On top of our rehearsals, we all have to take one academic course here in Scotland which is either Religion or English. I chose the English class and was pleasantly surprised to learn that we had the opportunity to partake in masterclasses a few times a week. These master classes allow us to work with staff from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, including successful playwrights and working actors. The final project in our class is creating our own work where the end goal is to have a 10 minute scratch of our own solo show. This week we had the honor of working with Lynda Radley who wrote the Interference which was performed by the Pepperdine Scotland company in 2016. She gave us an insight into the life of a playwright and decided to work with us on our own work. After introducing each of our ideas she did a number of exercises with us. One exercise consisted of giving us a list of words and 14 seconds to write anything we could think of related to each word. Some very interesting associations came out of this exercise and it showed us that really all you need to do to write, is to start. No matter what you write down, just start somewhere and something is going to come out of it. We had 30 minutes left until the rest of the company from the Religion class would come to join us so Lynda decided to give us the rest of the time to write something to perform for them. It could be anything based on our idea- a piece of script, an outline of our idea, or even a full-on performance. After a very stressful 30 minutes, we set up a performance space and one by one presented our ideas. It was great- the feeling of putting your own work up and getting feedback for it was awesome. It was very helpful and guided us all in the right direction. Before this masterclass, no one really knew where they were going with this project and how to get their ideas into script form, but Lynda lead us to a place of confidence and understanding. All we had to do was start.
Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic
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