Pre-Finals Week or Burnout

Our final week of class was a positive experience to leave on. I think that we are all burned out, that we are all feeling the slow pull of self preservation as a priority, and that we all are feeling a little guilty and a little sheepish about that. At least, I am. I've been rather spoiled and selfish the last two weeks out of end-of-semester stress and nerves. Even though I know to breathe in clean positivity through the top of my head, I still get caught up in the minutia, the petty stuff. 

Playing games was actually extremely rejuvenating. I've never felt comfortable enough to do improv work like that--usually, I'm absolutely terrified of being somehow not enough or not right. When it's comfortable, it turns out, it's a blast! It's also kind of the next step in the image evolution game where one person presents an image that the other person changes by stepping into it back and forth. The Freeze game that Alex led became almost a dynamized, Stop and Think version of that Image game. 

Exploring what we wanted to be and what we never wanted to be was very interesting and very fun, especially gaining that kind of insight into our classmates. Something about it became...easy. It was like, for a few days, we were sort of released from one another. While we were still cautious to not offend anyone, free play was allowed. We were not ourselves for most of the games, so anything we said or did was part of the world of the game. It was nice to take a break from being busy, scared, anxious people to be just...big kids. It was nice to set aside the mantle of the stressed-out grad student and just....play. 

I also feel like I picked up a few tips on teaching acting from those games. I now feel comfortable in leading a game of Freeze--I would totally use that in a class like 1400. We could have a blast! 

Thank you for allowing us to lay down our exhausted, battered little spirits for a while to play. I know it may not have been the initial plan, but I don't think any of us were strong enough or selfless enough to pull through a Rainbow session no matter how much we wanted to. I think if we had tried, it would have ended up being a less productive, resentful situation. So thank you, Dr. B, for letting us tell you our limits.