Many people ask, how can theatre affect your life? How can it help you in everyday situations?
Well, here are just a few ways it can:
1. Theatre people are hard workers!
It's what we do. We sign up for long hours and hard work. A typical tour day is unloading a show, building the set, programming lights, sound, preparing props and costumes, performing the show, and then packing it all back up at the end of the night. A typical tour day is approximately a 17-19 hour shift. Lifting heavy equipment, and dealing with sweaty clothes and broken props we must fix is nothing to us; it’s what we live for.
I love waking up early every morning for class, going to the shops immediately after, having a quick dinner break before going to rehearsal and then not getting home until hours later! 12 hour days are the norm in theatre. It’s fun to me. When people ask me nowadays, “are you ready for a little hard work?” my response is, "You have no idea."
2. Theatre brings out your best people skills.
One of the major needs in the industry is communication. If you cannot properly communicate with others, you need to find another career path. Our industry has the best people skills because of how well we work together and how close we get. We are all one big family through every show. We respect each other and have a wonderful time. Another huge part of communication is working with those you don't like. If you don’t like someone, you still have to grow up and work with them.
In theatre we do it the best. If there is someone that we don’t like then we suck it up and act like adults and continue to work hard and do our jobs to the best of our ability and the majority of the time, the situations resolve themselves.
3: We are better at public speaking than most.
We are doing it so often, it's second nature. A few examples of public speaking in theatre are production meetings, safety briefings, and performances. We are prepared at any given time to make announcements and talk to new people we've never met before.
4: We provide better reactions to situations.
This means we take the time to quickly process something and then come up with a wonderful solution. Instead of jumping the gun in any situation, we put our brain in drive and our actions in park and solve the problem quickly and efficiently.
5: We know about the hardships in life.
Because of the characters we interact with every day and the loads and loads of research that go into looking at one single character, we know about a lot of different situations. We can also provide tons of helpful advice! You would be surprised by the lengths actors will go to in order to dive into their characters lives.
