Since my last post I completed one whole year of my PhD. program. I was fairly successful with all As but I also know that the real work is at hand in the Fall. I am signed up for 12 hours, which is technically considered an overload, just don't tell my brain that. There will be much reading but, as I told someone earlier this week I would much rather be reading all the time than feeling all the time.
This of course, was in reference to my decision that I would never want to get an MFA in acting. Not because I don't think it is a worth while experience but, you have to feel things ALL the time. When I cry I want it to be alone in my room with my face down in the pillow, not in a room with a whole bunch of sweaty people dressed in yoga pants. Half of the stuff I watch my MFA actor friends do I don't understand and the other half I am amazed by their physical and emotional strength.
Plus, I wonder how much of getting an MFA involves b.s.-ing your way through the feeling and emotions. I know that during certain points of my grad school years I have sat in a class room and b.s.ed my way through a seminar because I didn't do or didn't understand the assigned reading. Do actors do that to? Do you shake not because you feel it but because everyone else is feeling it?
I have taken a few movement workshops on biomechanics and viewpoints and it never failed that during those workshops I found my inner critic saying "What are you doing? You have no idea how look for a point on the floor and find it interesting. You are a big old phony! You are a floor point faker!"
This same kind of impostor syndrom happens with PhDs. as well except, instead of staring at a spot on the floor you are giving a paper in front of junior and senior scholars who were giving papers before you were born.
I guess in many ways going to grad school, no matter what degree you get, is full of similar stresses. I imagine that PhDs and MFAs alike get the polite smile and nod when you say you are in school for theatre.
