I'm so tired...

It's the end of term 2, and boy am I exhausted. We've been working extremely hard to pull together an in-house presentation for the first-years, with our melodramas and various chorus pieces we've worked on over the course of the term. I'm in three pieces, two melodramas as musician and a big chorus that supports an excerpt from Mein Kampf.

I guess I should explain exactly what these territories are. Melodrama, or epic story, is about the struggle of an individual to make a difficult choice against a background of political and/or social upheaval. I'm still involved in the post-WWII story about a womens' de-Nazification camp, and I'm also doing the music for a group that's dealing with a strike and subsequent fatal collapse of a mine in the southern US. I really like being the musician, and I think I'm good at it: being a foley artist is lots of fun, and it requires a precise timing that's really gratifying when you get it right. These pieces have required the most "standard" theater approach that we've used so far at LISPA, that is having actors, a director, writers, etc., and it's been interesting going back to such a segmented approach after having devised freely for so long. It's hard to tell whether either or both of these pieces will "work", since we radically changed the structure of one piece today (two days before the presentation) and I haven't had a chance to rehearse with the other group yet. We'll see how that goes.

The choruses are really interesting as well, and I'm really excited about the one I'm in, which really goes to the dark place that dealing with Hitler requires. We have dim light, shadows on the wall, blood, dismemberment, stomping ritual circles, and more: it's one of those pieces that is (I hope) deeply discomforting to watch and really really fun to do.

I'm flying to Texas on Saturday morning, but at this point that flight feels like it will never come. LISPA is all-consuming, and my classmates and I are running on fumes toward the finish line. Wish us luck!