2.5 Not Just Dance

In Dance this week we learned about Georgian manners: how to stand, how to walk, how to bow, how to lead a lady (by the right hand so she doesn’t bump the sword!) and how to dance one of the dances; none other than ‘Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot’, Darcy and Lizzie’s dance in the BBC Pride & Prejudice. So fun!!

Also this week we decided on a scene to shoot later this term for our showreel. I paired with Sam, a brilliant actor from New Zealand, and we found a scene from a play called ‘Journey’s End’. It’s a drama about the First World War, set in a bunker in the trenches. I’m going to get to be a WWI officer, in the uniform and with the accent. I’m jolly excited!

I sometimes wonder if aiming and training for film first will limit my ability when working in theatre in the future. Veteran actress and Central alumnus Vanessa Redgrave, CBE said something very reassuring in an interview she gave at the school this week. She said she’d learnt more about acting for theatre by doing film because it shows if the truth is really there. So maybe I’m actually approaching things in a better order.

Markoesa invited me to see a dance show directed by her dad called ‘At Swim Two Boys’. I didn’t really know what it was about, though I suppose I could have guessed, and it’s not the kind of thing I would normally choose to go and see. It was a sort of homoerotic movement and musical performance, the two male performers dancing on a stage covered in a layer of water. So the audience in the front row (where we were sitting) got sufficiently soaked during the show to give new meaning to the word ‘immersive’! I had very mixed feelings about the whole experience, most of which I did not voice because I wanted time to think it through. I was impressed by the live music and careful choreography but my overwhelming response was one of deep sorrow for the brokenness of humanity. There was one point where the characters were lying in an embrace (‘spooning’ I believe it’s called) and we were offered an alternative perspective through a projected image from an overhead camera. Two men in what appeared to be an intimate, loving relationship and yet I was struck by the realisation that though this might be romance, it wasn’t love. This was furtive, exclusive and selfish. They’d turned their backs on the author of love, on God, He was being shut out and rejected, and somehow, on a really tiny scale, I felt His pain at our rebelliousness.

It should have come as no surprise that the story ended with one of the boys accidentally and tragically killing the other, and being left alone. How revealing that even people who don’t know the Lord and have no Biblical knowledge somehow still know that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Here art was reflecting reality, but, mercifully, not the whole truth. The picture God gives us of real love is one of open, all-inclusive selflessness: an empty cross on a hill. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16). Praise God for Jesus!