Shakespeare's lessons for me today

The Lesson for Today

I'm halfway through the rehearsal season for my second ever Shakespeare play, and loving it.  Great actors, great director, designers, stage manager, and of course, a great script.  There were many challenges in my last Shakespeare show - the biggest one that of playing four or five different minor characters - and I grew so much as an actor because of them.  The fun challenge I'm discovering now is that there's a particular pitfall associated with doing Shakespeare, and I'm falling into it a bit, I think.
This shit's famous.  You get cast in a Shakespeare show and you're the latest in a line of thousands of people who have played the part before you.  Also, in my case, I'm playing a part featured in a particularly famous spin-off, and initially I found it hard to get Tim Roth's Guildenstern out of my head.

So the temptation is that my joy at getting to be Guildenstern #24601 leads me to try and wring every single moment I can out of my time on stage, which leads me to be all over-played and self-conscious.  I have seen it in other Shakespeare productions, too: there's such a sense of privilege at getting to do those famous scenes that you out-Herod Herod a little bit.
I realised this today after reading my favourite book for the umpteenth time in my favourite coffee house (on the advice of Julia Cameron, I am taking myself on weekly Artist's Dates), and this quote stood out to me:

He is like a man who plays Yesterday on the piano with Brahmsian amplitude & lushness and so casually kicks aside the very thing which is the essence of the song

and also:

Lord Leighton (the painter) specialised in scenes of antiquity in which marvellous perplexities of drapery roamed the canvas, tarrying only in their travels to protect the modesty of a recruit from the Tyrone Power school of acting.  His fault was not a lack of skill: it is the faultlessness of his skill which makes the paintings embarrassing to watch, so bare do they strip the mind of their creator. 

It brought to the front of my mind the lesson I have been learning almost without realising it at every rehearsal:  I watch our Hamlet mutter "to be or not to be" and "alas, poor Yorick" so quietly and so casually that the rest of us in the cast can't take our eyes off him.  The best actors don't shout out "DID YOU HEAR? THAT WAS A REALLY FAMOUS LINE!" with their performance.
So off I go to learn how to hold all my research and nuances and technical work on the language with a very open hand, with the hope that not everyone will get everything every single time I'm on stage.  And that's why I'm so lucky to be Guildenstern #24601.

P.S.  If you have a few spare dollars, please consider helping this brilliant company out so I can continue doing good theatre with the Classical Theatre Company.  Or at least watch the video in the link and laugh at how cute our director JJ Johnston is.

Houston Day 816 (Australia Day 14): Dance of the Sugar-Plum Corporate Professionals

Dance Class Teaching Workers How to Figure It Out

I wrote this piece recently for Hope Stone - very interesting to look at the impact of dance on the lives of people who are not professional dancers.  (Boise readers - there's a link to a fascinating piece of work that's happening in your city!)

http://hopestoneinc.org/dance-of-the-sugar-plum-corporate-professionals/

Houston Day 812 (Australia Day 10) - dance of the after-school performing arts

Mum & Luke at the College Winter Showcase

It seems my entire family live in a whirl of extracurricular performing arts programs.  Not just my nieces and nephews, who take such courses (Luke, my oldest nephew, is obsessed with theatre atm - YES!), but my sisters, who teach them.




Dad & my niece Emma at Showcase

Yesterday I spent some of the day visiting my old school, where Sarah is Head of Music, helping out with her VCE Music class and the Middle School musical rehearsal.  Her work environment is busy, beautiful, and never-ceasing.  I don't quite know how she does it, but she was obviously born into this job.  Toward the end of the school day I visited Ballarat North Primary to watch my 7yo niece Imogen's class perform a piece about dinosaurs in their school assembly.  Her job was the make the brachiosaurus prop eat the tree prop.  She was very proud and did it perfectly.  I also went to watch her after-school swimming class, and hung out with my dad, who happens to be visiting Australia at the same time as I am.  If you were to check in with any of us around three-thirty, you would have observed us performing the following intricate dance:

• Mum's track: leave Imogen's assembly and go home.
• Dad's track: leave Imogen's assembly with Imogen and her brother Paddy and take them to their house for afternoon tea.
• Claire's track: leave Imogen's assembly, check in with her kids about heading home with Dad, then go to meet her piano students, who had their exams.
• My track: leave Imogen's assembly, wait outside Imogen's school for Sarah and head to the College Middle School musical rehearsal.



Emma's beautiful ballet feet

• Sarah's track (by far the most complicated, as always): leave her own school, pick me up from Imogen's school, pick her own kids up from their school, and take us all back to College for Middle School musical rehearsal.

Then the rehearsal finished and Sarah looked at me blankly, saying "All day I was just aiming to get us all to this point.  I have no idea what happens next." and then we headed to Claire's.

Today I get to watch 7yo Emma's ballet class and tonight I go see Claire playing trumpet for the Ballarat Academy of Performing Arts' production of 42nd Street.  I am having a lovely time.

Houston Day 808 (Australia Day 6)

Fantastic things have been happening in my world.  The Hope Stone blog is taking off, and I would love you to read our latest post at http://hopestoneinc.org/every-summer-has-a-story/.  It'll help you understand some of the awesome things that happen at my side job!

My gorgeous sisters

I'm in Australia right now visiting my family.  It's been such a special time.  I'm writing from my dear friends Ray and Cheryl's house, which will always be home to me because they were our landlords before we moved.  We had a fantastic dinner last night with a bunch of friends, and right now I'm listening to the lovely Sass' radio show Stand Up Straight before I get to visit the radio station tonight!
And right before I came to Australia Lucas and I spent a week in Minnesota with his family.  So much special family time! We played golf (regular-sized and mini), had dinners, played poker, swam and boated in the gorgeous lakes, visited Lake Superior, and generally had a good time.  I love being a part of the Buchanan family and getting to call this dock one of my homes.

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.)