I survived my presentation! I felt (of course) relieved that I had gotten through it without passing out, throwing up, or having any other sort of adverse physical or mental effects on myself or anyone else... And I felt GOOD about it, which was one of the last things I was expecting. It's a pretty cool emotional high to go through that growth (in less than two weeks). Last week (a week and a half ago?) I was so petrified that I could barely produce sound singing "O What A Beautiful Morning" in front of people with the notes being plunked out on the piano as I sang. Not the whole song mind you-- just those 5 words. Today, I got up in front of my class, sang JASON ROBERT BROWN with insanely ridiculous accompaniment, and brought the story and character to life. And I felt PROUD of my performance. (Relief too. Lots of relief...) It's a pretty cool high.
The song I directed I am really proud of also. I worked with my actor on accessing the emotion of the piece, which was especially difficult for him, being very different from the character he was portraying. I'm really proud of his performance, and I think he was really happy with the direction I gave him. He said I asked all the right questions, so I'm feeling really good about my process as well.
The thing about this class is that it made me realize how CHALLENGING musical theatre is. I'm really glad I had the opportunity to experience the actor side of it-- that's something I don't think I ever would've done on my own. I have a better understanding about the depth that musical theatre has the potential to harness, and know how to better access it to allow the audience to empathize with the characters, understand the story, and buy into the whole presentational aspect of musical theatre which can be so distancing. I feel more comfortable with using the music in the score to help tell the story, and using those clues musically to figure out what's going on with the character at given points in the score... It makes me really excited to start to really dig into my thesis and figure things out.
I'm about to go in and record my cues for my final lighting design project. Video (hopefully) to come after my presentation. We had to select a piece of music to use to design our lights for, and I'm really happy with the music I edited (not perfect, but with the time crunch I had, I cut a nearly 5 minute song down to 2 minutes, which I'm shocked I was able to do and keep the story intact...) I also added a soundscape layer of effects that really help tell the story of the music piece that I chose. We'll see what happens when I go to record!!! Now to go get into a lighting designer mental space... The person cueing before me is learning how to use the techno-beams (which are movable, programmable intelligent lights) and I hope to use them in my design as well!!!
More to come later...
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