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RyanWyse
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Name: Joshua
Birthday: 10/4/1983
Gender: Male
Interests: God, theatre, hiking/climbing, relationships, good books, traveling, music...ya takin' notes?
Expertise: Wearing ridiculous clothing, procrastination, and falling asleep in coffee shops...and class...and well, everywhere.
Occupation: Student
Message: message me
AIM:  RyanWyse
Member Since:
9/7/2005
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| Hello, faithful few.
Just figured I'd do a quite update for all those people who still read Xanga on a regular basis and might be interested in hearing what's up next in my theatre life.
First of all, I just finished my first year of Grad School at LSU. So far, it's going very well. I think I have made some marked improvements over the course of the year and am looking forward to continuing the work in the future.
Some recent highlights -
- So far, I have been involved in 4 shows this year. First was 'The Last Days of Judas Iscariot' that I did in the first semester (I played Simon the Zealot and The Bailiff - Julius of Outer Mongolia). This semester I played Ben in 'The Four of Us', understudied Eric in 'Satellites', and played Dumaine in 'Love's Labours Lost'.
- Roger Rees (see earlier post) visited again a couple of weeks ago and saw 'Love's Labours Lost' and gave another workshop (I got to show him my Edgar monologue). He also performed an excellent one-man show of his own and hung out with the graduate students at a local restaurant afterwards.
- My sister and 2 of her college friends came to visit this last week! Great fun.
While the year here is done, I'm not coming home quite yet. The theatre department has offered a 2 week intensive in stage combat, in which I will be trained and certified in both unarmed and weapons (rapier, dagger) combat for the stage. We'll be training for two weeks straight, from 9am-5pm everyday.
AND...a more recent development is that a local theatre company, Renegade Shakespeare Company, will be staging the play 'Closer' by Patrick Marber and I have been cast as Dan (for those that saw the movie, this is Jude Law's character). I am very excited to do this role, as I think it is a great play (although admittedly, not always comfortable for an audience to watch)...but it's going to be a bit of a crunch as well, as we are staging the play DURING the 2 weeks that I'll be doing the combat training. Yep - only 2 weeks of rehearsal for a pretty long and difficult play. Right now, I'm actually taking a break from memorizing my lines to write this.
After 'Closer' and the combat training finish, I'll be sticking around Baton Rouge for another week and then heading to DISNEY in Florida! A friend in the program has a free place to stay there and tickets for a week to any of the Disney Parks, so I'm part of the group that's going. Can't wait. As for the rest of the summer, I'm going to be roadtripping around the country a bit and spending parts of June and July back in IN to see family and friends as well. My brother and I are planning to do some backpacking in Colorado in July/August and I'm trying to get out east to see some of my Pennsylvania and D.C. friends as well. And I may be looking to head up to Canada for a weekend if my cash holds out because there are a few shows at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival that I'm very interested in seeing.
Let me know where you'll be this summer and when - I'd love to see as many of you as possible!
Peace,
J.D. | | |
| Having Roger Rees here...was incredible. What an inspiration. What a down-to-earth and completely brilliant artist!
I actually felt a little ridiculous performing Iago for him...it felt a bit like showing off my chip shot to Tiger Woods. Still, he was so genuine and interested in the work and us as performers that he took that tension away. And he was actually very complimentary while offering incredibly honest and sharp criticism.
I'm already looking forward to working with him again in the spring. | | |
| So, I know that I've pretty much given up on posting things on Xanga...but every now and then I feel that it's a good idea to send big news to the world out there that still read after all this time and let you all know what's happening.
First, if you haven't heard yet, I spent the summer working with Huntington University as the Assistant Director and Company Manager for the summer tour of "Godspell". It was a great summer and I miss the friends that I made in that group. If you missed this chapter of the story, feel free to check out the website: www.huntington.edu/godspell
Second, after auditioning a lot last spring, I got accepted into a few different graduate programs and ended up choosing to attend Louisiana State University. I will be graduating in the spring of 2011 with my Master's of Fine Arts in Acting. And it seems that it will be a rigorous program...so I probably won't be able to return home except for Christmas break and possibly the summers (depending on where I get summer work). I would love to see any of you at Christmas that I can!
The first show that I will be doing here starts rehearsals in about 2 weeks - it is "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot". I will be playing the Bailiff and Simon the Zealot with an additional understudy role as well. In a month, I'll also be auditioning for "Satellites" and "Love's Labours Lost" at Swine Palace, which is an equity theatre connected to LSU.
And lastly, I'm getting the opportunity to work this weekend with ROGER REES. He's coming to do a couple of workshops with our graduate class. Those of you into theatre might know that Roger is a famous Shakespearean actor that worked at the RSC for years with people like Dame Judi Dench and Patrick Stewart. For those of you less familiar with some of his stage work, you might recognize him best as the Sheriff of Rottingham from "Men in Tights".
That's all for now!
Peace,
Joshua Ryan | | |
| "It must be a peace without victory...Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last." - Woodrow Wilson, 22 January 1917 Oh, God...let us learn from our past... | | |
| So, I'm finishing up The Republic and I just wanted to share something I came across that I think is a significant paradigm shift from how we, as Americans, tend to think regarding education. The basic idea is that the aim of education, according to Plato, is not "to put knowledge into the soul, but to put the right desires into the soul". Education is supposed to "fill the soul with a lust for truth, so that it desires to move past the visible world, into the intelligible, ultimately to the Form of the Good". I like to think that I've been developing this lust for truth over the past several years, but it's amazing how much we, as a culture, seem to have missed the point here. Thoughts? | | |
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