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So up until last year, I was in an opera company. I could split my time with them and school, until transferring into this program to work on my master's. I'm very excited about my department! I like my new job! But oh, I miss the company so much. A day doesn't go by when I don't wish I was still singing a role. I wanted to work up to Cherubino, Prince Orlofsky, I was working on Che faro senza Euridice? for recital and I couldn't carry the role but the music - just the music-
You know the bit at the end of Captain Marvel when she looks down at earth and lets her powers arc over her? this one? that's being in voice. And I miss being in active vocal practice like a limb. A family friend is composing and I'm bringing my voice to that project, but full opera voice is like nothing else. 

But actually, lately I've been missing something else, just as much: I didn't enter the company as an actor and I don't identify as strongly as one, but to be on stage in recital versus in character can't be compared! Of course, there's the costuming and sets and props and other actors to work off of, which is an entire delight, but something even more special to me is also building and inhabiting a character. Whether you're named or ensemble and giving yourself a backstory, there's only way I've found to be the final trick of being comfortable in their skin: You have to love them.
For me, acting comes out of empathy, out of understanding their motivations for the choices they will make over the next few hours. In the ensemble with Luisa Miller, I was a messenger and attendant to the Count and his son, and ended up being the one to, specifically: attend Worm welcoming the Duchess, arm Rodolfo, bring Worm to Rodolfo for the attempted murder, and lead Rodolfo back down to the village so that he could kill Luisa. If a character begins and ends there, it's nothing but blocking. But to play someone who, too late, realises what he has enabled is so much more interesting! Before and after that few days, who would he be? That guilt doesn't make it into events that constitute the play, but I know it's there. I could be anyone onstage because I knew him down to the bone. And maybe I just read Ender's Game at too formative an age, but if Card got anything right ever, how can you understand everything about someone, their hopes and fears and flaws and pride, and not love them at the end of the day? 
I don't know. I'm not an Actor. There's a million ways to take a stage. But I can't be confident in a role if it's only a costume and set of stage directions. Acting comes out of understanding, for me, and a character coming together in you is an amazing feeling. It begins with an embrace. And I've been missing that more than usual, lately.

Aah, Luisa Miller was a good production! I don't care much for the staging of this version, but I studied the off of the 2007 Parma production, and miss it all!
It's a little odd visually, but such beautiful music!!