Celebrating International Friendship Day

For anyone involved in creative events or activities, you always know you are going to be spending a lot of time with the people you are working with. 

My experience has been in the world of musical theatre and quite often you are coming together as a bunch of volunteers who love to dance, sing, act and want to have fun.

Musical theatre productions in a nutshell require rehearsal time where you learn and start to retain all of the dancing, singing and acting. You then go from retaining it all to perfecting it all, which consists of countless hours of more rehearsals, cleaning and detailing. And the last piece of the puzzle is pulling it all together on stage with set, props, costumes, hair, makeup, sound, lighting… I mean, the list truly goes on.

While the audience sees a polished product, you have been spending upwards of 25 hours a week in rehearsals with people for 3 months, along with countless hours of revising in your own time, while also balancing life at home and often full-time jobs.

This experience of learning something new from scratch, rehearsing it and pulling it all together into a polished performance is one of sweat and tears, but along the way, true friendships are made, and this is part of the process that truly is the greatest.

To honour International Friendship Day (30th of July), I thought I would show how friendships created through creativity are truly special.

When you are working with each other so closely and spending most of your free time together for 3 months, it is normal that you go through real-life situations. Everything from the good to the bad and everything in between. 

These people are often the first to check in on you and make sure you are ok. Or to be an ear that will listen to the complexities of life while also understanding the demand on your time, as they are living this too. They are the people who are also awake at 1am because they are struggling to come down off an adrenaline rush after performing, or they know how your body aches after rehearsal and how something as simple as reaching for your water bottle hurts.

They are the ones that, outside of rehearsals or shows, will become your most called or messaged people and become your biggest cheerleaders in other projects you undertake.

Sometimes, they are people that you may not talk to for years but when you do, everything is the exact same. They are still friendships that you cherish and have a special place in your life.

For me, these friendships are a true reflection of how experiences bring you together. And not all experiences are the same. Some a beautiful and values aligned and others are more tense and difficult to navigate, but it is the people you meet through them that truly get you through.

I have been extremely lucky in my life to have some of the most incredible people enter my life through the world of musical theatre and many of whom, I can hand on heart say I can’t imagine my life without.

So to all of those friendships built through creative experiences, you are truly a special part in a person’s life!

Written by: Alexis Holmes, Creative Waikato team member