Within Sight

I'm finally done with classes for the Thanksgiving holiday! Such a small and insignificant end, since we'll be resuming on Monday, but it feels so releiving. The air is so crisp and cold outside and there's something festive about the remaining students on campus. It's as if everyone has let out a huge sigh of relief and are all buzzing with excitment about going home. I will be staying in D.C. over break, or the surrounding area at least. My family will be coming up tomorrow morning to spend the holiday with me and some relatives in Fredericksburg, VA. I'll use the time to catch up on lost sleep and get back to a normal life having just finished my second off-center. I'll be seeing Corteo again on Thanksgiving Thursday with my mom at four. What a great thing to do on Thanksgiving. It's such a festive show anyway, it will mix well with the attitudes in D.C. at the time, I'm sure. It will be my mom's first experience with the Cirque on any significant level and I'm looking forward to sharing that. We'll also go shopping while they're up here and I look forward to eating a lot of good food!

Tomorrow I have to wake up early and come to campus to turn in some reports then I'll begin cleaning my apartment and making it look nice. During the run of a show things get all out of whack and I made such a mess of my place. So tomorrow I'll rid my room of the bad ch'i buildup and be productive. I also have to come back to campus for my advising appointment at 2, but that should only last 30 minutes or so. Hopefully no longer since I pretty much have my schedule laid out for next semester - or at least an idea of it... Today I'm seeing a reading of Reckless at 4 and then I'll head home. I think I'll make green curry chicken again and do some writing for my Theatre Performance class. Who knows? I'm just glad to not have homework to worry about for a few days.

Closing Stonewater Rapture

This evening's performance of Stonewater will be its last. I meant to post on it while it was running, but I've been so busy this past week that I simply haven't had time until now. With Thanksgiving break ensuing, all of my professors seem to be getting in that last exam or paper due. So it's been hectic anyway, on top of that with the run of Stonewater Rapture. But after tonight my time will be once again more open and I can concentrate on school more as we near finals periods. Thanksgiving break cannot come soon enough. I look forward to luxuriously sleeping in many days....

So about Stonewater...
It's been an interesting run thus far with audiences of around 15-20 people per performance - nothing like the house sizes we had for The Weir, which was often full to capacity. I'm not sure why that is, maybe John LaBombard's name had something to do with it (he's well known and well respected in the department), or maybe The Weir was more attractive to many audieces than Stonewater Rapture, which is a lesser known title. Who knows? But they were both totally different experiences and processes, both from which I learned from - both positive and negative things. Drama in the theatre is ridiculous, and something I'm avoiding so far no matter how much people try to drag me into it. I now, thankfully, know which people to avoid to be successful in this effort. It's sad really, but I've grown from this experience and that's ultimately why I do thatre - to grow. So I've accomplished something through Stonewater and I'm happy for that. And I've recieved relatively positive feedback from the audiences on the piece, or at least from the people who's opinions I value enough to ask, and that's been nice. I'm curious to see how the house is tonight, it should be relatively full because the faculty prefers to come on a weekday performance and tonight will be the only one we have. It will be good to be seen by faculty for a second time. Getting my name out there!

As for now, I think I'll go revise one of the two papers that I have due tomorrow before I have to leave for call. One...more...day.....

Borat and Rapture

Yesterday was an interesting day. Due to my recent exaustion from so much work to do and a show in tech week, I decided to refrain from classes and stay in my apartment. I was actually much more productive in doing so; I got ahead in homework for the week and made a good start on a major paper that's due on Friday. So I made the right choice. Around 1:30 or so I decided that I needed to go downtown and do something, and that something ended up being Borat. I took the metro to Chinatown, on which there were two people having a rap battle (go figure), and went to the cinema there at the Verizon Center. Chinatown was oddly very active to be the middle of a business day, but that made it all the more interesting. The cinemas there are very nice, and the movie was not crowded at all. It made for a pleasant and enjoyable time. Borat itself was hilarious. The things Sacha Cohen did for that character are insane. Very daring. I read somewhere that the police were actually called on him 91 times during filming. But in the end it made for a very humorous movie - not for the squeemish though.

Later on yesterday afternoon I had rehearsal for Stonewater, which opens on Saturday!!! Lindsey Snyder, a doctoral candidate here at UMD worked with us on some tension moments and it really helped me. She's very talented and I'd like to work on a project with her sometime in teh future. I hear she AD's a lot of mainstage shows here....
But anyway, after our full run through, and finishing at 11:30, I left with a sense of accomplishment. Sure, the show still needs work - and we have three more days to cement things - but I haven't felt accomplishment with this show at all until this past Sunday afternoon. So that's a good sign for me that things are finally falling into place. Physicallity is a huge problem that I have and is something I'm trying so hard to overcome. I'm simply observing my actions as a person more closely and deciding why I do certain things. Is it tension? Usually. So to alieviate myself of these habits I simply need to convince myslef of their unneccessary tensions. AND IT WORKS, I think. Positive results thus far, but still so much further to go. Challenges to overcome and new ones to seek out. And that's what keeps theatre fresh for me. Claudia Kiss and Ryan Cury may be coming up to see it from JMU as well. I hope things do work out for them to get up here, it would be nice to see them both and show them around D.C. But we'll see how things arrange themselves with time.

Now I'm in Applause Cafe waiting pour ma classe de la fancaise. Mon Dieu! I really don't want to go, but I missed yesterday and can't afford missing another participation grade. I just wish I could have more interest in it. Although, it is hard to concentrate on anything when you have such a demanding show opening in only days and two major papers due! C'est la vie. Now to continue with my papers...

Corteo

Can the Cirque du Soleil ever go wrong on a show? Not yet, at least! Their latest show Corteo is evidence of their continuing success and beauty. Today I had the privelege of attending a performance of Corteo during it's one month stay here in D.C. and it filled me with such inspiration and motivation for the art of theatre. I want to go out and do great art like the Cirque now. Such great artistry and beauty from this troupe, and they always accomplish it!!!

So today I went to the four o'clock showing of Corteo. Cirque has set up their fortress in the convention center parking lot on H street. It's really an amazing complex that they set up and to think that they travel all around the world with it seems like such a huge accomplishment in itself. Entering in by the Billetarie, or Box Office in English, the audience is then ushered into a large merchandising tent where they sell there coupious amounts of merchandise and refreshments. Once outside again, the audience enters le Grand Chapiteau which is the main show tent. It's a huge circus tent on the outside but the inside rivals Broadway theatres. The technicality of le Chapiteau is so incredible that I can't even begin to describe it. One has to just see a Cirque show to understand its possibility.

The show itself is based on the premise that the audience is attending the funeral of Corteo, a recently deceased clown. The show is then the funeral procession by a group of Corteo's close friends - all clowns or angels of course. The overall feel of the show was semi gothic mixed with classical clown techniques. The acts within the show were, of course, amazing in their physical feats. However, many rip off shows include the same things. The thing that makes Cirque different is its artistry in telling the story and interweaving everything within it. It was perfect. But that's all I can truly say on it, that it was amazing and reinviggorated an artistic sense within me that's been lacking recently. Everyone should see this show! GO NOW!

Crestfall

Tonight I went with my friend Matt Reckeweg to the Studio Theatre downtown to see Mark O'Rowe's Crestfall. I have been thinking recently that I need to take more advantage of and see more D.C. theatre, so whenever I received the e-mail that I could get free tickets to this show I jumped on it! It was my first visit to the Studio Theatre, which is in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, and I loved it! A gorgeous space with 3 or 4 separate theatres, all different types of theatre spaces. The design is very modern chic: brick, glass, and cement with very clean lines and modern furniture tucked away. Crestfall was in Theatre 4 on the top level, a very experimental type of blackbox space that can vary in size for the different shows. This show utilized about half of the given space, had audience facing each other on two, opposing sides, and only one chair served as a semi-setting/prop for one character. The show instead mainly focused on the stories.

Crestfall is an Irish play by O'Rowe who is an Irish playwright. The piece centers on three different women who live in a bad district in an Irish city and how they're grotesquely connected through their tramas and problems. Just finishing McPhereson's The Weir and having seen Irish theatre performed elsewhere, such as McDonaugh's The Pillowman on Broadway, I'm beginning to understand and fully appreciate the basis of Irish theatre. That basis is to tell a story. The Wier was a piece in which the characters all related through haunting stories of their past, Pillowman was a story about a storyteller and his stories, and Crestfall is about the stories of three different but deeply connected women. All very wordy: the use of language to accentuate the story allowing beauty to emerge from the pages. These plays are all connected by a strong sense of storytelling, an oral tradition that runs deep in Ireland and was brought to America by its Irish settlers, many of whom ended up in SW Va and NE Tn. So now the stoytelling tradition lives and thrives in the foothills of Appalachia and provides me with something I can totally relate to these Irish works. So I am almost emotionally connected to these pieces in a cultural sense as well. I have some Irish ancestry but, even though these plays are based on people thousands of miles away in a country I've never visited, I know these people. They're people I grew up with and am related to. Their mannerisms and patterns of speech are parallel to my upbringing. So needless to say, I truly enjoyed this experience and will definitely be attending a show here again, soon! But Nine Parts of Desire is to be seen next at Arena Stage!