One Weight Off My Shoulder, Several More To Go...

The Opera Workshop is over. Friday night was a beautiful recital performed by 19 very eager students. I was so proud of them; a couple of them actually leaped over mountains to achieve their performances and deserved every bit of applause as it rang out through the Copper Room in the Civic Plaza Concourse.

I think I was proud of myself too, helping Cynthia stage all of those numbers (and staging all of the group ones myself) in only three days. My favorite to throw onto the stage was "Chacun Le Sait" from "Fille Du Regiment," only because I'd recently done the opera in Florida and was excited to attack a bit of it myself. I needed to light a fire under a few arses to get them into the right energy, but by the time they ran roaring to the stage they all had me grinning.

It's always nice to end a program and feel satisfied with its outcome. This was a pilot workshop and I think all of us teaching were infinitely happy. There were only a few bitty down moments and frustrations with students, but I think they are impossible to avoid when you are working with such young, fragile egos.

The next morning was a debriefing and day of relaxation with all of us meeting at one house (the only one with a pool), eating bagels, drinking mimosas, and ultimately jumping into the pool and letting all of that stress and nerves melt off into the warm water. The weather had cooled down considerably and we stayed for hours, ultimately grilling burgers and laughing into the afternoon. It's such an amazing luxury to like who you work with (and enjoy the company of everyone's significant other and children as well). The pic is a radial blur of all of us relaxing together - what fun.

In another weight-lifting moment, I finished my fourteen minute duet today, just in the nick of time as one of my dancers is leaving for eight days on a wedding-planning excursion to the Midwest. As soon as the piece was finished, we ran it and I felt my dancers take a huge leap forward in their performance. Sometimes it just takes the satisfaction of knowing that a piece is complete and whole to really dive into it as a performer. I loved watching them finally "get it" as their onstage relationship developed and their speed, efficiency and sharpness went up several notches.

Now I just need to get these other projects off the ground and I will be golden. It's good to feel like I'm accomplishing things.

We're Very Wide Awake, The Moon And I

Insomnia sets in when I have too much on my mind, and I definitely have too much hanging around in there right now.

I had rehearsals with my two girls tonight up at UCSD - a beautiful dance building, and I kind of felt like I was walking in circles. They were right there with me, listening to everything I said, trying everything I asked them to, and I could see the movement form in my head and for some reason had no concept of how to translate it to real time. I kept referring to my "Cartoon-Fantasy World," because that's what I felt like it was.

Ultimately, they got versions of the lifts I was looking at and we found floor patterns that worked within the parameters of the music, but in the moment it gets so difficult to take what I see happening behind my eyeballs and turn it into something tangible and beautiful (and doable). I commend them for stayinng with me.

The piece isn't exactly right yet. It's almost finished - just about three more minutes of a fourteen minute piece; not bad. There's just something, an essence, a connective tissue, that hasn't yet been discovered. I won't know what it is until I have the whole architecture to look at. There are a lot of things we won't know until that happens.

In other news, I finally got the piano vocal score in the mail for "Seven Deadly Sins." I love that I get to work with live music for this project. What a luxury, especially while I am working with students. Adding the musical element will give so much life and breath to the whole project.

We've begun staging arias for the final presentation of our Singer's Conservatory, and I am dealing with a complete lack of confidence on my part in my ability to put people effectively on stage. I think it was part headache, part sleep deprivation, and part that I completely respect the other teachers and don't yet feel like a peer. I think I'm still learning all of this stuff too and it's given me a mini complex. John and I were trying to figure out where this comes from right now; I think it may stem from my being overwhelmed with work and projects and still trying to reintroduce myself to the community as a whole. Who knows. It needs to end now though.

I'm not into beating myself up but I seem to be getting pretty good at it.

Identity

I'm feeling pulled in a lot of different directions right now. I'm not sure if I've put too much on my plate or if I'm just overwhelmed coming back home and jumping so quickly into work, but I can't seem to find time for self right now. I feel like I am defined by the classes I teach and it's more and more that I realize teaching is not my niche.

Don't get me wrong, I am ecstatic to see kids grow with work that I've given them, I just think I'm in a bit of a selfish mode and am trying to establish my own identity as an artist. All of these projects I've got in the works are behind my classes right now and I feel myself shoving through everything else to get to them.

I'm teaching my kids at the Opera a Victorian Waltz tomorrow, and then will go up to the Playhouse on Wednesday to work on a duet piece they've all been developing. Watching so many ah-ha moments happen in the course of six weeks is fantastic but wears me out beyond compare.

On the other side of this I'm trying to put together a short dance film with John, choreograph two pieces for Celebrate Dance Festival, adapt a Brecht piece for a group of talented teens in the fall, and work on an evening length piece for a December concert I'm trying to put together. All this while I'm also planning a wedding.

Who am I and what did I do with that lazy girl who used to sit in front of the television before Glimmerglass called?

Bush Thinks Bombing = Peace (A Political Moment in all of my Daily Madness)

Found this article outlining Bush's asinine foreign policy ideas on The Washington Post's site, via Steph at Narrow At The Outset. One of my favorite quotes:

Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, said Bush's statements reflect an unambiguous view of the situation. "He doesn't seem to allow his vision to be clouded in any way," said Rosen, a Democrat who has come to admire Bush's Middle East policy. "It follows suit. Israel is in the right. Hezbollah is in the wrong. Terrorists have to be eliminated, and he sees Israel fighting the war he would fight against terrorism."

Many Mideast experts warn that there is a dangerous consequence to this worldview. They believe that Israel, and the United States by extension, is risking serious trouble if it continues with the punishing air strikes that are producing mounting casualties. The history of the Middle East is replete with examples of the limits of military power, they say, noting how the Israeli campaign in Lebanon in the early 1980s helped create the conditions for the rise of Hezbollah.

I think what Jack Rosen is demonstrating by his comment is Bush's extreme simple-mindedness. He is only capable of seeing a black and white world view. Any shade of grey becomes way too complicated for him to appropriately comprehend. This is why he (and the rest of his administration) seem completely unable to learn from our country's mistakes (ie. Vietnam) in the past. He's sees nothing complicated about the situation, only "Israel Good, Hezbollah Bad." He's done the same thing in Iraq ("Me Good, Saddam Bad") in that toppling the regime there and creating huge unrest in the country has helped create conditions for the rise of Al Quieda and other insurgents within its borders.

Be that as it may, I can't possibly see any reason why this conflict should be escalating the way it is. As I am writing this, articles are coming across the wires exclaiming that Israel has burst past the Lebanese border and is now attacking and taking over border towns. What ever happened to diplomacy? To talking before conflict? Is this really an appropriate response to Hezbollah's kidnappings?

I'm so sick of reading about death tolls on the news. There are a lot of horrible, greedy, ignorant people in the world, but this is not the way to get rid of them.

The Slave of Duty

The pic is of lovely Chad Johnson proclaiming himself a "Slave of Duty" at Glimmerglass' "Pirates of Penzance." I've been reading the relatively favorable reviews on line and am happy that the run seems to be going well even without my presence. I always have this unreasonable fear that my leaving will be the catalyst for all sorts of problems. It's never the case, but makes me nervous with every show I walk away from regardless. It did, however, happen that the only time anyone injured themselves during "Fanciulla" was when I left the auditorium to walk around in the fresh air one night during the end of the second act. Way to feed my fears I say.

John and I went to see "Mother Courage and Her Children" at the La Jolla Playhouse last night. I'm in the middle of adapting Brecht's "Seven Deadly Sins" for the fall, and thought I'd better start getting into a Brechtian mood. This experience did it like gangbusters. I loved every minute of the bare stage, chalk drawings up one bare wall and down the next, stark, harsh lights, anachronistic costuming, cabaret numbers bursting out over the Forum audience. I was especially enamored with the way the Mother Courage character was adapted with a certain tough-minded humanity that made you hate her and love her all at once. Also Hilary Ward, who pulled off a beautifully mute Katrin, very much in touch with her physical self and more expressive in her eyes and posture than most people are with every ounce of their voice.

It was good for me to see Lisa Peterson's work with this piece, as it reaffirmed the way that I am wanting to take "Sins." The more I reread the translations I've got, the more stark and dirty I see the piece.

In other news, I am teaching two very talented groups of young people: twenty of them singers, and twenty actors. They all suffer from similar physical issues and it is a joy to see them discover their kinesthetic sense as we move forward with movement work. For the next two weeks I am spending the most time with my singers at the San Diego Opera. We are learning the Polka tomorrow and I am ecstatic to get them up and bouncing around. The more skills you have as a performer, the more marketable you are.

Creative Juices

Readjusting to home and working on my own thing; readjusting to being a teacher and a dancer.

Not sleeping well, though I'm not sure why. Being back with John usually relaxes me, but I think I have so many things on my mind right now - so many things coming up in the near future that require my exacting attention. If I accomplish everything on my list through the holidays, I'll be directing two shows (both written, or at least adapted, by me), choreographing a short dance film, and teaching three workshops. . . Life gets very full very fast.

I started teaching at the La Jolla Playhouse two days ago. I love high school theater students. They are so eager and passionate and just stuck enough that I get to experience both their breakdowns and euphoria as I push them to become unglued. I always start my classes off simple, solely concentrating on the idea of Shape: the range of movement and space used to create the shape, the volume within the shape, the level on which the shape sits, and the negative space that's been carved around the shape. We make phrases of movement going from shape to shape to shape; we make shape sculptures, and then, slowly, they begin creating full bodied pieces.

It's a harder concept than it would seem, simply because we aren't used to thinking so much in the abstract, but I was wholly impressed with this group. Usually, I give ou a series of words to get creative juices flowing as they create their human sculptures, and half of them come back with extremely pedestrian, upper-body-only shapes that completely imitate the word in its most literal sense. This group, which gives me great hope, came back with these incredible full-body shapes which only hinted at the literal sense of the word, and more often evoked a mood more than a pedestrian scenario. I was smiling and am thrilled to see how advanced I can get with these phrases they are constructing.

I'm also choreographing for Celebrate Dance right now. I actually want to use CD as a place to get some of my ideas out before I have a concert in the winter, though I'm not sure I can swing the winter concert. I'm trying; I just need to find a place to have it. I worked for an hour and a half with my two dancers yesterday and was so scared that I would walk in the door and have no idea what I wanted. Somehow, just by being in the room with these two beautiful movers, the opposite happened; I knew exactly what I wanted and could point out to them when things were not the way I saw them in my head, and could give them suggestions on how to express various bits of the peice. We didn't get very far, but we have two and a half hours on Saturday and I think we'll start moving faster as they become used to each other and I become capable of walking in the door already confident.

Isn't that really what its all about most of the time? Starting off confident allows you to try things you would have easily poo-pooed in any other state.

I'm HOME!

This time it's for a period of several months. I still can't believe I'm here and working where I live.

I flew in terribly early in the morning on Tuesday and went straight to teach class at the La Jolla Playhouse. I felt like I was spouting gibberish the entire class, and came home after three hours of trying to make sense to my eager high schoolers, only to fall asleep the second I walked in the door.

I'm actually still recovering. I felt fine yesterday, but woke up this morning and feel completely hung over. That month of craziness is truly taking its toll.

More substantial (and regular) writing is coming soon. So many things are happening in the next few months, not the least of which is a wedding and trip to Ireland with my honey.

I'm HOME! Hooray.

Tradition!

Quite a few things to report. I am officially mobile! I rented a car on the first and have it for an entire week. Joy!

My first order of business was to take my day off and get out of town. I have been in such need of respite in the midst of this difficult rehearsal process. This show is so full that it has caused me to feel a bit empty . . . I'd run out of fuel, and so took a two hour drive East to Massachussetts to rejuvenate myself.

I've spoken of my watershed summer at Jacob's Pillow before, and so this became a bit of a pilgrimage back to my career beginnings. I got to the Pillow in Lee, MA, early, and wandered around the grounds. Nothing had changed except maybe a new sign or two, and it was amazing to feel a sense of coming full circle, to stand on the grounds that had opened up so many opportunities for me as a teenager, and look at where I am now and all of the rewards this inspiration afforded me. I ate lunch at the Pillow Pub, bought books in the store, looked through the archives, and tromped around the Inside/Out stage overlooking the incredible Berkshires.

I also took in a performance of Jose Limon's company, which was also terrific. What lovely dancers they have right now. They performed a Donald McCayle piece, a Jiri Kylian piece that was exquisite, then presented Limon's "Choreographic Offering," which I learned from Carla Maxwell in college, and so I was bouncing up and down on my seat and grinning until the curtain hit the deck.

I never think it's wise to live in the past, but every once in a while I think it is infinitely important to go stand in its midst, if for no other reason, to remember why you are where you are and where you originally wanted to go.

Back in Upstate New York, we had our final dress rehearsal, which went quite well. It's a wonderful thing to work so hard on a piece and go through the stress and worry of putting it on a stage, and to finally turn around and see it become something all of its own. How amazing that we, as a collective group of people, can generally have the same ultimate goal and bring it there in such a short amount of time. Stress and heartache aside (and this has been a show full of both only because of its incredible intricacy), I am awestruck by the way things fall together every single time I do this.


Finally, we all celebrated Independence Day yesterday and I was lucky to experience another bit of Americana I've never been around: the Small-town 4th of July Parade. Large portions of the Glimmerglass staff and artists made their way to Springfield Center for a ridiculously large holiday parade, replete with twenty-odd marching volunteer fire departments, tons of small-time beauty queens in the realm of "Drop Dead Gorgeous," Boy Scout troops singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," and candy thrown in every direction. I was standing amongst a bunch of Brits who were completely fascinated by the experience.


They weren't the only ones. I was snapping so many photos and absolutely entranced by the retired Marines riding by in their wheelchairs and the corn-fed Dairy Queens doing their Queen Vic waves in their flourescent blue dresses. And to top it all, the parade ended with a John Conklin-designed, Glimmerglass Opera Float done up with tons of Pirate Paraphanalia, our amazing crew riding atop a boat, waving Pirate flags and sporting hats, coats and eye patches. It was truly fantastic. I'm so glad I got myself out of bed to see it.

So, having a car makes small-town life not quite so bad. This is, by no means, a declaration of wanting to stay. Getting home will be the true reward for everything I've done so far this summer.