I have a memory, incomplete and loosely formed, from my childhood, where I sat on the floor of my parents room, neck craned up at the old television.  I was watching a musical which I wouldn’t remember I had seen till several years later when I finally saw it on stage.  Vague images of the dancers and the set was all I carried for a time.  At ten I went to my first musical, a small production of Footloose put on by a sixth-grade class at my school.  After that night I knew I had to have that teacher so I too could be part of a musical.  Two years later I was granted my wish as an extra in Grease.  As preparation for our performance my teacher took our class to professional productions of the Lion King and other shows.  Over the years I went to more and more shows, read plays in my spare time, memorized monologues and lyrics.  While I waited with excitement to start high school where I could finally take theater classes I worked backstage for my sixth-grade teacher.  I learned the in’s and out’s of stage management and lighting, of how to handle performers and their props, how to transform the stage from a garden to a castle.  By the time  I finally took a real theater class it was very much a part of my identity.  In high school it only began to consume me more.  Lunches and free periods were spent in the theater room with my teacher and the senior students who had taken my friend and I under their wing.  By the time these students graduated my friend and I had taken up their place mentoring new students during class and at after school rehearsals.

There was no part of theater I didn’t enjoy.  Memorization came easy to me, accents presented a fun challenge.  I could never dance without specific instruction, and things always seemed to be scattered right until the curtains opened, but the satisfaction when the curtains closed made everything worthwhile.  Stepping onto the stage I could leave behind the identity I had constructed for my high school peers.  I could step into the character and present some aspect of myself with more honesty than in my day to day life, and no one would know how much closer this character was to the real me; they just saw a performance.

It was my intention to keep performing after high school.  We used to say in my family that my brother was the artist.  He could create beautiful imagery with a canvas or a camera.  I have never been artistic in the same way, but if you gave me a stage I could perform my art.  With my junior year things started to change.  At the prompting of a friend, I went to my first martial arts class.  I went to two nights of taekwondo and felt what I describe now as falling in love.  It was so outside my normal realm of activity that I felt painfully awkward and self-conscious, but passionately driven to mimic what I saw the others practicing.  My instructor was endlessly excited and encouraging, teaching exactly what I had no idea I had been seeking for self-defense and self-development, that I just had to keep going.  As time went on my body found that forms and details of techniques felt natural.  I no longer felt like an outsider.  I became part of a community to which I still refer to as my taekwondo family.

A year after I found a new love in the disciplined training of martial arts I had the opportunity to do my first real theater work outside of the high school environment.  I was in a small show in the city.  For a period of three months I devoted much of my time to this show and to the the theater company.  I helped to remodel the building, build the set, acquire props, enlist volunteers, and on and on.  Every night I drove into the city to nurture this growing theater company as they put on their first show.  Now, until this point there had been no conflict between what I called my two loves; theater and taekwondo.  For high school performances rehearsals fit in between school and taekwondo practice.  For this professional show the rehearsals ran during taekwondo.  So for three months I had to take a break from my training.

Never in my life had I been so miserable.  I was doing what I thought I loved so much, yet I found myself suddenly without an outlet, without a source to re-energize myself.  All of a sudden monologues and performances were dull instead of satisfying.  The director could no longer command my attention as well as my teacher could.  Stepping onto the stage no longer fulfilled my need to express myself, for now it felt like a new art in expression to perform my forms for my instructor.  My body ached for the chance to work out with my little family.  My mind suffered as I had no contact with this new love of mine who just a year before I had no awareness of.

When the show ended I couldn’t have been happier to walk away from the stage and onto the mats.  I had learned something.  I loved theater, I still love theater, but there is something I love more.  My path was altered when I was forced to see where my priorities lay.  There are many things I enjoy, that I view as important, but I have yet to find something more important to my mental, physical, and spiritual development as my practice in martial arts.  As my current sensei says, we practice to keep our sanity, so we practice all our lives.

I haven’t been in another performance, or taken another theater class.  Now I spend most my nights in one dojo or another, training and teaching.  My free time is no longer spent memorizing monologues, but memorizing the history of our lineage as I sit and listen for hours to my teachers.  I express myself now through the movements of my art as my teacher has passed it to me, blending his teachings with my interpretations.  My identity has shifted from a performance artist to that of a martial artist.  Theater was a hobby, my practice is a way to be.