our characters.
I remember leaving the room ready to burst, until we reached the door and rushed out. We quickly came together in a group hug, one that felt so familiar. I was on top of the world because I knew that the four of us had spent the past several weeks working to put on a quality show, and we achieved that. We were given fifteen minutes to give each audience member a chance to relate to our characters in some way.
By then, scores meant nothing. A number could never represent the feeling I had after our state performance; a feeling of accomplishment that I got to share with four really great people.