est performance on film gave an entirely differentperspective still. Some members of the faculty, some friends, and somestrangers came to our screening to see the fruit of our creative weekendin Swanton Ranch. We put a lot of time and practice into our scene,making sure that we had our lines, that they flowed right, that welooked right. We brought the scenes from just a text, clear through toperformance, and were now able to look back over the whole creativeprocess. In the theatre, however, just before our showing, our"performance" somehow seemed less serious to me. I was so afraid thatwe were all going to embarrass ourselves! The lines I said when I wasPhilostrate suddenly came back to me. No, my noble lord, it is not foryou. I have heard it over, and it is nothing, nothing in the world;unless you can find sport in their intents, extremely stretched andconned with cruel pain, to do you service. (Act V, Scene i, MND) Muchlike Bottom's company, we were good not because of any phenomenaltalent, but because we tried, because we were simple people trying to doShakespeare. Like them, we were not actors, but were still able toexperience the fullness of the creative process, bringing to fruitionour own comedic rendition of A Midsummer Night's Dream. ShakespeareI believe that it is not by accident that our play turned out asit did. It could not be but that Shakepeare intended for us, theactors, to relate to Bottom s company, to everyone who ever put on AMidsummer Night s Dream or any other production. This is part ofShakepeare s genius: to be able to write into the play a reflection ofourselves, to see our own creative processes being mirrored by those ofthe characters we coarsely attempt to play. Even now, when the actualperformance of our scene is over, I look back through the t!ext andstill see my group in it: when I read the word, Demetrius, I nolonger picture the old Demetrius I first imagined, or even those I sawin film. Now I see Trici...
