Follow your dreams.
Believe in yourself.
Do what makes you happy.
The difficult part of following this advice is knowing what your dreams are, who you are, and what will make you happy. For me, all of these things seem extremely variable and somewhat dependent on other things. Having work makes me happy because there are time when I don't. Spending time with my family makes me happy when I have additional things to do. I become restless easily and thus need a variety of projects and, as I like the call them... adventures.
Still, I continue to look for that one thing I am supposed to dedicate myself to. I was told by one of the theatre practitioners that I admire most that I could be great at any of the things I had listed to her if I focused on one. So, here I am, still flipping and flopping around, looking for The One.
Today I realized another reason why DSM wasn't right for me and why theatre management might be wrong for me altogether... Name Dropping.
I don't know names and I don't feel bad about it. I know why they're important... they bring in a lot of people, but I don't want the excitement of names to overshadow the excitement for the story. I visit Playbill every day, but for the jobs, not for the names so I rarely know who is starring in what. As far as management or producing go... I want to use organizational systems to make efficient and effective environments in which purposeful art is be created. I don't know Betty or Susan or Joshua or Gerrard or.. whomever and they aren't what is important to me. I do care about how the story is told, so they matter in that respect. If Susan is the best person to tell the story... fabulous! I hope the director casts her.
In the long run this may mean I'm not meant to be in commercial theater in the US. I'll hold out hope that more purposeful theatre will enter that sector in time, but right now, I may need to concentrate my organizational self elsewhere. After all, I'm happy to put together lights for anyone, but when it comes to filing and answering phone calls for most of a 40 hour week, I can only happily do that for a project that has passion behind it. I also have to find the space in which I'm not surrounded by people who will gasp in disappointment when I don't recognize the first three actors' names. It wears me out to have my theatre practitioner identity consistently questioned because I don't know so-and-so... and I'd rather exert that energy they exhaust out of me teaching eighth graders what it means to have an objective.
But first, I should probably figure out my own.
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