To Performing, From Me
Written By: Amy Li
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How did it begin?
Although still not certain to the answer to such a simple question, one thing is for certain and that is that I love to act. Why I do, I don’t know, but one of my earliest memories is standing on an imagined stage, pretending to be in a play with my parents in the audience.
I also loved to dress up and pose for pictures, as well as act out scenes from my favorite books. Merely acting in general brought me so much joy whether it was just voice acting while reading a story outloud or actual acting in front of a camera.
In elementary school I auditioned for every play and every main role in each play, my efforts culminating in three roles in a play about the Revolutionary War. In middle school, without any sort of hesitation, I signed up for the Drama and Acting electives for both seventh and eighth grade, determined to make a name for myself on the stage, albeit a simple school one. Even though our class didn’t have a play for seventh grade, the next year we did and I, bursting with pride, marched home with the script book in my hand, telling everyone in my house that I had gotten a supporting role in the play and had quite a bit of lines to memorize. I was so proud and, again, so set on making myself “famous”, that I was the first in my class to be off-book, and one of the first to receive a shout-out from my acting teacher for outstanding performance. I was ecstatic.
In ninth grade I enrolled in an acting class at school, and in tenth grade I participated in the making of a film – my first film on camera! And although it was only a short film, I couldn't help but be filled with joy at the thought that I had been in a film.
Acting wasn’t just a sort of hobby for me, however. It also helped me study. Since middle school when my English teachers began to assign me Shakespeare’s plays, I have used acting to more fully enjoy and appreciate the plays. If I was having a hard time understanding the play or if I did not find it interesting, I would act the play out to myself, trying to understand the characters and the situation to give a more accurate portrayal, which ended up giving me a much richer understanding than if I had just read the play.
Despite all my experiences with acting, though, I’m still not quite sure why I love acting so much. Maybe it’s the applause when taking my bow on stage or the pride when I see that I could get into character and create a working plot or maybe the leftovers from when I was small and like to play dress-up and pretend to be my favorite characters from the movies I had watched and books I had read.
Whatever it may be, acting has and will always be a major part of my life. It has become something that is both so demanding yet so rewarding.
