Two; a trail of thoughts

So time for entry number 2! If I’m honest I planned to do this post a few days ago and to be posting another today but my life seems to only keep getting busier and time has gotten away from me, but here I am now! As I’d planned for more than one blog so far I think I’m going to take the opportunity I have now while I’m writing this blog to collate my thoughts and write one longer post. 

So where to start. I’d like to round of my thoughts by talking about the module handbook. I definitely need to have another read (and probably never stop reading it) to keep my ideas coming and fully understand what it is I am doing or heading to do; that being said I have quite a lot of annotations so far and although the lenses of thought are tricky at times they’re already opening my mind to new ways of thinking about my practice that I may not have yet.  An example of this would be the theories of different types of learning. While I am aware of the ways in which we learn I had never considered how the style in which one prefers to learn can be effected by the practice they are doing, and more so be limited to the practice they are doing. When reading this section of the module I realised that drama school training lends itself much more to one way of thinking and learning than the other and if the students preferred learning habits don’t fit that, it may well cause more stress and pressure to the class. This theory also opens up the age old debate of wether creativity and creative practices are just as structured and academic as those subjects that we perceive to be “academic”, especially in regards to musical theatre; where even though we are encouraged to think creatively, the structure and discipline is comparable to the military at times 😂. Just something I would definitely like to further my thoughts on over the coming weeks. 

The second thing I would like to discuss on this blog is both a stream of thoughts I’ve had over the past few weeks as well as a continuation of yesterday’s writing class. I attended the academic writing class yesterday in order to remind myself and check in with myself in terms of writing essays and formal papers. It’s not a task I’m very confident in as I am open to the fact that I have dyslexia and it takes a little longer for me to express myself with clarity (in terms of writing) than others. The class was good and reminded me that I should have more confidence in writing than I give myself credit for. That being said I know it can be an area of struggle for me so I will keep checking in through these blogs! We did an exercise in the class where we tried free writing for 10 minutes. The topic I ended up talking about was social media and the internets effect on performers. Circling back to the start of this paragraph, this is the topic that I have been actively thinking about for weeks and have been meaning to write about in the blogs. I’ve been aware for a long time (as I think anyone who has an online persona is) of cancel culture and how that can so negatively effect young and upcoming performers. It’s a grey area as obviously it’s important to educate people and inform people if they have said something out of turn however I also believe that we are all humans who are constantly growing, changing and making mistakes and we as a culture should not be using our online power to ruin peoples careers before they’ve even started. I think that there’s a huge level of stress being put on individuals to be perfect online wether that being from their image to their personality; and this stress and pressure is only added to when you’re in a career that relies hugely on social media. It’s no secret that casting teams, fans, journalists, to name a few, will all check a performers social media - I mean does it really matter how many followers i have if I’m a good enough singer for the show? (Unfortunately the answer is yes; but I’ll get onto that next time) This is a topic I could talk about for hours and go off on many tangents about so I’ll leave that for another blog post! 

I am now realising that I have written a lot for one post and even though I have more to say I will keep it for another time as I did not intent to write a miniature essay tonight ahhaha. Hopefully my continued thought will urge me to post very soon! Until next time, thanks for reading! 

T D