For the past several weeks I’ve been trying to stay offline as much as possible while visiting family in the US and going to see some Olympics tennis. I haven’t been entirely successful, but I have managed to slow down a little bit-maybe from fifth gear down to fourth. Today I’m jumping back into a higher gear… I’m on the train now back to MMU after not being on campus for nearly four weeks.
Today will be a day of playing administrative catch up and trying to cross off some of the items on my long to do list. Starting tomorrow I’m in rehearsals for the rest of the week with Proto-type on The Good, the God and the Guillotine, our sound-driven performance that responds to Camus’ The Stranger. I’m looking forward to being back in the rehearsal room, although I have the usual insecurities and fears going into the scary (and exhilarating) roller-coaster of working on new material. Our goal for the week is to end with a good film of one small section of the piece which demonstrates how we are thinking about staging and the interplay between song and performance.
Next week I have a few days off during which I need to write some Proto-type final reports and finish up the paper I’m giving at this year’s TAPRA conference in Kent. I’ll then polish up PANTS before taking some of my students to Portugal to perform it in a festival in Evora. I’ve never been to Portugal so I’m looking forward to that very much.
The rest of this year looks like it will be crammed full: I’m at Kennessaw State University in late Sept/early October directing performances of About Silence and teaching workshops, then in Romania in Oct/Nov giving a directing master class to MFA students from Romania and Hungary, and then in India in Nov/Dec conducting some workshops as part of a British Council/MMU project I’ve been leading on. Throughout the autumn, I’m doing a number of Proto-type projects, some of which are in totally new territory for the company, so my mind is likely to be filled with new and strange ideas. Somewhere in there I am determined to get a weekend away with Brian since we didn’t get a real holiday this year. I will also be finishing up the book I’m editing, hopefully. I guess I should be glad to be busy rather than sitting around washing my hair (if only I had hair…), but maybe I need to slow down just a bit…