As I was going through boxes in my garage during in preparation for my recent move I came upon a box labeled “school papers” and if you are like me then I’m sure you too have such a box that has a thick layer of dust and has accompanied you from multiple locations in some capacity that box has maybe been with you longer than some friendships or relationships. After 17 years it was time open this box and after a few rems of documents I came across something special. My personal statement that I had wrote when I was applying for graduate school:
In naïve and even subliminal ways, I have always been drawn to the theatre. It is only in these last years of my undergraduate education that it has all coalesced in terms of my memories and my passion.
As a child, my family made an annual journey to “Murryʼs”–the local dinner theatre. Every August, we would all dress up, head out and go to see the seasonʼs opener which was the musical. Ever since then, theatre for me has been bound to family, to a special evening, to sharing a special story, and to celebrating being an audience. Now, when I have the opportunity to “make theatre,” it is still in the context of a family-of my peers and collaborators. We may be the ones telling the story but “coming together” is still at the heart of my experience.
Family trips were often centered on visits to theme parks. Early on I was drawn to the technology and to a medium that took me from the routine of my daily life to “Paris” or “China” or all the way to the stars. That “it had to be me” came with my first visit to Cirque du Soleil–La Nouba–at the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando. Spellbound by light and music and movement and the metaphor of the human figure in acrobatic flight, I grasped the connection between my fascination with the physics and the electronics of the “thing” and the imaginative flight that harkened back to the simple staging at Murryʼs…
Today, I read scripts and they are the maps to the trips in my mind. I travel in the company of a community and within a culture headed toward the abstract and the outlandish, to difference and discovery, and to the door that opens on the mind and the heart.
The last two years of my undergraduate program have proved very formative in terms of my opportunities and accomplishments. This period has also contributed to my intellectual maturation. I have moved from a fascination with the razzle of making theatre to a place where I have “something to say” and to an understanding that theatre is the proper form of expression for my ideas. It seems appropriate to act on this growth by narrowing my focus to include a similarly motivated company of my peers and to benefit from the instruction and mentoring of an expanded body of artists and teachers.
“Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder East:
Nightʼs candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.”
Romeo and Juliet
My career goal is to realize this eloquence in space–in color, and movement and time; to work toward this goal in the live theatre and especially in dance.
I have always had a big imagination. When I read a play it is easy for me to live within the characters and to begin to paint the world in which they live. Some of my first responses and images ultimately continue to resonate and remain important. A deeper analysis is aimed at trying to get behind the text in order to find the authorʼs original impulse. Similarly, I enjoy listening to other collaborators and their quest for the “guts” of the thing.
And, hopefully you will read the following as realistic rather than crass but I am also motivated by a desire to benefit from the halo effect of an CalArts education with exposure to a network of professionals and to the challenges provided by fellow students whose experiences have been broader than my own. CalArts has a vast range of material produced and the opportunity to dive into the sandbox and create a world with other artists is the main reason that I want to pursue a career in theatre.
As I re-read the writing of 23 year old Ryan and reflect on my career, now after a successful higher education experience at CalArts and 3 full gates of experience opening new theme parks I hope that he would feel proud and relieved that he was true to those words and while my focus has evolved beyond theater alone the threads of community building and collaboration continue to be the cornerstone of my process, even more so, now that I am embarking on this next chapter outside the corporate sphere.
I am beyond excited to join Mood and it’s even more special that two of the co-founders and many of my current and former colleagues and even current clients share roots with me that can trace all the way back to those years at CalArts. Next time you come across that dusty box of “school papers” I recommend that you spend some time going through it because if you feel stagnant or were like me and embarking on a huge life change and might need a boost it could hold the seeds of a past that you might have forgotten but have since grown into the blossoming trees of your present that held the record of your ideals for the future.