After frontloading a lot of the high-impact effort of my research at the beginning of the summer, I now have had plenty of time to reflect on the experience. Above all, I want to expand the scope of how people perceive what theatre is and what it can be. This work shows that even with the financial and time constraints of community theatre, it is possible to experiment with theatre, treating the rehearsal space as a laboratory rather than a factory. As we experimented with the play, it also kept our work in rehearsal very specific. It resisted inheriting received ideas or stagings. Rather, it favored bringing in Tallahassee. The final performance took place at Goodwood Museum and Gardens, where neither we nor the audience could escape constant reminders of where we were. Despite this, it felt as easy as ever to connect to the written material of Gardner McKay, the playwright. This was because there was a different relationship formed with the script. It was not our job to excavate the meaning from the text, but instead to have that text work on us.
There were many important discoveries about the text as we rehearsed, but the most interesting of them were the discoveries about ourselves. Observations of the world, which hadn’t been fully formed until now. As I sat and watched the final performance, it was those moments of personal discovery that elevated the show beyond a staged story and into a performance that lived and breathed. This way of working is not easy; it requires a different relationship with theatre and performing. I’ve gotten to practice this way of relationship in several different circumstances now, professional productions, classroom work, and independent practice. Each environment has challenged how I work and given me new experiences moving forward. I am very eager to return to campus as I will be moving on into the master’s program in the theatre department and continuing my research into a final written thesis. This project has been an incredible step that I have built up to with my work in undergraduate classes and Honors in the Major, and one I seek to continue building off of in the future.
This coming semester, I will be starting the initial inquiry and reading necessary to start my master’s thesis in the spring. I’ll be taking seminars in subjects like performance ethnography while continuing my practical work in rehearsal spaces. Combining research and performance is something I never would have found if not for the faculty at the theatre school and opportunities at FSU, which welcome the arts into grant funding. Next to me right now, I still have a small stack of books and many notes from this project and others’ previous projects to dig through. I feel very confident leaving the IDEA Grant, as it has given me not only a trial ground of sorts, but a large amount of research that I can continue to grow. I hope to continue them far into PhD applications, a dissertation, and further.
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