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As I reach the end of my third year, I’ve been reflecting on how I used to picture this moment when I first arrive at Rose Bruford College. Back then, it felt like something distance and overwhelming – as if I were being pushed towards a finish line I wasn’t ready for. It reminded me of the feeling I had as as child thinking about turning 18: something and big and abstract, that I couldn’t fully grasp and which was unapologetically approaching.
I remember meeting the multiplicity of the practices proposed in our first semester with frustration. No matter how hard I tried, I could never pin down what we were aiming towards. I felt impatient, as if I wasn’t getting ‘good’ at anything specific, and this would manifest in my inability to explain to my family back in Italy what my degree was actually about. I see now how foundational that period was.
Student director: Leah Sok. Photo credit: Ben Wilkin
First year, like many courses, is a playground, in which you are encouraged to try things out, to question and re-discover what performing can mean, to expand the range of what you think is possible in a rehearsal room. At times, the range of performance styles might seem overly varied, even disconnected, but the real value isn’t just in learning each one – it’s about learning how to link them together to create a coherent picture, and that this process is driven by the practical answers you develop in response to the questions that arise.
This year, for example, I found myself having to radically shift my understanding of performance – rearranging and contextualising what I knew about the industry, about sustainability and about my own goals. To answer the questions that arose, I was encouraged to attend networking events, join scratch nights, reach out to venues and tackle funding applications. I still don’t have all the answers, and wouldn’t expect to have them yet! This will take me beyond my three years on the course. But whether it’s a class project or self initiated, whether it’s performing in a show, writing a manifesto or budgeting, it all feeds into the bigger picture of who you are becoming as a maker, performer and collaborator.
European Theatre Arts isn’t about fixed techniques being handed down to us. It’s about understanding the structure in which they are produced, as a practical answer to specific questions about the self, performance and its role in society. The transition into the industry is then a gradual focus on our present situation as artists, in which we shift from generalised questions about theatrical principles, towards contextualising these principles in the wider landscape in which they are produced, with which they interact and to which they can respond. As it always has been on this course, the process is the answer.