Category: Summer 23′

Purpose of Theatre Statement/Thoughts

Maia Anjolie1 Comment

I don’t nearly have enough knowledge or thoughts to explain the importance of theatre. I do, however, understand the impact art has on individuals’ lives, including mine. I yearn for the separation art gives from life. Though, I don’t immerse myself in art and all kinds of variety it provides as much as I should – especially given that we, as humans, get sucked into life with every breath we take. 

I badly want to tell someone all about the purpose of theatre and give complex and intricate thoughts, but I am not educated enough about art as a whole. Ironically though, I have seen theatre more through motion pictures and television, yet I can name not even one of those examples because of how little impact it provided me on my life or even art. Theodore Shank rightly says, there is a distinction between motion pictures/television and live performances. My harsher and more biased input is motion pictures are less insignificant and even useless at times, while the live theatre performances I have experienced have been marked as some of the most monumental moments in my life. 

When I think about the experience of live theatre performances, it is so much more than getting strangers to fill up seats to watch humans engaging in a sophisticated and well-thought-out version of “playing pretend.” It’s about the preparation from undeniably the characters and even the spectators themselves. It’s about the purpose of why these humans are in the same gathering to watch this performance. Individuals may be bored, or isolated, and some are there for the future of their own careers and professions, etc. There are different types of reasons and experiences waiting to be conquered after the closing act. Witnessing the performance may be the only common thing spectators hold but the impact and experiences gathered from it can vary from each person, including the characters. Humans hold so many different thoughts and opinions but the one thing we can share is that we sat down and watched this performance together. Theatre can be represented as a universal language, regardless of what brought people together. 

When I’m preparing to see a live performance, I curiously want to be reminded of the characters’ humanity. I want to hear the strain of the person’s voice, see their tears fall, and witness anything I would not be able to attain through a blue light screen.

We deceive

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Hiding, lying, and the imagination all make sense now. The exploration provided by Oscar Wilde and Paul in Six Degrees of Separation revealed that art is only in response to existence. These works expanded my ability to recognize my identity, individuals who deceive, and the acceptance we create on earth. In other words, I feel penetrable because of the art I have discovered in this class.

Oscar Wilde compares lying and poetry to an expression of art. As someone who strives to be honest but gets sucked into dishonesty at times, Wilde helps me to become more flexible towards myself. I am learning, “Sometimes you do not want the burden of having your particular idea attributed to your social identity.” Dishonesty and masking can be described as a humane response to the dismissal of our own existence.

Lying and hiding might always be viewed as obstructiveness towards the good that exists in this world. I acknowledge that to this day, “it haunts me in the moments of pleasure,” and although Wilde expresses this in a different context, with respect, it applies to me. Even though it is not advisable, these are accessible measures to avoid judgment and disparagement. I have accepted that we endure feelings of inadequacy because we feel we may not be suited for a specific circumstance in our lives. As stated in the script of Six Degrees of Separation, we can either “face ourselves” or use the imagination to make self-examination bearable. My insights are not to excuse or endorse dishonesty, but it does help me understand why people do it and how humans have a foreseeable pattern. 

In contrast to the world of Gilead’s inhuman use of modesty in The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood, I realized that I don’t always recognize the beauty attached when I examine myself, possibly because of my lack of modesty. I have an extreme bias toward myself, and yes, Wilde’s ambivalent perspective may be correct, “the only beautiful things…., are the things that do not concern us.” Wilde’s viewpoint makes me wonder if humans merely need to achieve neutrality, rather than confidence, or dislike when perceiving ourselves in a healthy judgment. Humility has the chance to prevent lying and hiding—art and the existence that creates this yearning for modesty. At the same time, my existence yearns for the beauty that I hold candidly. However, I believe my existence will never be considered ordinary; no soul will ever be. I want to feel more than ordinary; don’t we all? Perhaps a balanced perspective reveals intricate beauty.

I once found comfort in masking myself and still do when I’m not too fond of the reflection of myself, but art is helping me to discover the sovereignty of humanity. Art is complicated, but the self-examination it provides will always remain clear to me. Individuals’ expression of their ideas on nature and art through people’s eyes will always provide warmth and closure. Although life creates art, it should not be mistaken for the other way around. Art helps me to clarify the world were all in. One day, I endeavor to find beauty in the things that do concern me, and I’m confident that art will eventually lead me there. No one has ever stated that existence is easy, nor there’s a right way to abide by it, and art supports that. Art is complicated, but so are humans and the lying and hiding we execute. My perception will forever continue to be changed by art. 

Unnamed Poem

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I am waiting to turn on. Must I always have to choose? 
My decisions are no companions or enemies. That is only my relationship with myself.
My soul becomes bitter and my heart remains conditional. Must it always have to be like this?
My head swirls to the middle of what I must be be
when will I turn on and grow?
When will I not give into my own persona molds.

Stop staring into me. I see you are damaged too
We stomp on the bodies of the dead, yet their distribution of souls are within us.

I weep with you. I lie with you.
I must not choose the vulnerability of your given sides.

This world is brighter for everything you gave it.”

Abandon Me

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By Melissa Febos

This book may have saved the most recent version of me. At the start of every book I’m someone, and at the end I’m someone else.

This book took me four months to finish, and for the first time, “life” wasn’t the reason to stand in my way of finishing it in a timely manner. My body physically could not pick up this book, and mentally I couldn’t get the words into my head.

It feels strange for me to reread books, I have to somehow build up the courage to pick up a book for the second time. I knew once I finished this book it would be one less voice telling me how to go on in this complicated world.

  • “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror / Just keep going. No feeling is final / Don’t let yourself lose me.” -Rainer Marie Rilke
  • “And comfort eases, but it does not erase. Until then, we keep reading.”
  • “I carried a story of my own into that room but her voice silenced everything in me.”
  • “…we trusted those stories because we could not trust our own.”
  • “It was the only comfort I knew well enough to offer.”
  • “It’s hard to care rightly for someone you fear losing.”
  • “I was both looking for and leaving myself.”
  • “That is, love doesn’t give us a god, unless we are also willing to become one.”
  • “We coo at pregnant bellies, sanctify that most blatant acknowledgment of sex, but shame this ephemeral evidence. A hickey is personal.”
  • “My body has always given me away. Or maybe it’s the other way around.”
  • “Praying to Jesus was not for anyone in our family. But I loved the word mercy. The idea of falling to one’s knees moved something in me that I tended like a secret.”
  • “I said yes and no at all the wrong times.”
  • “…the sweet terror of being recognized.”
  • “I barricaded myself in books and secrets.”
  • “I was afraid to touch him, my little brother, afraid of how badly he might need that.”
  • “For thirty dollars I could go anywhere without fear.”
  • “How could I have defined him by any word that did not include my love for him?”
  • “I have always chosen my poisons. The things that will hurt and grow me the most.”
  • “But the real power here is his, in knowing what he needed and in asking for my help.”
  • “The best we can offer each other, and ourselves, is a few honest words.”
  • “We all want this in love — for our lovers to spot the marks of our losses, the scars that note how we have been changed, how we became the person they love.”
  • “I did not choose my female body. But I chose every image painted on it.”
  • “I wish I could tell you what’s wrong with me, I whispered, tears dripping onto my knees. It was a lie and also true.”
  • “The thing about pain is that it pins you to the moment, to your body.”
  • “Believe in this until you can believe in me.”
  • “I still wanted to be a princess, and not for the political power.”
  • “Of course I wanted something to hold onto — I could not hold onto myself.”
  • “It is not easy to be seen, no matter how we crave it.”
  • “Wanting something does not mean it will suit us.”
  • “She wanted love to heal the wounds of her past.”
  • “But what does it mean to be taken care of? Material security. Adoration.”
  • “If he loved us, if he really loves us, where was he?”
  • “A hope that somewhere else might be the truer life or love you have hoped for.”
  • “I understood early that love was a mission to heal one’s own heart.”
  • “Every prayer is answered, I think, though not often in the ways we imagine.”
  • “Our selves are sometimes the only things over which we wield power. And our means of expressing it are sometimes chosen for us.”
  • “It was the kind of story that I’d loved as a girl, when everything seemed tragic and romantic, the kind of story that only ended in a wedding or a funeral.”
  • “The urge to list is an urge to locate and to contain. A list is an attempt to organize the chaos both inside and outside of us into something manageable, finite.”
  • “Love is not a feeling, a fever, or need; ‘Love is as love does.'” – M. Scott Peck
  • The problem with being known is that your people know when you are gone.”
  • “We are in constant collaboration with our contexts.”
  • “And writing was the only way I could think clearly. The thoughts in my mind ran on a loop — they were worried, obsessed, and small. They went nowhere. By building a story, I could find a beginning, middle, and end.”
  • “But feelings have terrible manners — they are like children, or drunks.”
  • “Feelings are not facts, they used to say in my meetings, and it was true. But facts had never rescued me and feelings had done their work.”
  • “You must look at the parts that hurt, that do not flatter or comfort you.”
  • “Maybe that’s all bravery is: when your hunger is greater than your fear.”
  • “You cannot erase yourself. You can only abandon it.”
  • “Some burdens can only be measured by their relief.”

Ask Me This in 10 Years

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p4

Acid is a drug I believe helps reveal one’s thoughts and expressions faster than you normally would sober. Writing to me is equally strong as this drug we call acid. Writing has created more acceptance towards myself and relief has only followed. I discovered this relief during my senior year of high school. I woke up with a heavy chest and had no idea who or where to turn to for this ease. The only healthy idea I could come up with was writing in my journal. Within the next thirty minutes, my heaviness despaired.

My grand spectacle has yet to come. The way I am holding up this expectation so high in my head it seems so realistic for it never to come. But the hope I carry from this belief is all I need. Writing has given me hope. It’s hard for me to separate myself as a writer and as a person because writing is the reason for who I am today. I have accepted that writing is the only chance I have to be less oblivious, quiet, and misunderstood. I owe as much debt to writing then I do to my tuition at UMBC. I don’t need an essay to prove to myself that writing is changing or has changed me because I know this from my body and perception. I am mentally and physically healthier because of writing. However, it is nice to document this if I plan to ask myself this same question ten years later. Perhaps in ten years, I will say this same thing to ask myself later on, that there’s still more out there for me to learn. But my experience and judgments as a writer currently are really just at the beginning.

Many people in my life can view me as a negative person which I can be impeccably. And writing is the only thing that is attempting to pull me out of this bleakness. For now, writing has forced me to relearn the feelings of trust I have in myself. My confidence in myself is only growing and enhancing as I write this very sentence. I’ll be waiting for my thoughts, realizations, cringe, and awe in ten years.

Wales

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I am becoming accustomed to the blindness of myself. I wonder what it would be like to finally look at myself with eyes. Although my lack of presence is non-existent when I write. I am a stranger to my own rot, but I am kin with the beauty of my own god.

Outer beauty doesn’t mean anything to me, though. When we walk on fields, we crush flowers with the soles of our feet yet seek and steer away from waste matter. We focus on adversity and take time away from the beauty we should appreciate. I don’t understand why. How can we ever honor beauty when we respect our loved ones’ death yet remove dead flowers from their own graves? I can only reply with silence when it is all I have.