Early spring, 2020.
I was a first-year acting student, preparing for a student theatre premiere that was less than a week away.
Then COVID hit.
Lithuania entered its first lockdown. The school closed. The theatre closed. The director said, “my hands are tied.”
Nobody knew for how long.
The expectation was simple: stay home and wait.
But there was one colleague from theatre I often trained movement with. Earlier that year we had started exploring the basics together and got hooked.
Two-person meetings were still allowed.
So I suggested: let’s meet and train.
We met once.
Then again.
Then again.
Two or three times a week.
Officially, we were just doing movement.
Unofficially, I already had an idea.
One day I smiled and said:
“This would be funny if it turned into a performance.”
The reaction was immediate.
We’re in quarantine. We lost our actual show. No director. No stage. No material. No point.
Fair objections.
So I didn’t argue.
Instead, I went home and kept working.
I recorded every session. What worked. What failed. Hand placement. Timing. Balance. I watched hours of contact improvisation, acrobatics, partner work, acroyoga. Replayed seconds of footage frame by frame.
When we met, we weren’t just training anymore.
We were preparing.
Building strength.
Building trust.
Learning to catch each other before attempting harder things.
Moves impossible two weeks earlier slowly became normal.
And every now and then I would drop a small comment:
“This part could already work on stage.”
Meanwhile, I called our director. First just to check in. Mentioned we were training.
Later:
“We’re rehearsing.”
Not because it was true yet.
Because I wanted us to start acting accordingly.
Next rehearsal I brought an old mattress from a basement.
We found another one at the theatre.
Now we could try more.
Individual movements became sequences.
Sequences became scenes.
Themes appeared.
Characters appeared.
Restrictions slowly lifted.
We invited the director.
Got feedback.
Kept refining.
I even started capoeira training to expand what we could do.
Eventually we returned to rehearsing our original show.
But we didn’t stop.
And in the end we had two premieres.
One of them was born during quarantine.
Nobody assigned it.
Nobody expected it.
Nobody really believed it would happen.
Until slowly… people did.
What stayed with me wasn’t “never give up.”
It was something simpler:
Belief by itself changes nothing.
But belief combined with repeated action can become evidence.
And evidence is contagious.
What do you believe is possible today that others see as unrealistic?
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