(Published in The Bison student newspaper Apr. 2021)
Flat on my back, I’m lying on the living room floor, eyes closed, picturing my body as slowly melting chocolate as I sink into the soft ground beneath me.
A YouTube audio file of rain and bullet sounds—the soundscape of my character’s life—plays on low volume in the background.
Everything inside me breathes a slow sigh of relief, opening up and unfurling—the sound the only thought in my mind.
It’s a strange way to spend a quarter of an hour.
~~~
As a piano student in high school, I knew what it was to love my instrument for its own sake.
I started practice and would have to be dragged away to do other things as I begged for one last chance to get that tricky scale section with all the accidental notes just right, to make sure that I was counting that triplet precisely perfect.
And it wasn’t just about the results.
My practice space was sanctuary for me—a place of peace where I could let go of everything, pore my heart out and lose myself in music for an hour—sometimes even longer.
Live performances were stressful by comparison.
I struggled learning to let go of worrying about the audience and allowing myself to find that same sheer love in the music, while I was onstage.
When I stopped taking piano lessons, I gradually lost touch with the way my musical rituals made me feel, the feeling of getting lost in a wave of sheer love like that.
~~~
I discovered theatre right around that same time and it was a new delight—one of energy, silliness and comradery. I thrived on the feeling of being part of a team making something so beautiful, or silly, or powerful, or human.
Every rehearsal was a joy.
Every class, a chance to put my growing acting skills to the test.
So, I started at OBU, became a theatre major, took as many acting courses as I could.
At each rehearsal and each class, I warmed up diligently: recited my tongue twisters, tried to wrap my head around what projecting even was, stretched, thought over all my character research work.
Despite this, I didn’t really understand the purpose of the warmups I was doing.
They were simply a series of motions I was going through and as soon as the production or class was over, I let go of them.
All my actions were geared at a specific performance or achievement and they dropped as soon as that next goal was achieved.
I wondered how I could stay—how I could grow—without constant community, and classes, and rehearsals, and performances.
I didn’t practice on my own because I didn’t know how.
Solo practice wasn’t a sanctuary, anymore. It was merely a tool toward my desired result.
~~~
Then music entered back into my life.
My junior year, I decided to tackle one of my biggest acting fears head on: my own voice.
I took a voice acting class and started private singing lessons that semester, in the hopes of finally figuring out what healthy vocal projection truly meant.
It was here that I started learning practice patterns that I could engage with on my own, without a specific assignment, or a performance agenda. I began to understand that my voice was a tool that I could hone for its own sake.
The following summer found me singing along with my favorite musical soundtrack, utterly unashamedly, as I drove all over a neighboring county for my first ever journalism internship.
I was learning to love my instrument, again.
~~~
Fast-forward to senior year and I’m lying flat on my back on a carpeted floor several nights a week, listening to YouTube audio files of distant warfare to get into character, warming up as I prepared for my senior capstone performance rehearsals.
Over the course of that semester, warming up slid into a comforting pattern.
Breathe
Just Breathe.
Be still and Breathe.
Let go.
Let go and Listen.
Let go of the performance anxiety and embrace the beauty of the story I have to share.
My voice during that performance was the most resonate, most confident, most assured it had ever been onstage.
~~~
After that, my warmups began to develop into what they are now—a form of practice that matters to me for its own sake, a ritual I can surrender everything to, a way to learn to love myself, body and voice, with the same acceptance that I loved my piano with.
I’m still not nearly as diligent about practicing regularly as I would like to be.
But I know now. I don’t need an audience’s applause or the pressure of deadlines. I can memorize beautiful speeches and learn to find relaxed readiness for their own sake.
I just have to give myself up to practicing my instrument:
Me.
Kendra Michal Johnson 