Houston Day 788 - Working Dancers

Questions for Working Dancers

 This is research for a piece for Hope Stone about working 9-5ers who also take dance class.   Please answer the questions in the comments below!

1.  What is your job?  Job title, company, workload, how it affects the rest of your life, is it your main passion?

2.  In what ways do you make time in your life for dance and other art?

3.  Why do you do this?

4.  How does your time in dance class affect your work - negatively? positively? at all?

5.  Is creativity valued in your workplace: e.g., are you often told to "figure it out" and come up with your own solution? Do you think it should be?

Houston Day 777 - a quiet Saturday

It's a quiet Saturday morning here.  Lucas is still asleep.  The many birds who visit our backyard are singing.  Tell you what, I never really cared about backyards until I moved into this house and now I don't think I could live without one! I also didn't care much for animals growing up but Lucas is showing me the joy of noticing interesting birds and lizards and raccoons and squirrels as they visit our yard (and dig up our plants).
I have been very diligent the past two weeks since Macbeth finished at keeping busy working at home.  Yesterday I spent hours working through my Speaking American dialect-training book.  Thanks to that book, I have mastered all the individual technical sound shifts necessary to speak convincingly as an American.  Now I'm working on intonation, which is very confusing to me, mostly just because I haven't paid much attention to it before.
We also spent a lot of yesterday hanging out with Nick and Bekah, and also trying to book our upcoming holiday to Minnesota.  Turns out we've picked the weekend some giant festival is on in Duluth and most of the state's accommodation is either a) crappy, b) expensive, c) far away from where we want to be, or d) booked out.
Today is our last quiet Saturday at home before lots of travel - to Austin, Minnesota (if we can ever get there) and Australia.  We'll be going to see a show tonight by a company I've heard a lot about - Landing Theatre - but never seen in action.  And tomorrow I'm taking Lucas on a surprise date.  Sh! Don't tell him what we're doing!

Houston Day 774 - auditions and heartbreak (and blogging and pools)

"Alas, poor Yorick..."

Whew.  Just finished a run of seven auditions in four days.  Four of them were first-round, the others were callbacks for Hamlet; By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and The Giver.  I love auditioning, as I've mentioned before, but this weekend really wore me down! The nervous energy and crashes both got bigger, like spikes on a graph.  The most enjoyable audition was the Hamlet callback; I was late and stressed out and fluttersy but then I turned around and my beautiful friend Jeff (who played Banquo in Macbeth) was there and it turned out we were reading together - we were being considered for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  We had a blast.
I'm also struggling with the possibility that I might not get cast in anything, and working through (again) the age-old question of why I pursue this even though it breaks my heart.  And the answer is, because I love it, and because to me excellent theatre is one of the most exquisitely beautiful things in the world, and because the longing and the heart-breaking are somehow all a necessary part of it.

Hope Stone New Orleans

When not at auditions, I've been working at home, either preparing for said auditions, or writing for Hope Stone.  The latest blog post is about Hope Stone's teacher training days, which I took in Houston last year, and which just ran in New Orleans.  I haven't been to New Orleans yet, but I'm enjoying developing an e-lationship with the staff at the Hope Stone there.
I'm also keeping social and doing a pretty good job at fending off those post-show blues.  Jeff and I had a drink after our Hamlet callback, and I caught up with Matt, another Macbether yesterday at Onion Creek - love it that he is as intense as I am and loves to just talk solidly for an hour about the meaning/s of life.  Leslie is moving house soon so we'll help her with that, and the Nickerbekahs are coming over for fourth of July celebrations tomorrow.  (Let's not look too deeply into what I am celebrating - it's probably not American independence, and maybe just the fact that everyone has the day off, and that we have access to Scott and Maggie's pool.)