Artist Statement

If someone were to ask me to describe myself, the first word to come out of my mouth would not be “artist.” Considering the fact that I am a theatre major, this might seem rather strange. But to me, it makes sense. The way I see it, there are many parts of me that make me an artist, but being an artist does not necessarily make me who I am. Being an artist is fulfilling. It allows me to take pleasure in the small things in life, and to appreciate every moment because our time on earth is finite. I cannot really explain how being an artist does this; it could be argued that any line of work or concentration can fulfill you. A surgeon might say that being able to save lives gives him or her the foresight to take nothing for granted. A teacher might say the same about shaping the young minds of tomorrow. I guess the best way I can explain how being an artist can fulfill you in a different way than any of these other professions is by highlighting the apparent distinction among them: when you are an artist, the work that you do is for yourself. The knowledge that you are doing what you love strictly because it fills your heart with joy is something that many people do not understand. In fact, most probably consider it selfish. Artists understand that they create their works of art (performances, paintings, sculptures, compositions, etc.) with the hope that they inspire or affect those who come to appreciate the art, but that the main goal in creating it is to please themselves. If Pablo Picasso completed every painting during his blue period and sold them all for thousands and thousands of dollars, but looked back on the whole experience and thought, “What a load of crap, those paintings were terrible,” he would not be fulfilled as an artist, no matter how much money he had made. The same goes for actors and singers. When I sing for an audience or perform in a play, if I am displeased with my performance, there is nothing anyone can say or do to convince me of my talent. This might make me sound like I am a hypercritical person, which actually is not untrue. But it works in the opposite direction as well – if I am proud of the work I have done, no matter how many people tell me they hated it, I will not be knocked down from my prideful pedestal. As a result, it could be said that artists are conceited or ignorant or just ridiculous. For some, this is probably accurate. But, for me in particular, this is the reason why being an artist is my essence, but it is not my self. I love it and I would be lost without it, but it does not define me. It reminds me everyday how precious life is. And for that, I will always be grateful.

Singing Under the Radar (A1)

“Folderol and fiddledy dee, fiddledy faddledy foodle.”
This is the nonsense that came out of my mouth as I pranced around the brightly lit stage with Cinderella. In my dark green gown with my eyes covered in emerald glitter, doing what I love more than anything else in the world, I should have been truly happy. Ecstatic, even. I should have adored the two hundred pairs of eyes that I couldn’t see, watching me in all my glory. But instead, I feared them. They were witnessing my rebirth in a way, but also one of the most horrifying experiences of my life: I was onstage and I was singing, but my voice emerged from my mouth sounding like it had just gone through a meat grinder. My audition for the Fairy Godmother had been perfect, as had the callback. This made sense to me because, after all, I had just emerged from a year of darkness, a year of vocal rest. And yet, here was my voice, fresh out of rehabilitation, sounding just as it had before the rehabilitation efforts had begun.
Sometimes there is grief that can result in only one of two outcomes: death or rebirth. When the doctor told me I would not sing until my eighteenth birthday, I felt this kind of grief; a grief I didn’t even know I could feel. A part of me felt like it was being ripped away, but this part had not been one I’d feared losing, but rather one I took for granted. I felt like Heathcliff in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, suddenly having realized what my life and soul were. The lengths I traveled to get them back helped me find my voice, quite literally, not to mention my air, and I have only to thank the teachers and doctors who destroyed my life once for ultimately restoring it to new heights.
I have always had a deep voice. Never have I been able to boast about my tinkling, soprano speaking voice, because my voice is more like a man’s than most other women I know. I thought little of it until I realized I could sing. Singing was a gift. I could cheer myself up and everyone around me all at the same time, and I was in love with that feeling. I sang everywhere I went: during class, at the grocery store, walking around the lake behind my neighborhood – everywhere. I can remember lying in my best friend’s hammock, surrounded by the huge trees of her backyard in 1998 in our little suburban town of Southlake, Texas, belting out tunes for all the mosquitoes and neighbors to hear. It came so naturally to me that I could never have imagined I was actually doing it wrong. But it wasn’t until sophomore year of high school that my ignorance of the finer techniques of my craft would finally catch up to me.
It was December of 2003. I wasn’t lying in my friend’s hammock anymore; now I had stages and microphones. I had moved back to Pleasanton, California, yet another little suburban town. Despite all the similarities, it seemed worlds away from Southlake. For one thing, life was much easier in Pleasanton for a half Catholic, half Jewish, liberal family than it had been in Texas. For another, our return to California signaled an important change in the realm of my singing career: recognition. Here, I was not only praised for my talent, I was rewarded for it. People knew me in middle school as “that girl who sang in the talent show” or “that girl who had the solo at the concert.” It was somehow satisfying to me to be referred to as such. I remember in particular my science teacher in seventh grade, Mr. Rose, who was a round older man with a bushy gray beard and wire-rimmed glasses. He forced the whole class to applaud for me the day after I sang in the talent show and then proceeded to hold me after class to tell me he thought I’d be the next Christina Aguilera. I thanked him and shook my head humbly at the ever eccentric teacher, but inside I was glowing. Finally, people knew what I could do. Even after I started high school, everyone still knew I could sing. I was in choir, performing in the musicals – singing at every possible opportunity. And I was immensely happy. Amidst all the singing, though, I knew something was different. I knew that I lost my voice more often and more easily than anyone else I knew, singers or not. I knew that it usually took me more than a week to recover from my periods of hoarseness. I knew that I talked too much, laughed too loudly, shouted at football games, and cleared my throat or coughed far more than necessary. What I didn’t know is that everyone else knew it, too, a thought which inspired in me not simply the frustration I felt at constantly losing my voice but also fear that my rampant happiness would end. It was that fateful December day in 2003 when my fears were confirmed.
The musical we were doing at my high school that spring was Grease. I had already been in the show once as Danny Zuko, a lead character and, yes, a male. I was excited about this show because I wanted to finally be able to wear a dress and sing the female parts of the score. So I auditioned in December with a piece from Cabaret, deciding for the first time to belt, which I had not been trained to do. Belting is more like speaking than traditional singing; for example, opera singers sing in what is known as “head voice,” whereas most musical theatre singers sing in “chest voice,” which is considered a belting range. I sang my sixteen to thirty-two bars and sat back down. After the rest of my group had sung, the directors announced that everyone could leave; everyone, except for me. I knew these directors, having worked with them the previous spring on How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, and they were quite fond of me, so I wasn’t nervous at all as I stood in front of them expectantly. Joanne was holding a little piece of paper as she told me that she and Mark had heard something in my voice while I was singing that worried them.
“I have the name of a fabulous Ear-Nose-and-Throat doctor [ENT] in San Francisco, and I have his information for you here,” she said, pressing the little piece of paper into my palm. “Please let us know what he says,” she continued, “because obviously we want you in the show but we want to make sure you’re healthy enough first.”
I nodded mutely and walked away from my heartless executioners, holding my sentence and trying to keep my face blank. What was happening? Could I wake up yet? I went home and told my parents what Joanne had said. They immediately called the ENT she had recommended. We couldn’t get an appointment until after callbacks, but we figured better late than never. At callbacks, I belted Rizzo’s song, the only character I had ever really wanted to be in Grease, but I watched the directors in horror as they looked at me with calmly resigned sadness and nodded knowingly in unison when I finished singing. So I was still asleep, then.
A week or so later I found myself in a sparsely decorated office at the University of California, San Francisco. It had rusting tools in frames on the walls which, I realized with a thrill of fear, were used by ENT’s about seventy years ago. They were so ugly and sharp looking! All I could do was hope the technology had improved. Once inside the white square of an examining room that felt claustrophobic without windows, I was introduced to Dr. Herbert Dedo, a world renowned ENT. After a five minute examination that hardly seemed long enough to make any decisions, the doctor, who was older, wearing a long white coat, and was a harsh and rude man, held no concern for my well-being as he delivered the blow: I would not sing until my eighteenth birthday. This was over two years away. I was numb as he told me I would now be examined by his speech pathologist, a Dr. Krzysztof Izdebski, which was too many consonants for my benumbed brain to process. Dr. Izdebski was a very tall man with long white hair, thick black glasses, and a booming voice that possessed an accent I decided was Russian. He turned out to be a much kinder person than Dr. Dedo; he basically told me to disregard everything Dr. Dedo had said, because Dr. Dedo was a grumpy old man with complete disregard for people’s feelings. I silently agreed.
Dr. Izdebski examined my vocal cords with a camera attached to a thin metal rod which was unceremoniously shoved down my throat while I was forced to try to speak and sing. I was actually able to watch my vocal cords in their act of sound production on a live feed from the camera to the TV in front of me. It was fascinating until I realized how different my vocal cords looked from the pictures on the walls around me. Mine were bright red and puffy, while healthy cords are the palest shade of pink, almost white, and look lean and sinuous (the top picture is healthy vocal cords). The left fold had a piece that jutted out a bit, which Dr. Izdebski described as a vocal node (the three vertical pictures all contain vocal cords with nodes). So although Dr. Izdebski reassured me that I would be singing long before I was able to vote, he also had his share of bad news. His diagnosis was that I had severely mistreated my vocal cords resulting in a node. I would not be able to sing for one year; a prescription of strict vocal rest. If the vocal rest did nothing to improve my voice, I would be facing surgery in a year’s time. Little did we know then that the singing was not the culprit here: my speaking voice had done the real damage. If anything, I realized later, I should have been unable to talk for a year, not sing. This realization only increased my depression over my inability to sing. I knew I could deal with not talking, but I worried about my ability to prevent myself from singing. It turned out that my worries were not unwarranted.
The day after Christmas that year, I left with a friend, Julie, and her family to spend a few days in Lake Tahoe, where I would hopefully learn how to snowboard (let’s put it this way: I ski now). Julie is an avid singer, like me. In fact, she didn’t like me in middle school because she saw me as her competition. So it follows that she would want to spend the entire four-hour drive singing. But the problem was that I did, too. She and her family knew I wasn’t supposed to be singing, but what were they going to do, tape my mouth shut? So Julie and I sang. Every now and then she would remind me that I wasn’t supposed to be joining in, but that didn’t stop me. Despite my frequent bouts of carsickness and the snow that was eventually swirling around us, we sang our way through the CDs that Julie had brought, including Jason Mraz and Matchbox 20. Even through my guilt, I was having so much fun annoying Julie’s parents from our pilot seats behind them with our constant song that I almost forgot about my condition. Almost.
From that moment on, I sunk into a pattern of what I have termed “singing under the radar.” I remained in my choir class as sort of a teacher’s assistant, but I would sing my mezzo soprano or first alto part with them under my breath as I sorted music in a corner or pretended to be doing homework. I sang quietly in the shower. I was cast in Grease as a non-singing part of the ensemble, but when I was positive no one could hear me over the rest of the cast, I sang the harmony parts to myself. When I got my license a few months later, I sang in my car constantly, because who was there to stop me? When I was home alone, I belted music from all of my favorite CDs, imagining myself auditioning for American Idol when I could sing freely again without feeling guilty for doing it. Despite the guilt, I was still happiest when I was singing. I could breathe then, whereas when I was surrounded by people, I had to be careful not to sing. It made me feel like I was holding my breath all the time. My life was like that of a drowning person’s; I had been unable to breathe for so long from not singing that the sudden exposure to air was a shock to my system. It was a good shock, but it came with consequences. Each time I had to return to Dr. Izdebski’s office (I never saw Dr. Dedo again), I am almost positive he could tell that I hadn’t been resting my voice, but he never reprimanded me. I had to work with his speech therapist, Lydia, who never wore makeup, dressed in flowing clothes, and had strangely manly hands, and I knew she knew I wasn’t employing her techniques outside the office. It wasn’t until I met a voice teacher named Lucy Beck that I understood the gravity of the task before me.
Lucy had been recommended to me by Dr. Izdebski. She was a small, mousy woman, but compact at the same time, as if someone had put one hand on her head, another on her feet, and pushed hard. She had a light southern twang and she flitted around me, trying to correct my posture and the places from which I was breathing. I noticed that she did not have the most beautiful singing voice I’d ever heard, but I knew she could help me regardless. She was trained to work with singers who had vocal damage. Obviously, I wasn’t supposed to be singing, and she knew that. She explained to me that she could teach me the right way to speak using singing techniques and that when I could sing again, I could reapply what I’d learned back to singing. And so it began. I met with Lucy for an hour or more at least once a week, on top of the monthly appointments with Dr. Izebski and the twice monthly meetings with Lydia. None of them lived close by, so you can imagine how much time I spent in the car during these months. Through Lucy, I was able to confirm my belief that my speaking voice was the problem that needed fixing, not my singing. But condemned to my yearlong sentence, we practiced breathing and resonance techniques, trying to force the pressure of speech from my vocal cords into my face and head, where I could use the resonance to produce healthier sounds. It took much patience on my part as well as Lucy’s for me to be able to do this consistently; however, it is something with which I still struggle to this day.
Over the next few months, the condition of my vocal cords improved. The change was not drastic, but it was enough that in November of 2004, fall of my junior year of high school, Dr. Izdebski lifted me out of the water from which I had been drowning, shook me, and told me I could sing again. When my eyes reopened, I was overjoyed. The world was so much brighter with my gift restored! But I had to be very strict with myself in order to maintain this pattern of vocal health. I understand now that this is something with which I will always struggle, because changing something about yourself that has remained constant for your entire life up to that point can’t be reversed overnight. But when you’re passionate enough about your goal, the change does happen. The beauty of this experience was that it made me realize that singing really is my life, my air, my light. If my voice had not been threatened by my teachers and doctors, I would not have become aware of the enormity of its presence in my life. Like Heathcliff, I, too, cannot live without my life or my soul. And like Heathcliff, also, it took death, or in my case, the threat of removal, for me to realize what my life and my soul are.

The Diabolical Dabblers

For our group project, The Diabolical Dabblers decided to be true to our group name and demonstrate or dabbling skills. All four of us have our main artistic concentration, but we also are talented in several other areas as well. For example, I act, sing, dance, draw, and write poetry/lyrics, among other things. We realized that we all shared this "dabbling" quality, and we wanted to express that through our project. But how? We thought it would be effective to express our artistic abilities through a medium which none of us considers to be our staple art form: photography. Using photographs, we portrayed our inspirations, our other talents, our interests, and our methods towards achieving our artistic goals. In this way, we leapt out of our comfort zones and used a relatively unfamiliar mode of expression to translate the ways we express ourselves on a regular basis. It was very interesting being involved in this process, because each of us accumulated our pictures on our own and then when we brought them together, we realized that each person's photos had their own themes and spoke to the class in different ways. I could tell that the class found the project intriguing because of the questions they asked and their reactions to the various pictures. My four photos (which I have included in this post) had the overarching theme of one of my inspirations, which is the setting sun. Three of them represent my main concentrations, acting, singing, and dancing, and they highlight the peace and freedom I experience while performing in these ways and the processes involved in such performances. Most of the other photos my group members included in our project did not feature themselves. This made my photos stand out, but it also illuminated the differences among all of our artistic abilities, what they mean to us, and how we go about doing them. This project was really eye-opening for me because it allowed me to see that creative expression not only comes in many forms, forms that you might not always expect, but also that there are an infinite number of places from which people can draw inspiration, and art can be appreciated all the more when you realize that no one is inspired by the exact same things or in the exact same way.

Review of The Beggar's Opera

Over the weekend I attended the School of Theatre’s production of The Beggar’s Opera. Having read the play for a class last semester, I was very excited to see it on its feet. My excitement was not unwarranted, as the performance was extremely good and I proceeded to tell everyone I saw during the remainder of the weekend to make sure they made time to see it.
From an acting standpoint, the huge amount of work the cast did in order to carry such demanding roles was evident in every scene. I thought the acting was tremendous, and I commend every single one of them for their performances. Only a couple of the actors seemed to have interpretations of their characters that did not make sense to me, but even so, these interpretations did not detract from the overall excellence of the show. Similarly, a couple of the actors’ accents were not as rich and convincing as the rest, but again, this did not take away from the performance as a whole.
From a directing standpoint, the play was staged brilliantly. It was so creatively done, using all kinds of levels facilitated by the architecture of the theatre and the set. The director very obviously extracted the most from his cast, considering the fact that all of them displayed their flexibility and personal strengths in the grotesque ways they moved, reacted, and even changed the set pieces and props. Maybe it was so amazing to me because I know the cast members as friends and colleagues, but the transformations they underwent were astonishing.
From a singing standpoint, I must admit that the men’s vocals outshined those of the women. HOWEVER, and that is a very big however, I do not think this is a result of lack of talent. I think it has much more to do with the fact that the women’s songs were about two octaves higher than necessary, which is a fault of the score itself and not of the actors’ abilities. It was obvious to me despite the ridiculous notes they were forced to hit that, had they been able to sing in a key audible to humans rather than just dogs, they would have had lovely musical theatre-style voices.
From a design standpoint, the use of a thrust stage (in which the audience sits on three sides of the action, leaving one wall for set) was a very wise decision. It allowed the cast to have a flow to their movement that looked different but still dynamic from all sides. The makeup was ingenious – I have to say that I have never seen teeth more effectively blacked out and dirtied than in this show, even in movies. The costumes, too, were appropriate for the period and contained the perfect amount of gaudiness to show distinctions among classes and professions.
I must say that my Thursday night was well spent attending such a wonderful production of The Beggar’s Opera. Congratulations to the cast and crew, you all did a marvelous job!

I am in a class called Theatre in the Community and the foundation of what we've been learning is centered on Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (TO). TO uses theatre to give oppressed members of society a voice, as well as a way to establish solutions to the problems faced by the oppressed. I have included a video of how TO comes to life in Mozambique. Also, here is the official TO website. This is a movement to which I would never have been exposed had I not taken this class. Without it, I would also never have developed this amazing new perspective that is a product of studying TO. TO is crucial to our society, especially now during the transition of power and the current state of our economy. I know it sounds cliche to say that theatre can actually change the world, just like it would to make that claim using any other art form, but in this case, I really believe it. For example, a couple of years ago my professor for this class helped out with a TO performance near campus that was held for several higher ups in USC's administration. The goal of the performance was to illuminate the fact that students at an apartment complex in the area were being mistreated by their landlord: there were roaches, leaks, and problems with the heating and cooling units, etc. The landlord always promised to fix these things, but the promises were empty. As in any other TO performance, the main actors performed several short scenes depicting the various ways in which the students of the apartment complex were suffering and how they were dealing with it. After the performance, members of the audience were asked to go onstage with the actors and recreate a scene if they had a solution to the problem that they thought would be more effective than the actors' version. In this way, everyone in the community is encouraged to participate and come up with ways to solve the problems of the oppressed people in a situation. As a result of this performance, USC administrators were informed of the issue and handled it accordingly. It is evident that this method could be used to solve problems of all shapes and sizes, from homelessness to poverty to hunger to domestic violence to racism to discrimination and back again. In fact, our class has been divided into groups according to certain areas of our society that we believe could be improved and, using Boal's concepts of TO, we are going to directly interact with members of the community and try to change some of the ways in which they are oppressed. My group, for example, will be working with students at a public high school who deal with poverty and racism on a daily basis. I wish that TO could be used on a grander scale so that larger of the world's issues could be brought to light and handled using this peaceful, cooperative method. My hope is that what starts with our class will continue to spread throughout South Central and, if we're lucky, to the world.