Let me take a minute, just sit right there...

...I’ll tell you why I started a blog called Reactions. Yeah, I reverse-Bel-Air’d* you.

An overriding theme of my posts so far has been my current unwanted houseguest and life partner – Unemployement. It is often seen as a necessary part of the early stages of an acting career – the cliché has it coupled with waiting tables, and as usual the cliché is drawn from the truth. 

My challenge lately has been to fill my time productively and keep my creative muscles active. There are only so many Shakespearean monologues you can learn for the sake of learning something new before your brain becomes Elizabethan mush. So I’ve challenged myself to write – at least once a week, hopefully more if the mood takes me.

And the things I write will be Reactions to the world around me – to my experiences, my industry, my history and my future. There is an adage in my field that all acting is reacting – mostly because this is true for all life. All are actions are reactions, conscious or otherwise, to external influence. 

The title actually came to me a few months ago when, after becoming particularly incensed by an opinion piece in the newspaper concerning a mainstage Melbourne theatre company, I sat down to write a response. 2 hours later I hadn’t come close to making a sensible point, just 3 pages of vitriol, so I deleted the whole damn thing.

I realised that all I was doing was reacting without thought, just spewing forth the rage that consumed me without articulating why I felt so angry. And I remembered the one rule Paul Nelson has for his excellent collaborative blog Why I Adore...– no negativity. 

In any given conversation with a colleague from the arts the chances are high that the talk becomes more about what’s wrong than what’s right – particularly if one or both of us are unemployed. It’s always easier to focus on the down than aim for the up, but how can that ever create a new perspective?

To change the way things are, to improve the situation both personally and within the greater Australian industry, every conversation and thought and comment and blog post needs to contribute something new to the conversation. The same old conversation gets the same old result, and I want to change the result. 

If anyone comes across this, if anyone reads what I’ve written and has a reaction, add something to the conversation. Let’s find a new result. 

*To learn more of the Reverse Bel-Air, look here.