Getting boring background stuff out of the way.  I was kind of happy to see my counts for the last post were zero.  Not afraid to share, it's just not my aim at this point.  I don't know if it ever will be.

Tuesday I shot pictures for Freehold's Engaged Theatre Tour's production of The Winter's Tale.  Most of the shows I've done in recent years have been Shakespeare in the park.  I arrived a little early and the start for this, the last dress rehearsal started a little late as some cue work needed to get done first.  There is a magic before a performance, different people preparing in different ways.  There is an intense energy, often quiet which permeates.  I found it catchy and had to do some stretches and a few (very quiet) vocal and articulator warm-ups which relieve stress for me.

I've worked on a few shows with young/inexperienced directors and stage managers who insist on having everybody participate in warm-ups they liked in training.  The upside is this reminds folks to prepare, but someone else's warm-ups are not everyone's cup of tea and can unwind prep work they just did.  It is a blissfully ignorant bit of power politics usually motivated by good intentions.  If you gotta do that to your cast, leave them sufficient time to do their prep after your version of morning military drills.  That is rarely done, and in my experience only if someone asks for the time to be adjusted, and then only for a couple nights.  And for me watching individuals warm up in their own ways is something special to see.

Back to photography.  I'm only a little familiar with the play, partly because it is hard to follow.  It is considered one of the 'problem plays'.  Yet I thought it was quite good, even with my head in view finders or watching my feet as I moved about I miss most of it.  I hope to go see it as an audience member because it seemed like the best production I've seen of the play.

I haven't shot a show in about a year and only remembered at the last minute to sync up the camera clocks so that the shots from the three different cameras can be sorted in correct chronological order.  The last few times I shot productions I made an effort to keep the number of pictures down.  Didn't so much this time and ended up with over 900 shots.  A lot, but not the most of any show.  The hard part is getting the proofs of all the shots loaded the next day after work.  Then there were wrinkles with using Flickr so I used DropBox and it turned out there were issues with disk space and permissions for clients.  Fixed the later, but the former would have taken hands on with their computer, so copied from DropBox and loaded them to Flickr at work.  Gack!  Now to start culling and processing those I like best.

I was tired last night and forgot to watch a Tim Burton movie in honor of Mum's birthday.  I guess tonight will be the night.

Rebooting

I'm rebooting my journal here.  I decided to take a facebook vacation, and twitter too though I don't do much there.  The next to last straw was a post several weeks earlier when a facebook 'friend' posted a hateful anti-transgender meme based on the cowardice of sharing a bathroom with another person.  This same person is an outlier for actors and posts trump kissing, racist, and Islamophobic posts.  Most good actors I know tend to have more open minds -- this person doesn't do anything to break down the stereotype.  Never seen them affected by another actor or try to affect another actor with more than line readings (indicating).

The final straw was when I asked myself, "In your relationship with social media, which one of you is the tool?"  I didn't like my answer.

So, back to the journal which has some, but not an exclusive focus on my artistic journey as an actor.  A journey which opened me back up to other artistic endeavors such as writing and photography.

When I started this blog on 01Jun04 I was immersed in the final weeks of the Meisner Progression at Freehold.  Fourteen years later I took the class again, and finished again about a month ago.  Why repeat Meisner?  I'll talk about that more in subsequent posts.  In the meantime to summarize I felt I was really ready and hungry for that naturalistic approach feeling I wasn't really ready the first time.  I was seriously thinking of leaving the area and wanted to get the chance while I could.  As it turned out I retained much more than I realized and learned so much more than than I expected.

A quick example.  This Summer I'm working with Last Leaf Productions again, cast in Twelfth Night and King Lear.  Rehearsals were during the last term of Meisner, and we opened June 15th, just three days after our public performance and last day of Meisner.  I wasn't able to do as much homework as I wanted.  The homework I did manage was more focused and productive.  The last three or four rehearsals Kent whom I played is there with the dead Cordelia and dying Lear and I teared up every time, and have for our first three performances of King Lear.  Not something I expected to do, but comes from doing and trusting the work and your scene partners.  The well loved scene with Oswald -- "What a brazen-faced varlet art thou, to deny thou knowest me! Is it two days since I tripped up thy heels, and beat thee before the king?" -- is also more fun and different.  The changes in the character come as a result of homework, and of course most importantly listening.

Last Saturday we did both shows for the Seattle Outdoor Theater Festival.  It was a sweltering day, but not brutally so though it was warmer there than the official 84.  Aaron was down for a quick visit arriving just as we finished the second show which was King Lear.  I didn't take time to wind down and headed straight home after we struck the set and props.  Then off to pick up take out which we opted to eat there in the splendor of a/c.  Then we watched the old movie Michael.  It demonstrated I need to decompress after an intense role like Kent.  It's a funny show, but I laughed like crazy like my Dad used to when his funny bone was tickled.  That unwinding from a heightened state needs to get done, and while that was a very fun way to do so I should be careful about putting it off.  Don't want to rebuild walls it has taken so long to tear down.

Tomorrow is Mom's birthday.  The night she died I watched Frankenweenie with my friend Richard at the IMax at Seattle Center, and on the way stopped to see her.  I'll never know if she was aware, as I got the call the next morning at about 5AM informing me she had just died.  I couldn't bear the idea of staying home that day, so after work I picked up Dark Shadows from RedBox.  So, now on the her birthday and on the anniversary of her death I try to watch a Tim Burton movie.  I missed Mother's Day this year, but maybe that was overdoing it.  So many fun choices...