Joey Teo’s Experience (Participant) [he/him]

When I first joined SPLIT in 2019, I had very little acting experience. Throwing myself into the deep end and trying to understand and absorb everything was overwhelming but rewarding, and while I definitely grew as a person and as an actor, I did find myself wondering whether or not the things I had learned and absorbed were, for a lack of better word, “correct”.

Fast forward to 2022 as I rejoined SPLIT in their Work On The Self programme, I had the opportunity again to seek the answers I had been yearning for. Having left acting for years and coming back to it, I realized I had become a very different individual and so I was interested to see how I would approach the work differently than how I did all those years back. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the work itself had developed and grown, and that it had become a lot more accessible and easier to process.

Each week, we are challenged to draw upon different aspects of our lives. We are prompted to think about memories, stories, moments that are meaningful to us and how these things can influence and impact our creative process. It often feels introspective and even therapeutic, but the objective of this work isn’t so much to make you feel better about yourself but rather to be able to see and understand better who you are as a human being and where you are heading.

It is difficult, challenging work, not just physically but also emotionally and mentally because you constantly need to be wholehearted in approaching this work. And when it comes from a place within you that is so personal, it can often feel very draining. But in the end, the growth that I experienced both as an actor and as a human being throughout this training has lead me to have a much better understanding about who I am as an actor individually, and who we are as actors as a collective trying to create and tell meaningful stories and leave our traces in this world.