in person
with John Markland
may 19th - july 7th
Something in you wants to break free.
You can feel it. Not always loudly, sometimes just a low persistent pressure, a restlessness that doesn’t go away no matter how much you accomplish, a sense that the life you’re living is slightly to the left of the one you’re supposed to. You’ve gotten good at managing it. Scheduling around it. Explaining it away. But it doesn’t leave. It can’t leave. Because it isn’t a want. It’s a vital sign. And you cannot negotiate with the thing that is keeping you alive.
Somewhere along the way you agreed to something. Not all at once, small concessions, each one reasonable, temporary, until the thing you came here to do became the thing you do when everything else is handled. Which is never. So… it waits. And the waiting hardens into identity. And one day you look up and realize you have built an entire life around the edges of the only thing that makes you feel like yourself.
That isn’t a scheduling problem. This is an identity problem. And that’s where this class begins.
Vital Signs is an eight-week, in-person class built around scene work, direct instruction, and the kind of honest excavation that most people spend a lifetime avoiding. Because the work here is not about time management or motivation or believing in yourself. It’s about locating who you honestly are, beneath who you’ve agreed to be, and rebuilding the internal hierarchy around that person instead of around the fears of not being that person.
Each week you will write. Journals, letters, unflinching self-examination outside the room that begins to loosen what’s been calcified (falsely surrendered to). The scenes are chosen deliberately, as mirrors, material selected to reflect the precise split you’re living, so that what’s true in you has nowhere to hide and every reason to surface. We’ll work in the body because compromise doesn’t only live in the mind. It lives in how you hold yourself, where you go small, where the line between safety and daring is drawn in your muscle and your breath. We find it there. We move it there.
The scene work is the laboratory. New beliefs don’t arrive as realizations, they come as experiences. You will test what you discover about yourself in the room, in front of people, in material that asks something real of you. Week by week what you uncover about your character becomes inseparable from what you uncover about yourself. That is not a side effect of this class. That is the point.
Here's what changes when acting stops being the thing you fit in and becomes the thing everything else is organized around. Confidence stops being something you have to manufacture and becomes something you simply carry, because you know what you stand for, and you are standing there. Discipline arrives not as force but as devotion, you stop having to make yourself do the work because you have finally decided the work is worth protecting. Joy returns. Not the relieved kind or the grateful kind but the deep, unguarded, cellular kind that comes from a life that is honestly yours. And your sense of self, the daily, walking-around, looking-in-the-mirror sense of who you are, begins to gather around something real and refuses to unfocus.
Your passion is not a luxury. It is not a hobby. It is not the thing you get to have when you’ve earned it or when the timing is right or when you’ve taken care of everything else first.
It is a vital sign. It is telling you something.
Listen.