Practicing Craft
What does practicing your craft mean?
I suppose it can mean different things to different people. I would like to challenge the language and allow permission to claim the phrase fully.
You don’t need to wait to practice. You don’t need an audience to practice. If you are an artist, your craft is in continual metamorphosis and transformation. It might be REALIZED on stage, on set, with an audience, but you work out the details, often in solitude, in order to be ready for that particular point.
Language reveals. What language do you speak to yourself, speak out loud? It’s worth the observation in order to truly find out where you are and how are you engaging.
As an artist, our craft is influenced from BEYOND the stage. It is influenced from BEYOND the specificity of our realized craft.
What do you do when you aren’t practicing as it relates to your specific artistic pursuit? How is that practice of action, observation, integration influencing what you do when you then stretch the voice? Begin to embody a song or aria? a monologue? Pick up a paint brush? Put on your pointe shoes?
Practicing craft has so much subterranean depth that is never seen by anybody, but fully informs what you, the artist, DOES. It’s never seen, but it’s subliminally FELT. That practice needs nurturing from all directions!
If you think you aren’t practicing your craft, figure out what practice means; figure out what that craft actually is; what is informing your choices? What are you choosing to believe? What are you choosing to dismiss? Why?
If you NEED an audience, why? What does that do for the craft? Is it your craft that needs an audience? Or does it need you first?
There are no right or wrong answers here. Just the exploration. Just the discovery. Just the revealing. Just the exposing.
Some of these are subtle. Some of these are not.
Some of us revel in the practice and the exploration. Some of us crave the discovery in the rehearsal. Some of us embrace the audience and fully realized production. Some of us find the journey in all three.
Perhaps, right now, you aren’t “practicing” in what might be seen as a traditional way: you aren’t vocalizing, you aren’t stretching, you aren’t accessing the physicality of your instrument to make a place for your craft to reside.
Perhaps, right now, your artistic energy is being channeled into something else that is more subliminal. If you are an artistic spirit, there’s a very good chance that’s happening, even if you are unaware. Commit to the awareness. You might shock yourself in what it reveals!
All of that artistic energy still infuses and influences your craft. It doesn’t go away. It simply integrates into how your craft will respond over time. Latent or realized, that energy doesn’t disappear.
Perhaps, by staying present, and observing the details of what you might be taking for granted, will give you a fuller picture of where you are right now.
You the artist, you the human being, you the craftsperson, are practiced. To practice is action. Action is in motion. Motion can built momentum. Momentum can inspire. Inspiration can reach deeply in the soul of the artist to reveal more possibility. Possibility can create. Creating needs craft.
And so, permission to observe, to realize, to dig deep, to challenge, to be still and to settle in as you practice craft through so many facets of you. You do know that there are many facets of you, right?
May it create for you another discipline moving into the next, where it can be realized. Just don’t dismiss this magical time of possibility within your own transformation.
Practicing craft may have linear aspirations but it has timeless possibility in every breath and ah-ha moment.
Practice the possibility. Lean in and observe. Let the observation fuel the passion of why you are there in the first place.
I’m cheering from the cheap seats! Oh look! An audience!
With fondness & fierceness,
Susan
