Question 1: memorable experiences
Let's start with your experiences as an audience member...
Describe your most memorable experience as an audience member. What made it memorable?
posted by Adrienne @ 3:10 PM
Friday, December 17, 2004
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When I was a kid my mother took me to the circus, and I rode an elephant for the first time. I will never forget that because I'd never been so close to such a strange looking animal, and didn't realize how awful elephants smelled. They smell really bad, and if I think about it I can still recall the feeling of riding on the elephant's back and the rancid smell of dung, and me looking down to see this old morose woman pulling me along, behind her an incredibly long line of children waiting for what to me was a anti-climatic experience.
Is this the most memorable experience I have ever had as an audience member? Well, its a memory.
I don't think I have memorable experiences in the theatre. For one, thanks to theatre school, I am too busy scrutinizing everything to have an experience. But primarily, its because the vast majority of theatre I see is either aethetically unsatisfying, or it fails to transform me.
When I was a kid I became really obsessed with the movie Beaches. I loved that movie. I loved it because I really wanted to have a best friend, and looking back on it I think the movie helped me figure out what a friendship between two women might look like. Minus the Wind Beneath my Wings song.
I used to watch it over and over and over again, more than thirty times at least. At night in order to get to bed I would try and recall every single shot in the film, memorize all the lines, and sing all the songs as I lulled myself to sleep.
Well I'm not so proud of the example, for me that reaction is how I know I have been moved by something. I am desperate to retain every moment, every scene, every image, every breath. I retain it with a kind of desperation, because I equate the original experience with truth, and in my life I want to know truth.
Is that memorable?
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