Acting through life: Keely-Rain Battle has spent half of her life acting and explains why theatre is important to her and others in her major

Courtesy Keely-Rain Battle

Battle plays Eurydice in “Orpheus,” which was performed at UT in Fall 2012 and was directed by Jessica Bonenfant.

When you think of difficult college majors, engineering or other science-related programs may initially come to mind. But Keely-Rain Battle thinks otherwise.

“Theatre is not a regular major, you know. It’s not like business or engineering, and I feel like sometimes we are underrated because people think ‘oh theatre, you just go on stage and dance,’” Battle said.

Battle is a fourth-year theatre major at the University of Toledo who wants to show other students that theatre majors are dedicated and hardworking — they have to balance schoolwork, jobs and a variety of classes that Battle describes as “sometimes more physically demanding.”

“We are taking fulltime classes and we have rehearsals every night,” she said. “It’s not just mentally exhausting, but it’s physically exhausting too to perform. We really put a lot of work and heart into what we do, which is really cool.”

Her passion began at a very young age when she first performed in 2003 and immediately fell in love with the art of acting.

“I started theatre when I was in fourth grade; my friend who I went to school with was doing a community theatre production, so she got me started on it,” Battle said.

Her theatre involvement spans more than half of her life, establishing it as an essential and meaningful activity to her. Thus, the decision to focus her professional career on theatre was an easy one.

“I did every production in high school. Then, I just figured because I had never done anything else and nothing else was ever interesting to me, I figured I’d go to school for theatre,” Battle said.

During her time at UT, she’s performed in five productions, each of her roles expressing a varying level of difficulty, memorization and stage time.

Her first professional production was “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” during her freshman year, which was performed at the Peristyle in the Toledo Museum of Art with the Toledo Symphony Orchestra. Her other roles included Eurydice in “Orpheus,” Irina in “Three Sisters,” Shrdlu in “The Adding Machine” and Antonio in the “Twelfth Night,” which was performed last February at the UT Center for Performing Arts.

In addition to acting on stage, Battle said theatre majors are required to participate in backstage activities like make-up, costumes, props and design-related work.

“Everything has been so fun,” Battle said. “Everyone in the cast has been so dedicated and just so excited to perform.”

Although UT’s theatre program isn’t the most well-known one in the country, Battle said it has allowed her to learn the ins and outs of theatrical productions while also being able to experiment and grow on stage.

“My theatre experience at UT has been really interesting,” she said. “It’s definitely much [more] different from anything I was doing in high school. There, it was very plain things, and here it’s experimental and abstract and avant-garde.”

Battle said she believes the UT theatre department excels in pushing students to reach their greatest potential and wants everyone to succeed in whatever their strengths may be.

“They always want you to not be yourself, but free yourself,” Battle said. “We do a lot of emotional work; it’s almost like therapy where you dig out any bad or good things that have happened to you, and you bring them up so it’s not just hidden in you and hurting you.”

Aside from hours of acting and memorization, Battle said putting together a production requires an unexpected amount of physical labor as well.

“We do rehearse four hours a day, six days a week,” she said. “So by the time we go on stage everything is figured out, but you have to experience it new every time you do it, otherwise it’s going to look dull for the audience.”

For her though, after hours of rehearsing, the acting becomes a natural instinct.

“It’s kind of weird. You would think that actors have to think it through all the time, but really it’s almost like word vomit,” Battle said. “It’s like you’re actually experiencing these things every time something new, and you just know what you’re going to say. You get to play someone else and you get to experience how they feel and how they feel about other characters and where they are.”

Despite the satisfaction that comes with a successful production, there are challenges and downfalls too. According to Battle, her struggles happened during her second year of college when her schoolwork proved overwhelming and she couldn’t seem to snag any roles.

“I wasn’t in any productions,” she said sadly. “The first semester was because I took on a heavy course load, so I decided I should probably focus on my studies. But the second semester, I just wasn’t cast in anything.”

The disappointment was excruciating because her best friend had been cast as the lead in the same production; however, learning to cope with rejection is something Battle said comes with being an actor or actress and that not being cast in everything is “just part of the experience.”

As far as a career goes, Battle said she plans to work in children’s theatre and would like to be a mentor to young actors.

“I figure I’ve done theatre for over half of my life, and I don’t really know anything else…I’m going to come out with a degree in theatre, so why not use it?”