Introduction

…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living…

–Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, #4, translated by Stephen Mitchell

In the spring of 2020, I found this familiar and beloved passage from Rilke’s letters to the aspiring poet, named as “Mr. Kappus,” surfacing in my mind again and again. Each day, students wrote emails, text messages, and set up calls full of questions, uncertainty, and confusion in the early days of social distancing and what we now know would be a years-long pandemic. Students who had found their meaning, identity, and even purpose in how they served their community suddenly found themselves alone and isolated. I had no answers. None of us did. All I could do was invite them to join me as we “lived the questions.”

In particular, a few students with backgrounds in dance came to me with a mountain of time on their hands, most of whom had danced for 20-40 hours per week since before they had aged into the double digits. What would they do with the empty hours, lack of discipline, and vacant spaces that had once held such beauty? I felt these questions resonate with me as a musician who suddenly could only sing solos in my kitchen, unsure of whether my voice meant anything if it had been reduced to the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.

Together, we decided we would fill this time by stepping back from center stage and into a space where we might examine our lives and identities as performers from a distance. Who were we now, as dancers, musicians, actors, and artists? We invited one another to submit creative essays that explored these questions and shared them with one another in a small group reading. And in that space, we encountered the beauty and challenge we had been missing, albeit in a very different form. We began to call our group “Center Page: Performance and Character in Isolating Times.” The catharsis and encouragement was healing, and we were immediately inspired to broaden our prompts and invite other Wake Forest students to join our writing circles.

We circulated the following questions to students in theatre, dance, music, and the visual arts, seeking to offer them a new stage during this season of solitude when we might consider how all of our years of inspiration, auditions, rehearsal, and performance had shaped our character. And if you feel so moved, we invite you to consider these same questions even now in your own life—performer or not—as they have proven to evoke new insights time and again for those of us who have been sitting with them for a year:

• Describe a particular day of auditioning or rehearsing. How do you prepare? Where do you go? Who is with you? What are you seeing, hearing, feeling? What are the greatest challenges you face? What brings you a sense of triumph?
• In order to be doing this work, there are other things you have chosen not to do. What sacrifices have you made to get here? What led you to choose this? What obstacles or voices made it difficult to pursue? Was it worth it then? Is it now? How does this choice impact who you are today?
• What is your ultimate goal or purpose when you perform? What calls you to the stage, studio, or microphone again and again? And if your aspirations are dashed (perhaps by a pandemic or any number of setbacks), what is the meaning of the process you have engaged? How has it contributed to or detracted from your flourishing or that of others?

The response was both broad and deep. Students all over campus found themselves reflecting not only on their lives in the arts, but on their pursuits as scholars, caregivers, and leaders with whom these questions resonated. And while many submitted essays and found deep meaning in that, a core group of brilliant women wanted to offer more to each other and go deeper still.

Ten women committed to gathering online to engage in the practice of creative writing and clarifying their voices with the guidance of memoirist and harpist, Dr. April Stace (White Knuckle Love, 2020). With April’s support and intentionality, these student writers were able to rely on their substantial academic writing skills and expand them to use language in a new way that allowed for the expression and beauty they were missing in a season of social distancing. Through these writing circles, I witnessed new friendships emerge and deepen and heard new voices break through the noise of expectations and assumptions. Bolstered by their courage and community, I even found myself trying new forms of art and creativity, joining in the writing process alongside them.

As a musician, I have always preferred gigs that were not solitary but helped others find their voices too. I have regularly turned down concerts in pursuit of communal song or given up solos in favor of harmonies. Beautifully, in my work here at Wake Forest as the Director of Programming for the Program for Leadership and Character, I get to conduct qualitative research on how creativity and performance shape character and develop leadership skills while also helping students in the arts and beyond both lead and follow, speak and listen. I have seen defeated juniors shake off burdens and heal from wounds that allowed them to take on new identities and interests. I have sat with tearful first-years who weren’t sure they could ever belong here and then watched them grow into powerhouses of campus policy-making and student leadership. I have observed self-described “dilettantes” design new courses of study with their professors and students from small mountaintop towns become leaders of movements. I hear story after story of “imposter syndrome” from students who exude eloquence and poise and grow into public figures in our community. And it is my job to behold it all, which honestly, was starting to feel a bit selfish.

So we decided to take some of these stories and share them with the community in this publication, where others might have the chance to encounter the inspiration that sustains me daily as we all press on in a new world that is still in the throes of a pandemic. I am so excited to share this tiny sliver of the beauty I encounter in these students’ lives, though I wish you could have accompanied me in the numerous one-on-one editing sessions we had on the balconies of local coffee shops or the patio of the Leadership and Character offices in Starling Hall or the tiny Zoom rooms where we somehow found wells of communal meaning-making through masks or screens or whatever other barriers existed.

In these essays, we discover that auditions have been places where we can recognize our own power and competence (and sometimes lack thereof) while examining our own biases and tendencies. We see that rehearsals have been spaces where we habituate the capacities that become our default behaviors of resilience or empathy or courage that we integrate into our identities even after the curtain closes. We have learned humility through reflection on our mistakes and confidence through our encounters with beauty. And in the day-to-day of it all, we meet the people who become our castmates, bandmates, company, and friends who will hold us accountable and offer aid when things do not go as planned, when we need to improvise together because the world has shut down and we are all left “yes-anding” each other in hopes we can somehow keep this scene going another day.

It is in this community that we overcome our isolation and find the strength to “live the questions,” even when the script is thrown out and we are left making it up as we go. In fact, that moment of uncertainty is where the character of creativity comes alive.

Ann Phelps, Director of Programming for the Program for Leadership and Character, August 2021