Down the rabbit hole

Is this what life could be like? Eating, sleeping, spending time with family and friends, and building and performing theatre the rest of the time (and having no time to blog - sorry!)? That was my life for nearly a week, and it was sooooo lovely...

The public presentations happened last week, and went well overall. There was some drama (aka blood on the floor) regarding what made the final cut, but everything more or less worked out in the end. I believe we had over 100 people in the house for each of the three nights, and though the closing evening was probably the weakest, which is never the best way to end a run, I'm still proud of us. We didn't have much time for self-congratulation, though, because less than 48 hours after closing curtain call we were back at school to tackle our final projects.

The format for final projects is this: every second-year (all sixty of us) must head up a project of our choosing, which at the end of the day we are entirely responsible for. We can cast our classmates as performers, directors, writers, musicians... whatever we need. And we have about 16 hours of rehearsal over the course of three weeks to put together a piece. The last two weeks of school will consist of 8 evenings of these performances - each only gets one showing, which will be the first time the teachers see it. Our class has 25 people, so 25 projects, split more or less evenly across the 8 nights. As of this moment, mine will be performed on Monday the 7th, and I'm performing in other people's pieces on every other night save two. It's exciting to begin to rehearse these, to get to step into other people's artistic universes and see what you can create. My first rehearsal is this afternoon and I'm less nervous than I have any right to be - the next few hours will be taken up with research so I can pretend that I know what I'm talking about. I'm thinking of exploring the epic storytelling form that we played with at the beginning of the year with the melodramas, and I'm looking into using the folktake of the selkie as the story to tell. I want a chorus of four women who sing, in addition to the main characters, and that's about all I know. (I was about to write "More to follow", but last time I wrote that it took me weeks to come back to the blogging world, so I won't make that mistake again.)

There really is so much more to write - about having my family here, which was So Great; about revisiting Palestine several weeks ago; about plans for the fall and the future - but writing about the final projects has gotten me inspired to go trolling for images and folktales on line in preparation for rehearsal. Wish me luck. I'll share my findings.

I hope you all are well. I am so very happy with my life these days, and it's incredible to me how autonomous, how independent I feel. I'm accustomed to always having an outside point of reference - usually Minneapolis - as "home", but I'm feeling more and more like my home is here, my home is where my life is, my home is what I carry with me, always.

I love you all.