Life in July

Who knew my July would be this busy: 32hrs of work + 17hrs of rehearsal?! Oh, did I mention summer school on top of that? Don’t get me wrong, this is great. I’m kind of getting a taste of the life I thought I’d have if I am doing theatre on the side of a full-time job. But there are things I didn’t expect:

1) Getting so many shifts for work. I work as a part-time theatre technician at SFU Woodward’s. And being a part-time tech, we usually don’t get called into work unless there is a show for us to work on. The SFU School for the Contemporary Arts is moving to this new building in the fall. Technically the campus isn’t officially open yet, so I didn’t expect it to host many shows, if at all. Little did I know that we would be there for days, weeks in a row, inventory all equipment and getting stuff ready for the move in. And now there’s a secret show on the 27th, who knows what else is in store for us?!

BUT I really can’t complain… because the pay is double what I was working for at Subway a year ago. AND I’m getting trained as a board op! Just had a session on the ion last Thursday. Awesome!

2) Rehearsals seem to be taking away all my free time. Well, I knew it was going to be like this, but since I didn’t expect to be so busy with work, I didn’t foresee rehearsals being so tiresome. I have to head straight to the bus stop right after work and zip it cross town to be at rehearsal on time.

3) School being extraneous and stressful. I am currently taking ONE class, Linguistics 100: Language and Communication. This is easily the easiest of all university courses. I missed six classes (3 weeks of lecture) in a row after the first midterm, which means I had about 15 chapters to catch-up on for the 2nd midterm. Good thing the professor doesn’t really test things from the text book. It serves more like a reference than anything. And good thing she puts her lecture powerpoints online so I can miss classes and not worry about missing material. I finished the 2nd midterm in about 40mins. Getting the results back on Tuesday… I think I did pretty decently —and by that I mean I don’t expect to fail.

4) Friends wanting to hang out but can never find the time. Because work and rehearsal takes up the majority of my time, there are limited times that I can hang out with friends. But it seems like there’s already an unending list of people who I should catch-up with. Those who require an entire day of my time keeps getting pushed back just ‘cuz I can’t spare that much time for one person right now. I can only do little chunks without running short on time… Another thing that’s affecting this is I’d like to catch a show (or two) that I really want to see. For example Broadway’s The Lion King, and Glengarry Glen Ross by the Arts Club starring Eric McCormack. Or special events that I’d like to attend, like the Vancouver Folk Music Festival this past weekend, and Playland for $9.45 on Tuesday nights until mid-August.

5) No time to write. Inspiration for potentially great entries have cropped up here and there, but if I don’t write some key words down or something, my mind is soon consumed with other things (work + rehearsal, most likely). And the ingenious post gets lost in the sea of business… which is such a shame. Though I suppose if there’s any writing in my spare time, my script should probably be top priority.

I’m beat. Slept for 11hrs last night after filming a wedding, and I’m still exhausted. Hopefully my habit of staying up late will soon change and I can get my life back on track.

July 5th, 2009

Wednesday night after rehearsal

I headed on down

Cambie and 18th

To Kino Café I went

Together with my family

Sat at a table near the front

At the feet of the performers

And enjoyed

A beautiful night out in Spain

My eyes full of admiration

For dancers of Flamenco

Why I Love Theatre

Death, I am sure, is like never being born, but death
is better thus by far than to live a life of pain,
since the dead with no perception of evil feel no grief,
while he who was happy once, and then unfortunate,
finds his heart driven far from the old lost happiness.
She died; it is as if she never saw the light
of day, for she knows nothing now of what she suffered.
But I, who aimed the arrows of ambition high
at honor, and made them good, see now how far I fall…

— Andromache in Euripides’ The Trojan Women.

This is presently my favourite text from a play. I would have never stumbled upon this monologue if I did not choose to take the FPA 357: Context of Theatre II course. This is the class that most people in the theatre program dread because this is probably the most difficult theory / art & culture studies class in the entire school of Contemporary Arts (at least that’s what I believe it to be). But having said that, I am enjoying and starting to appreciate the classic Greek tragedies that formed the basis of many contemporary plays.

Before, when people asked me why I like theatre better than film, I could never fully explain myself or give them an elaborate answer. I think I may have found my perfect answer now though. Following along on the required weekly reading list, I discovered a passage in Marcia Ferguson’s A Short Guide to Writing About Theatre that seemed to have extracted the passion I have for theatre right out of my heart and explained that exact feeling thoroughly:

Theatre is a meeting place where a variety of opinions and tastes can come together and experience the same play at the same time, in the same room, and elicit very different responses. This “liveness” of theatre distinguishes it from many other forms of contemporary media.
…
Theatre is one of the few remaining art forms that brings artists and audiences together for an event they experience at the same time, in the same place… If a play makes us sad, if it makes us laugh uproariously, or if it’s an embarrassing failure, our feelings about it are shared with other audience members, as they are with the performers themselves.

What can be more fun than that? You are doing something you love with the people who love doing the same things you love and then sharing that love with the people you love. What’s disappointing, though, is that even though you are trying to share that love with the people you love by giving them lots of opportunity to participate in the work that you love, they don’t appreciate it. (Am I getting too wordy here?) I remember hearing someone else say that theatre is like a prolonged social event. You make new friends and they become your short-time permanent family. Just by reading a play or being involved in a theatrical production, you are going through a phenomenal experience: mind-boggling in some ways and innovating in other ways because “…plays contain essential ideas, passions, histories, and emotions that use the materials of life to lift us to new ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling.” (p1, M. Ferguson) Your lives are being changed and transformed in ways you don’t even realize.

So why do I love theatre? “Theatre is life” (Peter Brook)!

Breaths of Fresh Air

Life is not measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breaths away.

If you observe carefully, you may be able to find times every day that takes your breaths away. And it’s those breaths of fresh air that keeps you in check. Whether it’s a wonderful delight or an ugly revelation, it helps to ground us in reality.

However rare, I try to remember these moments and turn them into writing inspirations at the end of the night. But sometimes when they are the ugly revelation kind, I try to not think about it too much. There’s too much ugliness in this world that it’d trap you in eternal depression if you are too pessimistic.

Being ignorant then means not changing the world for the better and possibly making it someone else’s burden. You proceed to wish that you breathed the wonderful delight kind instead. You hope that those problems will not catch up to you, that you’d be long dead before any of it becomes a state-of-emergency.

Then, at the end of the night when all is quiet and calm, you breathe deep and wish that someone was with you; to sit in the silence and enjoy breaths of fresh air with you.