A1-Suicides to a “Seventeen Year Old Crisis”

My Struggle to Communicate and Connect Artistically

My English assignment was to kill myself believably and poetically while reciting Shakespeare in front of the whole school. This was a scary task for an eighth grader who had only done some small comical roles at Montcrest School. The assignment was to take a scene from Romeo and Juliet and make the costumes and props and perform it for the school. I was given the scene in which Juliet wakes up from the sleep potion and sees Romeo dead and thus kills herself. I was terrified; would it look believable? Or would I just look silly in front of all my peers? In eighth grade I was going through that awkward puberty phase that all kids go through, where I was not quite comfortable with my new self and the opinions of my friends meant the world to me.

My godmother, Janet Land, who is a theatre and film actress gave me some tips on how to die believably. At first when I was rehearsing with Janet I was really self-conscious and unsure of myself, but I soon lost my inhibitions and became really open and connected with her. We spent hours, going over and over the sequence, not only the part where I committed suicide, but the whole scene until I got it just right. I would drag the “Ahhh,” sound as though someone has kicked me in the stomach as I stabbed the collapsing plastic dragger into my stomach, and leaned toward my Romeo as I fall from my knees to the ground. “Thus with a kiss I die,” I breathlessly muttered as I fell falling over his dead cold body. Janet would comment that it was a good run, but she would say that I needed to annunciate the “thus I die” more and so we would do it over and over until I was completely out of energy and she had to go pick up her kids from school.

One of the best parts of the experience came a week after the performance when during recess a confused first grade girl tapped me on the shoulder and asked me about the pain I felt when I stabbed myself and if I put a Band-Aid on my cut. I had connected with her and she believed that I had really hurt myself. She was even amazed with my swift recovery.
After that I was hooked. My experiences on stage and in the art studio have given me confidence and the courage to listen to my gut even if that means walking away from a childhood dream. My struggles in the arts have given me a voice and a way to connect with people.

At the family fair that took place every summer near my cottage, our family summer getaway on Georgian Bay near Toronto, when all my brothers were competing in the swimming races, I was more interested in the art contests. I would create cottage-themed crafts out of old scrapes of garbage or nature like moss, leaves and twigs that I would find, paint and glue together into houses, animals or people. My most prized craft was the year that I made, “The Secret Olympics in Georgian Bay.” It was during the summer that the Olympics were in Atlanta and I made a 3-D map of the bay on the back of an old flattened TV box with fashioned rocks and Popsicle sticks for the hidden secret sports facilities. As I often won the art prizes for my odd recycled creations and my brothers won the swimming prizes and egg toss prizes, it was clear I was the “artsy” one of the family.

As a kid I was driven to a buffet of different artistic classes from ballet, hip-hop, theatre games to art lessons. However my real artistic passion didn’t come until my Shakespearean suicide in grade eight. After that I was absorbed with the power of theatre and going diligently to every acting class I could find-improv at Second City, on-camera class downtown, and Shakespeare School at the Stratford Festival of Canada.

While I was sitting in an on-camera acting class where many of the students had representation, I decided that I too was ready to get an agent. Janet gave me a couple names and so I auditioned for representation. Eventually one of them decided to take me on. Her name was Barbara. She was short and plump with a big warm bubbly personality that had become an agent after her daughter had become a TV actress. Barbara had realized the lack of decency amongst child and teenage agents and decided she could do it better. I used to love going to her office before my auditions because we would act out the audition situation. She would be the casting agent and I would do my audition for her. At the end she would say enthusiastically, “Good audition,” and then we would talk about it, and I would feel less nervous as I chewed on the jellybeans from her candy jar on her desk.

My first big audition came that summer, when I was at my remote summer escape on Georgian Bay. My mom had bought a fax machine and set up our answering machine at our cottage so that I would be ready for when important auditions like this came ringing. The audition was for a big American network TV family drama that was being created. My heart was pounding extra fast for the two days before and I had mentally created a countdown to the minute in my mind till the audition moment. The day of the audition I was nervously sitting in the waiting room, going to the bathroom every ten minutes, when one of the stars from Degrassi, the most popular Canadian TV show sat down next to me. She was auditioning for the same part. I felt like I had made it. I was a real actress. I did not get a call back but it didn’t matter because not only was the show later cancelled, but more importantly I felt like I had made it just by being at the audition.

In grade 11, I was auditioning for TV parts, commercials and sometimes indie films every other week, and also taking camera acting and art classes. My plan was to hopefully get some roles, get into USC or NYU theatre school and also maybe minor in studio art if I had time. I heard about the summer program at the British American Drama Academy in London and thought it would be the perfect step for me to get into the USC theatre school as USC recognized it for credit. Janet coached me through the two Shakespearean monologues, one humorous and one more serious required for the audition. I auditioned and felt a real sense of accomplishment when I heard that I had been accepted into the program for that summer. All my hard work had paid off; I was going to go to BADA, then hopefully USC or NYU theatre program and be a successful actress in NYC or LA.

During the months leading up to the program, however, I was not that excited for theatre school. When people asked me about my summer plans I would mutter quickly that I was going to London to study theatre and then gush nonstop about the time after where I would be at my cottage. Something was clearly amiss within me.

After the first day of the Academy I could not understand why I did not want to be there. Theatre school is supposed to be one of the best experiences for an actor. I should have been enthralled and happy with what I was doing, but the material that I was learning no longer interested me and I felt like I no longer needed to perform. I remember doing breathing and annunciation warm-ups during my first days at BADA, activities that a year ago I had found really engaging, but now it just seemed tedious and chore-like. I realized that I had worked so hard to get into theatre school to come to the conclusion that I did not really want to be an actress. I was unable to understand how something that I was so passionate about no longer interested me and how it would be possible to let go of one of my childhood dreams.

It was a very difficult tear-filled week. In hindsight I refer to it as, “my seventeen year old crisis,” because it felt how I imagine a midlife crisis. You wake up one morning and realize that all the things you thought mattered and were important to you, no longer are and you desperately crave a change in direction. Many nights were spent on the phone with my parents back home tallying up ridiculously expensive phone bills as I dissected my life and my passions.

My parents worried that I would miss theatre once I left it. I did not though. I realized that what I loved about theatre and acting was telling stories. I loved connecting with a group as we created a production, however I no longer loved performing, which is vital for an actress. So I followed my gut, exited stage left to leave behind the theatre and acting world and focus my energy on a different artistic pursuit.

My roots in fine arts were much deeper than theatre; I had been drawing since I could hold my favorite broken red crayon. However in high school when I had an agent my fines arts had been put on the back burner. Maybe something deep inside me knew I would end up with my first artistic love, as it was the art form I had always had the most confidence in. So I got back with my old flame and I focused my visual energies as President of the Senior Art Club and came to USC as fine arts major.
I realized with fine arts I was more apt to connect with a greater audience. In theatre there is an emphasis on the singular performance to communicate with the audience. Whereas with visual arts, the artist’s ability to speak to an audience goes far beyond the point of creation of the art form. I saw how the power of the visual image to speak to audiences could transcend time and history while I was studying art history and working in Italy.

As I stood alone in front of Michelangelo’s David in Florence mesmerized for the better part of my morning, I understood how art created five hundred years ago could still speak volumes. I was captivated by how the messages communicated in the Renaissance masterpieces had been speaking to and still spoke to different audiences for hundreds of years. This understanding was further enriched when I worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice for the summer where I was surrounded by masterpieces that had been chatting away to viewers for almost a century.

Every morning before we opened the museum, as we dusted off the sculptures and took the pajamas off the painting (the protective cover that we put on during off hours at the museum to reduce the amount of light the painting receive), I anxiously waited to see how different people would respond to the artwork’s messages. I would hear a plethora of different languages all experiencing the art in various ways depending on their cultural backgrounds
My favorite part of my job was when I could explain an art piece’s message to the visitors by giving tours and art talks. Giving these talks and tours, I was using a lot of the skills I developed through my theatre training of speaking clearly, projecting my voice, and gauging the interest of my audience.

After spending so much time in the galleries, I had a special connection with the artworks- I felt like I knew their individual personalities. When I walked into the Los Angeles County Museum a month after I got back from Italy I realized how attached I had become to the artwork. When I went to the Modern Art section in the museum, and saw their Brancusi’s “Bird in Space”, which is so similar to the one in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection that had been chatting away to me all summer, I was moved to tears. Fighting my impulse to openly sob in the gallery, I realized how much I missed “talking” to all the artwork from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the incredible beauty of my whole experience in Italy.

As I think back to the timid grade eight girl terrified to “kill herself” in front of her whole elementary school to the young woman I’ve become who stands confidently explaining the significance of Pablo Picasso’s “On the Beach” to a group of all different international travelers, I realized how important this journey has been for me to overcome the singularity and alienation that all humans inherently feel by connecting through art.