Tuesday’s Tea is a weekly blog post where we talk about discoveries we’ve made as emerging artists. 

THE POWER OF AN EMPTY STUDIO

To me, this is the safest place in the world, it’s my home, it’s one of the things I am continually missing or searching for. I know that probably sounds very odd, but hear me out.

As soon as you walk in, there is endless potential.

You can move without judgement. You can block all of the mirrors and be entirely with your thoughts. Or you have the option of dismissing all of your thoughts and overpowering them with physical energy. You can literally dance your thoughts away. If it was a bad day, a confusing lecture or even a good day. Good days make the most memorable dances (in my opinion) They are always filled with laughter, smiles and joy.

Going to an empty studio after a long day of classes is how I got through the day, and emotionally processed my education. For some context, I started exploring acting only 2 years before I was accepted into the BFA acting program.

The basic rundown of a general first year of studying acting (for those of you reading this who have may not have pursued it yet,) the struggles you can encounter consist of;
Self-Reflection (about yourself as well as who you are and want to strive to be as an artist,)
Emotional Discovery & Recall Work (which is done usually through a series of various acting techniques and exercises)

Doing all of that work to the best of your ability %100 of the time every day can result in an emotional overload – It’s only human. Your studying in recalling emotions and being able to portray a vast array of emotions isn’t an easy task. The main problem I had with this is growing up as a dancer, you are told to express emotion through your body. Not through your words or necessarily thoughts. The concept of exploring emotions intellectually was new to me, making it easy to be overwhelmed by.

At the end of the day, it could sometimes be challenging and “turn off” the work and go home and leave school at school. I would often feel so disconnected with myself. I would think I was walking around with a “new face.”

The best tool I could find to fix this feeling was dancing

At the end of every day staying at school, finding an empty studio and processes the work through my body. Allowing all of the intellectual investigations I did that day physically to filter through my body and create something new in the process. Dancing in an empty studio is how I maintained my drive and mentality and got reconnected with yourself.

My understanding of movement is, when you dance, you can feel yourself propelling into a different physical and mental state of being. You can witness the room around you, you can control the music and the movement. Or you can decide to control nothing at all and dance purely out of impulse and play music on shuffle.

The question now is how one can find an empty studio now

I’ve turned to wearing headphones and stretching in the most private room in my house that I can find. Which is not the same but similar enough to get the same quality. Or sometimes, I wake up at 3 am and dance around my kitchen, because it’s the only place in my house that is not overly cluttered.

The beautiful thing about movement is that it will always be interpretive. No matter what style, you still have the freedom of expression that you don’t have to share or explain to anyone.

A beautiful release.

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