Pillow Posts -- 7/20/07

We almost managed to have Inside/Out outdoors today, but despite a lovely afternoon, it started to rain at around 5:30PM, so we had to move into the Ruth St. Denis studio again.

The only other point of interest is that I almost ran over Paul Taylor today; he was backstage during the second intermission scene change, and I nearly collided with him as I was coming down the stairs from the fly loft. Oops.

I can't deny that I'm excited for Harry Potter #7, which will hopefully arrive in the mail tomorrow.

Pillow Posts -- 7/18/07

Today was our first actual Inside/Out (I/O) performance, but I didn't really do anything--the Chunky Move sound dude did all their sound (even though it was easy and I totally could have done it), and it was raining all day long. That meant I wasn't doing anything during the actual show, and we couldn't do any projects on the I/O space because we would have gotten all our equipment soaking wet.

So anyway, I just sat on my butt all day and read Harry Potter. I finished the sixth book, which is really depressing, and I was doubly depressed because I didn't like sitting around while everyone else was working. It's weird--even though I'm really busy here and am always glad for a break, it doesn't feel good to have a break when all my comrades-in-arms are still busily working.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a little bit less relaxing. ;-)

Pillow Posts -- 7/17/07

This week marks the halfway point for me; it is the sixth out of eleven festival weeks, and not only that, but this is my week to work on Inside/Out or I/O. I/O is our third stage--in addition to selling tickets at the Duke and Shawn theatres, we also provide free performances every night on the I/O stage, which is located outside in a natural amphitheatre. Working I/O is a completely different experience from working in the other two theatres, because a) it is outdoors and hence subject to weather and critters, b) there are only two of us running it, instead of a crew backstage and a bunch of ushers in the house, and c) you always get done by 8PM, because after that it's dark and you can't see.

The only weird part is that the guy in charge of I/O is named Derek. Yes, Derek. So when the first company shows up tomorrow, he'll say "Hi, my name's Derek, and this is my assistant for the week, Derek." That won't get confusing at all.

Anyway, Derek can sometimes be a taskmaster, but I know I impressed him today with my carpentry skills when he assigned me to make speaker stands for either side of the stage. Hopefully that'll cut me a little slack if I screw up any during the rest of the week, but I'm actually not too worried, since my responsibilities are mostly sound-related, and I'm good at sound.

Pillow Posts -- 7/14/07

Today is photography day! I few days ago I sat down with Rose Eichenbaum, a professional dance photographer. We mainly chatted about composition, and today I took a bunch of photos of the Royal Danish Ballet to try and test out some of her tips. I apologize for the slight blurriness of most of these photos--a point-and-shoot camera, even a nice one, simply isn't made for shooting high-speed dance photos. Still, I think the composition of many of them is a big step up from what I have been doing with dance, so I hope you all can just take a step back and enjoy! This is top-notch ballet, by the way. You may find better photos, but you probably won't find better dancers anywhere, really.

Note the stump.




Not dance, but super cute. It's not just a red squirrel, it's a baby red squirrel.

This is our stage manager/lighting designer Mårten (pronounced Morton). His superpower is that he can balance a chair on his chin.

Hope you've liked the photos. By the way, there were two bear sightings today, but I managed to miss both.

Pillow Posts -- 7/12/07

I spent today reading the entire fourth Harry Potter book, since I didn't have call until 6:30PM. It was pretty good; I'm going to be happy when the fifth arrives in the mail, although one of the people here inadvertently told me what happens at the end of it because she thought it was the fourth book. Oops.

Anyway, the Royal Danish Ballet is going well; the slang term here is "lights 'n tights", and that's pretty much all it involves. The dancers put on their tights, we turn on the lights, and off they go. It's nice and simple, which makes me glad, because when things get difficult, people get snippy, and I'm still kind of recovering from Aurelia, which, though it was a good show, had a very stressful setup period.

A couple of the Royal Danish Ballet's dances have stood out. There's a world premiere called "My Knees Are Cold" (the dancers are wearing shorts and not-quite-knee-high socks) which I really like. It certainly has a similar style to what Yuri choreographed for Gala: a little bit of a fusion of ballet, jazz, and modern styles, and upbeat, fun music.

There's also a more classical work about two horse jockeys having a race, which I always find hilarious, because the two dancers prance around carrying riding crops and wearing ridiculous striped jockey jerseys.

Those are probably my two favorite pieces, although a couple others are enjoyable. The really classical stuff just kind of puts me to sleep, although finding out that one of their tutus cost $10,000 was pretty interesting (and they don't even store it properly!).

Pillow Posts -- 7/10/07

One of the things I love about theatre is the quirky things you are sometimes required to do; today's quirky activity started when the Royal Danish Ballet showed up and immediately asked us to procure a tree stump.

Yes, a tree stump. One of their shows is a pastoral piece about a guy dancing with pixies in the forest (kind of like Belladonna, except without him getting eaten at the end), and so in order to give a sense of the setting, they decided to put a tree stump on stage. Preparing that seemingly-simple piece of scenery actually required a lot of work.

First, we had to find a tree stump. A couple Operations interns went out to the bonfire wood pile and found a nice big one. Once they gave it to us, we first prepped it by cutting off a loose bit of wood on the bottom. Next, we covered the bottom with a felt-like fabric called duvetine so that the wood wouldn't scratch the marley floor. We cut the duvetine so that it approximately matched the contours of the wood, and then stapled it to the sides of the stump (not the bottom of the stump, or the staples would scratch, and not too high on the sides because we don't want the duvetine to be very visible). Next, we wrote on the staples with black Sharpie so that they would be black and not stand out against the duvetine, and finally, we brushed down the entire stump to get as many loose bits of bark and sawdust off before we took it on stage.

We had to talk to the dancers to find the appropriate position and orientation of the stump, and then we had to put spike tape on the floor and on the stump so that we can put it back into the same position every night. Once the stump was spiked, we carted it off stage right. During the show, at the appropriate time, Jason will wheel it onto the stage on a dolly. I will assist him in putting it onto the stage from the dolly, and I will bring with me a dustpan and a brush to sweep up any bits that fall off in the process of lifting the stump. Once we have the stump set, I will sweep up the loose bits of wood and store the dolly with me stage left. When we strike the stump after it has been used, Jason and I will put the stump back onto the dolly, and then Jason will cart it back to stage right, while I sweep up any more wood bits that have landed on the floor.

As you can see, a fair amount of thought goes into simply putting a tree stump on a dance stage, so if you ever see one, you'll know some of the things that had to be done to get it there.

Pillow Posts -- 7/7/07

I had a long talk with Brian and Mark today about the state of computers in theatre, and it seems that the theatrical world is a strange mix of low and high tech. For instance, ETC, the dominant maker of lighting consoles, still produces and sells DOS-based lighting consoles, long after DOS has ceased to be even a remotely viable operating system. Not only that, but even though all consoles have the capability to store a show to a floppy (!) disk, there is no standardized format for storing shows, and no one has made a translation program.

This means that if you are a traveling show, and you want your show to run at a theatre, but that theatre has a different type of lighting console than you do, then you either bring your console along with you (there is a standard for how consoles control lights, thank goodness), or you have to print out all your lighting cues and have someone manually type them in once you get to the new place. There is another piece of annoyance in getting from design to execution. The design program that most lighting designers use is called VectorWorks, and it has pretty advanced lighting design and management capabilities when combined with a program called LightWright. It can deal with circuits, dimmers, channels, hanging positions, and instrument types. Unfortunately, there is no effective way to go directly from a VectorWorks plot to a lighting console and have it work.

These all sound like problems that could be solved with not very much trouble, given enough time and effort. I may make theatrical programming projects into a hobby of mine next year, to keep my hand in.

Pillow Posts -- 7/6/07

We had to store the A-frame ladder outside tonight, and because it was wet and raining, when we brought it back in, it was crawling with slugs. Several people got slugs on their clothes, and we had to pick several of them off the floor. Yep, that's pretty much the only interesting thing that happened today.

Oh, and there was a bear sighting--but not by me, sadly.

Pillow Posts -- 7/5/07

Guy, of Club Guy and Roni, made a really interesting comment last night during a question and answer session after the Inside/Out performance. An audience member asked what language they use when rehearsing, since they have company members from all over the world. The answer, unsurprisingly, was English, but then Guy commented that he found it interesting to be in the US—because everyone here speaks English as a first language. I imagine that after speaking in English almost exclusively with people who did not speak it growing up, and then finding oneself in the middle of a country where everyone spoke it growing up must be rather jarring. You no longer have to work as hard to communicate since everyone understands you nearly perfectly, and suddenly people are using new vocabulary words, new idioms, and talking twice as quickly as you're used to. They're probably feeling how a Classical Studies major might feel if he or she were suddenly dropped in the middle of the Roman Empire.

Tonight's performance went well, except for the fact that it has been pouring rain all evening. That didn't really affect us at all, although Rocky, our production coordinator, told us that in the event of a power outage, we were to immediately stick our flashlights out the windows of the booth in order to provide light for the audience to calmly use the nearest exit. Yay for being a technician; I'm tempted to keep wearing my gear once I get to law school, just so that I can be the one guy walking around with a wrench, gloves, flashlight, multi-tool and Sharpies in his pockets. I think that'd be pretty amusing, although I might run out of pockets; I don't carry my cell phone or wallet with me here, since they're essentially useless.

Pillow Posts -- 7/4/07

Happy Fourth of July, everyone! My holiday was marked by lots and lots of rain, but at least I got to see a cool dance concert. Club Guy and Roni did an excerpt of their full piece for Inside/Out, our free outdoor performance (which was today Outside/In because it was raining a lot), and I ran lights.

I really liked the piece, at least from what I saw of it. It was humorous, it combined multiple forms of performance, including speaking and singing, and the choreography was powerful. We didn't do the full light cues tonight, but the dance didn't really need them; it stood on its own. One aspect of the dance that especially stood out for me was their jumps. The dancers leapt into the air from almost every conceivable position, and they jumped high. Seeing someone suddenly fly three feet into the air from what appeared to be a nearly prone position was incredible.

The piece also featured a stuffed pheasant wrapped in Christmas lights. When asked about the significance of the bird during the post-show discussion, Guy, the artistic co-director replied "Absolutely nothing." Plenty of other things in the dance had lots of significance, so it was nice to see that he had plenty of irreverence to go along with his message.

Pillow Posts -- 7/3/07

Not much of interest happened today; we mainly just did changeover for Club Guy and Roni, which was just a lot of lighting work. We did lay a giant faux-wood floor, which was kind of cool, and apparently they're using a black light, so I'm excited to see that. Otherwise, the first three Harry Potter books arrived in the mail today, so I'm going to dive in and see if I can get all six finished by the time the seventh is released. I'm about halfway through the first book already, which is nice, but as we all know, they get much longer as the series progresses, so I'm not holding my breath that I'll finish. We'll see.

Pillow Posts -- 7/1/07

Judging by the amount of crap in the Duke right now, I'm probably not going to make it to bed until some ungodly hour of the morning, so this is going to be a combination post for yesterday and today. It seems that Fridays and Saturdays are going to be the least interesting days of my week, since I will have already seen and written about the show at least a couple times by then, so don't necessarily expect a daily post if I don't have anything to say. You all probably don't want to hear a detailed account of how many pieces I added to the jigsaw puzzle currently in progress in the Campus Center.

How much crap is there in the Duke? Well, it would be tough to take a picture because it is spread all over the place, but I think an inventory list (only approximate, since it is only what I can remember) will get the message across:

• Two lengths of truss spanning the entire stage
• A big red curtain
• Two red curtain legs which travel across the stage
• Two more sets of two black curtain legs which remain fixed
• A large chest of drawers
• A flower vase, a round table, and a coat rack
• A costume that makes the wearer look like she is walking on her hands
• A toy train track
• A costume that makes the wearer look like he is being carried by a coat
• A small tap dance floor
• Various articles of clothing suspended from the ceiling
• A contraption that allows someone to look like they are turning into sand and falling through a funnel
• A giant puppet stage, at least ten feet across by ten feet in depth
• A small puppet stage, probably four by eight feet
• A litter (as in, a chair carried by two people on their shoulders)
• At least two or three ladders
• A costume which makes the wearer look as if she had a hole in her torso
• A lots of other stuff that I can't recall at the moment, but which we will nonetheless have to pack up tonight and put into a truck

It is next to impossible to walk through the wings of the Duke, the shop is full of their road cases, and even with that, we still had to truck some of the road cases out to one of the farther dance studios that no one uses and put them in there. We had to remove and/or reposition several of our side lighting booms to accommodate all the stuff in the wings.

Luckily, the guys coming next week (Club Guy and Roni) aren't using the side booms at all, so we'll have all week to get them back into working order. The reason Club Guy isn't using side booms is because they are going to turn the theatre into a giant room. That is, they will use big giant cloth flats (or something; I haven't seen exactly how it works yet) to cover the three onstage walls. This actually makes me pretty happy, since it will cut down on the lighting work quite a bit. They don't really seem to care about the lighting too much anyway; the plot they sent us made no sense, and in the words of our lighting coordinator, looked like it was "sketched out on a bar napkin." So I'm hoping Club Guy will be a little less crazy than this week was, although now that we've gotten to know each other, the Aurélia folks are actually pretty cool.

Thomas, the lighting guy, left us a note two days ago saying "See you to the pub?" and Nassir, the sound guy, wanted to show me a free sound program which you can use to play back cues just by using a "Go" button (currently, he is using three MiniDisc players, two of which have their two channels split into four). The program is called SeqCon, but he says he doesn't use it simply because of reliability issues--you always know that a MiniDisc player will work, but computers tend to crash, quit, and otherwise explode in ways that are unacceptable in a theatrical situation.

Well, I've wasted about as much time as I can in typing, so I'm going to post this and then try and think of something to do with the rest of my day; everyone partied hard last night, so I don't think people will be getting up for at least a few hours yet, and we don't have call until 3:30PM.

Pillow Posts -- 6/30/07

Today was a bit slow; Fridays usually are, since we don't really have anything to do until the evening show. I finished Will in the World, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in Shakespeare. I also watched the video of the State Ballet of Georgia, which I had never seen from the front. A nice old lady joined me in the archives to watch it, which was fun.

I took a picture that I'm proud of, although I wish I had a better camera so it could be bigger. It's a shot of the Barton Mumaw weathervane on top of the Ted Shawn Theater, silhouetted against the full moon. I think it's pretty cool, but I wish I had a better zoom lens so that it could be a bit bigger; this is as big as it gets.

Pillow Posts -- 6/28/07, Post 2

I just found a New York Times review of Nina Anananiashvili and the State Ballet of Georgia, which summarizes their pieces better than I could. Enjoy! Check out bugmenot.com if you don't want to register with the Times.

Pillow Posts -- 6/28/07

L'Oratorio d'Aurelia, which is the formal name of Aurélia Thierée's show, is absolutely wonderful. Imagine a circus with the aesthetic sensibilities of Amélie, and you're somewhere in the ballpark of L'Oratorio. It is full of impressive acrobatics drawn straight from a big tent performance, combined with the visual puns and creative twists on familiar activities that I am starting to expect from the French. In many cases, the "dancers" are actually pieces of furniture, curtains, or puppets.

Not only that, but we turned the Duke into a proscenium theatre in two days. Before:
After:
Photos of L'Oratorio.

Things got very stressful this morning as the deadline for the dress rehearsal drew ever closer, while the list of things to be completed before then seemed to stay the same length or grow longer. However, we got enough done to run the dress, and everything was in great shape for the performance, which went very well. The sad part is, I have nothing to do with the actual performances; the sound and lights are just as much a part of the choreography as the props and performers, so they insisted on doing their own lights and sound. That's fine by me, since without a stage manager calling the show, there's no way I could have gotten it right after only one rehearsal, so the show would have suffered. I know my limits as a technician, and the sound is pretty intense.

Anyway, once we got the show running and two successful runs under our belts, their technicians were much happier. In fact, while we were doing a post-show debriefing, their lighting designer came into the theatre and yelled (in a great French accent) "Vhat are you doing? Eet eez beer o'clock!"

Pillow Posts -- 6/27/07

So, Aurelia is absolutely insane. Not the woman--she's nice. But her show is crazy complex. I have never seen a theatre more jam-packed with stuff than the Duke is right now. There are multiple additional legs, two extra travelers, a mirror ball, dresses, a trapeze, and a number of gizmos whose function I don't really understand, hanging from our grid right now. Not only that, but the floor is littered with furniture, toys, puppets, and the road cases that everything came in. We worked an extra hour today getting everything up, and we still have more work to do tomorrow morning before our dress rehearsal at noon, and then it's showtime tomorrow evening.

I'm going to take a few pictures tomorrow before call, because I want you all to be able to compare what the space looked like to what it looks like now--the change is astonishing.

Pillow Posts -- 6/26/07

Today we began to work on load-in for Aurélia Thiereé, and we have a huge amount of work to do; we're transforming our studio theatre into a proscenium space. We've hung a giant main rag in the front, and we're working on hanging a black curtain in back and several sets of legs.

The purpose of all this, as Aurélia's technicians so eloquently put it, is to "hide the magic." In other words, they're blocking off as much of the audience's view as they can so that the gizmos and gadgets they use aren't revealed. And boy, do they have a LOT of gizmos and gadgets. We were taking a break at one point today, and suddenly Aurélia comes in and asks us to help move a crate that was in the sun, because she was worried the contents would get too hot. We opened the road case, and inside were at least a dozen string puppets made in part out of plastic pop bottles. This is going to be an awesome show.

In less happy news, I'm not going to get to run sound for Aurélia; apparently their system is complex and it took their sound guy like a month to learn, so I don't get to operate the sound board during the show. It's too bad, but I still get to learn a lot, and I will get to be in the booth during shows.

Also on a less happy note, the intern who had heat exhaustion also had something more serious: he has a congenital heart defect which had gone undetected until now, and so he won't be able to continue working with us. We'll all be sad to see him go; it's not fun to lose a member of what has by now become a very close group.

Pillow Posts -- 6/24/07

Today was the last performance of the State Ballet of Georgia, and I'm really going to be sad to see them go. I find their culture fascinating; they have an alphabet and language all to themselves, and they are incredibly family-oriented, as I already mentioned. We had a cookout-style dinner after their performance, and although I was shy at first, I finally summoned up enough courage to sit down with a group of them to eat dessert, and I'm really glad I did!

For my trouble, I learned some of their names, how to say "goodbye" in Georgian ("car-gat"), received compliments on my pronunciation of "Tbilisi", their capitol ("Tbee-lee-see"), which they also gave me a postcard of, on which Nina pointed out where her house is in it. She also gave me a hug, which was nice of her--as I said, they're very family-oriented; how many other companies do you think there are where you can sit down with a world-renowned ballerina and eat ice cream and play with a cute baby?

Nina's daughter Elena is the most adorable baby I've ever met in my life, and she's incredibly lucky to have more than 20 extra mothers and fathers. Sergei, the principal dancer, was playing with her last night, and he put a big foam makeup pad into his mouth and made growling sounds with it to try and get her to laugh. This was backstage, during the curtain call, and he was all decked out in sparkling sequins and rhinestones and dancer tights while he pretended to be a dog. Elena smiled, but I nearly died laughing.

Here are some photos of the company after the show today.

The dancers from Balanchine's Mozartiana. The little girls in front are not actually Georgian; the company requested we find them girls, so these kids are imported from the School of American Ballet in NYC.


A group shot of most of the company after Petipa's Don Quixote had finished. Nina is the woman in the lower left wearing the crazy red tutu.



A few of the dancers from Trey McIntyre's Second Before Ground posing. Apologies for the goofy exposure; I had to take this quickly because it was in the middle of an intermission, and we needed to clean up all the confetti that you can see scattered on the ground.

Pillow Posts -- 6/23/07

I'm really going to miss the Georgians after they leave tomorrow. This week started out tense, since neither we nor they were quite sure how to act around each other, but once we got the first few shows out of the way, everyone relaxed and we all began to do what people do best: connecting. They began showing us their newspapers and their money, and teaching us their language. There's something intensely human about meeting people from the opposite side of the globe and realizing that they're pretty much the same as you are.

I'll try and do a full wrap-up of the pieces they performed on Monday; right now it's late and I'm really cold, since the breakfast nook where I'm typing this has no heating (although, like most of the buildings around here, it does have mice).

Pillow Posts -- 6/22/07

In each run of a show, there is always a night that just doesn't quite go right. Tonight's performance was that night.

To start off, the weather today has been capricious at best; without exaggerating, I can say that I have seen blinding sunshine and torrential downpours within 15 minutes of each other. About the only thing constant about the weather today was that it was cold and windy, which made for an unpleasant dancing environment inside of our barn, which has no heating and doors which do not latch shut.

While I sat outside holding the exterior doors of the theatre shut and trying to make sure that the tarps we use to cover our outdoor backstage crossover didn't blow away in the gale force winds, all kinds of drama was happening inside of the theatre. One of the dancers became dizzy and nauseous, and the state news network of Georgia was constantly trying to film onstage, which a) isn't allowed, and b) was preventing us from putting on the next portion of the show. Not only that, but there was a minor sound screw up, where the sound stopped and then restarted.

But hey, it's live theatre--these things happen. You just work through it and go on to the next show. Still, it's kind of a downer when everything seems to happen at once. On the other hand, I'd probably prefer one bad night with a bunch of issues to four good nights with one minor issue each.