Week 50/2025: No particular order
Week of 8 December 2025
I was back at work this week after being sick last week, and my main focus was on preparing for my acting class performance on Sunday.
This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
No particular order
This is my third year of doing acting classes and my second year with React Drama School. (If you want to read about how it all started, I wrote about it in 2023.)
I changed classes last year because my 2023 class didn’t go ahead. The school I’m in now runs on a term by term basis. Second and fourth terms are performance terms, which means we spend those terms preparing a place to perform.
This is great because the main reason most people (I imagine) do acting classes is so they can perform in some capacity.
Ten weeks, I have to tell you, is not a long time to put on a play when you only have one two-hour class a week to rehearse. Obviously, there’s a significant commitment outside class to learning the lines, but you also need to practice performing the scenes, responding to the other actors, figuring out where you want to be standing and where and when to move. And what to do with your hands. (Trust me, that’s complicated.)
So, it’s pretty full-on leading up to the performance. Especially in the last couple of weeks when it all starts to come together and you realise there are thees two or three lines that you just CANNOT remember, or a cue that you miss EVERY TIME.
It’s also around this time that lines I think I know perfectly, and can perform well outside class, disappear from my head the moment I begin to rehearse in front of the class.
But, onwards.
Rehearsals
On Wednesday we had our final class and we ran through the whole play one final time, spent some time making sure we knew our lines for the third act (which was very short) and ran that again. Then our teacher, Andrew, sent us home with instructions to practice our cues and to minimise the gaps between lines. A lot of the lines had people cutting other people off, so we had to focus on that.
On Friday we had what I think would roughly be called a tech run in the theatre, where we went through the transitions between scenes, the sound effects, and the bits where there were projections on the screen. And that was it until the performance on Sunday.
The play
The play was called No Particular Order, written by Joel Tan. It’s about what ordinary people do in response to a dictator coming to power. The first act is set in the present day, the second act after the end of the war, 30 years later, and the third act is in a spaceship 300 years later.
None of the scenes are directly connected. They’re short scenes, each having between one and four people. The characters include colleagues, a married couple, soldiers, protestors, artists, writers, and parents and a child. There’s possible connections between some of the people in the first act and some of the people in the second act, but this isn’t definitively stated anywhere as far as I know.
It was an interesting play, and suitable for the large class we had. It was originally written to be performed by four actors, but it worked well with our class too. Almost everyone had a role in each act, so we all got three scenes to work with and to develop characters for.
That’s some of the fun work. Who is this mother, who stops to plant the bulbs before fleeing for her life in this new authoritarian regime, and what has her son done? Is he responsible for his parents having to flee? Did he survive? What is her relationship with her husband like? Where are they fleeing to? Who’s coming to pick them up?
The performance
Sunday came and I was pretty chilled about it all. We were one of the last performances of the day (ten classes were performing all up) so I went over my lines a few more times before I went to the theatre. We had some time before the show to run through our lines with our scene partners. I ran through the lines of both my scenes and with the second one, we got to the point where we felt like we were messing it up rather than making any more progress so we stopped.
We just had to trust ourselves.
Reflecting back now, I think that’s maybe a bigger deal than I’d thought. Trusting myself: Trusting that I’d done the work, that I knew my lines, that I knew where I was and I knew what I wanted from the other character. Easier said than done when, as soon as I got into the theatre space and it got closer and closer to my first scene, I started getting really nervous. Really nervous. By the time I got on stage, I’d forgotten all the work I’d done to ground myself and put myself in place.
It’s all a blur after that. I know I forgot a line in each scene—not the ones I was struggling with—I know I sat down in the wrong place, and I know I forgot to be present. I wasn’t in the garden that I’d worked so hard to create. I was in the theatre.
But still, it went well and once I got over the nerves (which took about half of each scene), I relaxed and loved performing. The show was the end goal all term. All year really. And I did it. We all did it!
Thanks to everyone in the class who worked so hard this term, to Andrew for his support and coaching, and to the tech team there on the day. And to everyone who came out to watch us.
It seems weird now it’s all over. One show, a couple of scenes, and that’s it. Until next year.
Habit tracker
Existing habits
- Go outside first thing (7 days): 7/7
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 7/7
- Hip exercises (5 days): 5/5
- Walk (7 days): 5/7
- Carry a notebook with me when I walk (5 days): 4/5
- Thinking time (4 days): 1
- Mid-day journalling (7 days): 0/7
- 9.30 shutdown & dim lights (6 days): 0/6
- Evening routine (6 days): 5/6
New habits
- Set timer for morning planning (5 days): 0/5
- Work shutdown (5 days): 0/5
- Days out of 30 I have got up at the alarm: 6/7
Summary of the week
Some positive things
I wrote a blog post about going back to uni this year on my Substack. That’s my writing blog, which I get excited about, post a few things and then forget about again. I’m going to try and update it more often.
I went to see Shrek the Musical at Taroona High School. It was great!
It brought back so many memories of watching Shrek with Kramstable when he was little. He loved that movie.
This week I learned
I learned how to delete a tool from the toolbar in Photoshop (Edit > Tools) and I deleted the ‘Generate Image’ tool because I do not want that in my workspace.
Pedagogy is the teaching of children, or dependent personalities. Andragogy is the facilitation learning for adults, who are self-directed learners. Heutagogy is the management of learning for self-managed learners.
I also learned about German health cults of the 1890s. The reason for this may become apparent some time next year.
This week I noticed
One of the chickens laid an egg under the tree. That was random.
The baby currawong I could hear last week is still around. This time I saw it.
What’s making me think?
I would like to remind correspondents to the local paper that they need to be clear what they are talking about when they complain about e-bikes.
My e-bike is powered by me pedaling it and I get ‘pedal assist’ from a battery to maintain my speed. The amount of assist and speed I get depends on my settings, but the battery can never power my bike above 25 km/h. If I go faster than that, it’s all me (or a downward slope).
This is entirely legal.
The Tasmanian vehicle standards allow
- A bicycle primarily propelled through pedaling with an auxiliary motor capable of generating no more than 200 watts.
- An electrically power-assisted bicycle (EPAC) with a maximum continuous rated power of 250 watts where the power assistance:
- is progressively reduced as the travel speed increases above 6 km/h
- is cut off when a speed of 25 km/h is reached, or the cyclist is not pedaling and the travel speed exceeds 6 km/h.
E-bikes that meet these requirements do not need to be registered and riders do not need to be licensed. The road rules for bicycles apply to these categories of e-bikes.
Bikes with petrol-powered motors of no more than than 200 watts that are primarily propelled through pedaling are also legal. But bikes that are converted into “e-bikes” that either have a motor exceeding 200 watts and/or can be propelled by the motor alone without the rider pedaling are not legal and must not be ridden on public roads.
They are two very different things. One is legal. One is not. When you write to the paper to complain, you need to be clear which type of bike you’re talking about.
And while we’re talking about complaints to the paper, I have no argument that some bike riders break the road rules. Some do dangerous things. So do some drivers.
So do some pedestrians.
Reading
- William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, a New Hope by Ian Doescher
- The Longest Climb by Paul Pritchard
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
Watching
- Shrek The Musical by Taroona High School
- Resident Alien
- Doctor Who ‘Galaxy Four’
Listening
- Shrek The Musical Original Broadway Cast Recording
About The Author
