A Q&A with Dr. Chris Gurrie

While on sabbatical last year, Dr. Chris Gurrie, UT's speech program coordinator and assistant speech professor, traveled around the world looking to rejuvenate his research and take some time time to gain perspective. He discovered so much more along the way.

An active public speaker, Dr. Gurrie was not content to simply complete a customary report in his sabbatical once he returned. Rather he took journal entries and stories, chronicled from every day of his three month odyssey, and assembled them into his own one man show "Searching for a Purpose" to share with an entertain an audience. "Searching for a Purpose" promises songs, stories, laughter, and pondering life's purpose with plenty of audience interaction in between.

I had a chance to sit down with Dr. Gurrie in his office on Tuesday for a sneak preview of his show and how the idea to share his experiences came to him.  His free show premieres next Fri.-Sat., Feb. 27-28, at 8 p.m. at the University of Tampa Reeves Theater.

How did this idea for “Searching for a Purpose” come about?

When I was on my sabbatical last year, which is an academic leave where we’re supposed to work on rejuvenation for our research and our scholarship and stuff, I did some academic projects and some research projects, but I really wanted to travel because I had the block of time to do it.

So I condensed the projects and then I condensed the travel and when I returned — you’re supposed to do a report of what you did and so the idea for the show came about because I was journaling everyday while I was traveling and so I thought “Well rather than write a report why don’t I perform or present a report since I’m the ‘speech guy.’ So that’s where the idea for the show came from.

And the “Searching for a Purpose” thing came about after writing the stories. It’s like “Why am I doing this? And why go see these places?” That’s where it ultimately came from.

So when you got back that’s when you decided to put this together and do a show and say “I want to share this with everybody, what I found out?”

Yeah. Because I had a really thick journal I wrote in everyday for three months and a lot of stuff was just, you know, ‘Today I finally found a laundromat’ or you know ‘I can finally shower this weekend’ but people don’t wanna here about that stuff, but then I thought “Well what do they want to hear about?” So that’s where the show started to come together.

You’ve had the opportunity to travel internationally on study abroad trips and things like that, did you re-visit any previous destinations or was it all new destinations for you?

I re-visited old destinations in Europe to see friends and I sort of—well I partially structured it that way because I did an around the world ticket where you have to circumvent the globe and you have to go west to east or east to west. So I wanted to see as many places I had never been before, so I chose east to west. 

I started in New Zealand and then Asia and so I knew that in the middle it would be very comfortable to meet up with friends in Europe. So if I was mentally drained from being with all of these new people and being “on” all the time, I’d feel real comfortable in Europe. When I got to Europe I had been to most of the places before that I had visited.

Of the places that you visited which had the most impact on you personally? And which places helped you form the ideas for “Searching for a Purpose” the most?

I think personally Japan had the most influence on me. When I went into Japan I sort of wanted to check it off my list that I had been to that part of the world and I didn’t stay nearly long enough. In fact, I extended my trip three more days, but I didn’t have the time to stay any longer, and I don’t know what it was about Japan, and I know being a Westerner and a foreigner that the Japanese people treat us very nicely, but if you go there to live it’s completely different, it’s more like their “show” face.

But I was overwhelmed with how polite people could be to someone who doesn’t speak their language. So that’s one of the stories in my show is how people in Japan drove me places when I didn’t have—when the bus stopped running and they showed me how to get on the train and stuff like that.
I would imagine though it was probably somewhere in Europe when I was comfortable, when I wasn’t on my guard, so to speak, that I thought more about school, work, and writing, and “aha I could put these things into a show, I just gotta think about how to do it.”

You bring up the language barrier and obviously that was probably a major challenge. Does that have any impact on the show? Like how you were able to get around that barrier to communicate with people?

In the show itself I don’t really talk about the language barrier per se. Because the clip of my pace was very fast, I was only in large major cities most of the time, but in rural Japan, again it goes back to Japan, there was this little old lady and me and we were waiting for a train to take us back to Tokyo and she really wanted to talk to me and I only knew like “thank you” and “hello” and I had one cellphone bar on my phone and so I was Google translating with her. I would say like “Where is the train?” and show her the Japanese characters and she would then go off into a tizzy like “Oh it’s coming!” and I was like “Oh ok!” That was one really, like, magical experience.

Then in Thailand you stay in these places that are supposed to be English-speaking hotels for travelers or something, but I think they graduate people from these English classes faster there than they should, so people didn’t really know what they were saying like you would ask them questions and they would go “Oh have a nice day,” and you wonder “are we gonna get new towels or are we not gonna get new towels?” like it was really confusing, so it was very funny. That’s pretty much the language barrier and in all the Spanish-speaking countries I tried my hardest with my Spanish so it wasn’t a problem.

What do you hope the audience will take away from your show? What can people expect from “Searching for a Purpose?”

What I really want is for people to be thinking about themselves while I’m doing the stories and so the way it’s set up is I’ve paired it down to about five or six stories that are polished, that are written, I wrote them properly with like metaphor and, you know, not just journaling and that’s how I’m going to perform them as a speech.

Then between each of those stories I’m going to talk back with the audience and say how I really felt and where the story came from. And my purpose in doing that is that people in the audience will go “I’ve been there” or “I’ve had that happen to me” and it doesn’t have to be in a foreign place it just has to be “I lost my wallet and I felt like crap and it got better.”

So that’s what I want people to think about is themselves while I’m telling the stories. So even if they’re listening to my stories going “Oh and then that’s what happened, interesting” then as they can decompress during the transitional talk-back maybe they think about the time they were on a cruise in the Bahamas. Because even the first cruise that you take is a little bit nerve wracking.

Just going into the foreign waters and everything?

Yeah so I want people, regardless of how far they have traveled, how much money they have, to think about themselves and so I sort of set that up in the beginning when I say “This isn’t about me, it’s about the experiences I had and I think that everyone in this room can contribute to those same feelings and what do we learn from those feelings?”

If this show is very successful, which I think it probably will be, do you plan on taking it on tour to other places?

 That sounds amazing! I don’t know what sort of venues are there. Maybe somebody who comes during one of the talk-backs or—I’m gonna have a small few minutes for questions before the final conclusion at the end—because I want to let people go if they want to go—maybe someone will have an idea of an outlet for that or a larger off-campus, like at a warehouse or something like that with beer and wine or pay tickets or something, I don’t know.

But it would be really nice. I’ve got a friend in South Florida who keeps saying he’s got a guy that owns a wine shop and he wants me to come do it there. That might work.

Dr. Chris Gurrie holds a BA in Communication and Organizational Leadership from Purdue University, an MS in Integrated Marketing Communications from FSU, and a PhD in Education from Nova Southeastern University. Catch his show, "Searching for a Purpose" next Friday and Saturday.  

This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2015.