Fear, Creativity, and a Love of Acting
By Lucy Kramer
During the last semester of her senior year, History-Political Science major Grace Wade-Stein was looking to take classes like Acting 1, an art she had been interested in but had never pursued. She did not feel like acting was “her,” even when the class rolled around and she began actually acting. Her self-perception did not change simply by joining the class. “I felt an inability to access the space of being an actor or wrap my head around that mindset.”
What she had been doing for the past four years was writing History-Political Science papers. Asking the right questions to better understand a problem was something that Grace constantly employed intellectually. So, for her acting class, Grace began asking others one question: “What do you love about acting?” She asked a panel full of professional performers, interviewed close friends who are pursuing acting, and texted strangers who had an interest in the activity—people who act in any capacity.
The question is deceptively simple. After a performance of Aubergine at UCCS, Grace stayed for the artist panel discussion. She asked her question, but many on the panel misinterpreted her question as asking for advice on how to act or how to overcome fear. But Grace already had her method to overcome fear: asking the question of why people love to act. “I am a person who tries to combat anxiety with information.” Exposure therapy is a method Grace has used with anxiety previously. Here, she designed her own exposure therapy; the overarching exposure was the acting class. Each conversation was an exposure.
Her question starts from the assumption that the person does love acting. By asking the question of why they do, she hoped to uncover the way people give themselves over fully to craft and use that in her own ability to act. The process of asking this question and writing it in her notebook was a way of testing this hypothesis.
First, she jotted down responses in her notebook without names attached. It was only after the class that she turned the responses in her notebook into a visual display. Did she read her display for reference? When I asked about this, she said that the process of asking and writing these responses allowed her to internalize the idea—acting is joyful. Anonymizing the quotes allowed Grace to imagine herself in a positive relationship with acting. It was a way to actively reform how she thought about acting in relationship to herself. “I also simply enjoyed the class more,” she said.
The last thing that Grace mentioned was how grateful she was for each of the various actors with whom she connected in the process. This project underscored the power of communication. Even if it was personal, even if they didn’t understand why she was asking, people were still willing to help. Through her persistent willingness to ask, Grace was granted access to the resources of each actor’s lived experience, emotion, and community.
