UC San Diego

Have you ever wanted to escape the limitations of what your brain thinks you are capable of? Well, lets P.L.A.Y, Performance Living Actively in You! Enter with me into a rehearsal process where perfection is replaced with discovery; where creation need not be tied to rhyme or reason. Leave the critical adult mind behind and jump into the body-your personal vehicle to this imaginary world!

Through my artistic experience acting in A Beautiful Day in November, I found that full body expression is where PLAY lives, in the world of a play. Playing with the body, and without the critical and intellectual brain, allows the actor to expand and discover their character beyond initial ideas or basic pretenses. The utilization of P.L.A.Y., is not only useful in absurdist works, like A Beautiful Day in November, but I also found it extremely freeing in the classroom, classical texts, and stage productions.

I was able to apply Checkov’s technique onstage in Man in Love, and use full body expression as a gateway to tapping into an internal feeling. By tapping into the physical sensation of falling, my body took inventory of the feeling of losing control. I was able to transmute that physical feeling into an emotional fear that was outwardly expressed onstage in my character Darylnn’s agoraphobia.

In classical work, such as Shakespeare, I found that heightened text is best understood, for both myself and audiences, when executed with full body expression. By metabolizing words into a physical expression, my body removes language as a barrier to the comprehension of storytelling.

My process to discovery changed once I got my body involved. Before then, I was a captive to the limitations of my mind with no idea of my capacity to be a chameleon of an actress. Through graduate school, I have found that there is no story that my body cannot lead me through.