Sunday Read: Blog: The MAP Project

Part VI: Theatre / Friends

What makes us unique

by Amy Kitz

Theatre is a unique place to make friends. As an actor, director, designer, technician, stage-manager: you freelance. When you begin a job it is often with the understanding that this job is contractual and has a definitive end point. The contractual aspect of a life in the theatre is not a work-place attribute exclusive to the stage, but I have found that theatre people have a tendency to be social people, big time social people, and this is what makes theatre friends unique.

In the theatre you may work on a show and feel as though, with that specific cast and crew, you have found/made the best friends of your life. You work together, have dinner-breaks together, go out for post-show drinks together! Theatre people seem to work very hard at making their co-workers their family. After all, we work in a business where connection is key, so this desire, combined with the added environmental pressure of working passionately towards one unique end-product (the show) makes sense. But then the show ends, and though everyone pleads life-long connections made, so too do the friendships. Or at least the style and intensity of companionship developed during the period of working. 

Friends and theatre: it is a funny, special, and transient mix.

The Sunday Read: Part V - Iris Lapid on MAP

Part V: January, 2012

The clown in me

by Iris Lapid

I recently finished Clown 2, a workshop taught by Francine Cote in which we developed our own unique clown through emotional state and physical gesture. The goal of Clown 1 was to open up and let what already exists within us come out, and in Clown 2 we worked at accepting it and developing it. Clown is all about discovering what you personally have a lot of, and then finding a way to let people laugh at that. I, for one, had a lot of difficulty understanding this concept in the first workshop because I had all sorts of ideas about what I wanted to play or how I wanted to be seen, without being able to simply let out what was already inside myself.