Friday, April 6, 2012
Saturday, April 7, 2012
With graphic design work, it's so easy to get sucked in and work for hours. It's interesting and creative and I just get absorbed. Started working around 9am and when I finally came up for air, it was 2 and ready to get dressed (sweats! again!) for Diablos rehearsal. I've been rehearsing, with eSe Teatro, to be a diablo at the Seattle Center on May 5. This means learning an Afro-Perfuvian devil dance, which I've been learning for the last 3 weekends now.We will be wearing devil masks (see image). There are parts of it that are really similar to tap and jazz, other forms I've studied before. But mind you, I am NOT a dancer. I've always kinda sucked at dance. I'm not graceful, for one thing. For another, I've always had a problem picking up steps. They have to be broken down to the most rudimentary of levels for me, and I have to do them a lot verrrrry slowwwwly before I can get anything close to the actual time they're supposed to be in. I took Jazz dance at Westlake Dance Center (WDC) for about 3 years back in the 90's. I was never really any good at it, but with perseverance, I *did* get better. Plus, one of the teachers I learned from, Sheri Lewis, was a really patient instructor with me, and I learned a LOT from her. Also, I felt like she actually LIKED me. I usually think all teachers dislike me, so I thrived as much as I was able in this environment. Towards the end of my time there, I finally started to get to the point where I didn't have to THINK about the steps as much but was just able to trust my body to a degree. Still not a pretty or graceful dancer, but at least I could get the combinations much faster. So, fast forward 15 years to 2012, and eSe Teatro. Haven't really done any dancing since the three years of Jazz. I've done lots of theatrical movement, even choreography, but none of it was very complicated, nor did I have to be graceful. However, it is a similarly welcoming environment...and considering the abuse I've dealt with at my day job for the past 2.5 years, it has been nice to have this place where people welcome me in at least in some corner of my life! But back to the dancing, I've picked it up at a surprisingly quick rate. For ME, anyway. I thought I'd be struggling with everything and far, far behind, but I'm not only keeping up, I'm actually towards the top of the pack of devils, in terms of picking it up, which NEVER happens. I've noticed that that thing I had started to acquire at the end of my time at WDC has actually persisted, despite years away from dancing. I don't have to THINK about the steps so much, I just listen to the rhythm and my body kinda GETS it. Mostly. The switch got flipped back then, and I guess it's like riding a bicycle: you don't forget.
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Things Accomplished since Day of Firing
Friday, March 30:
Saturday, March 31:
Sunday, April 1:
Monday, April 2:
Tuesday, April 3:
Wednesday, April 4:
Thursday, April 5:
Wow - it's good to see an itemized list - proving I really have been quite productive over the past 7 days. I vow to continue doing so from today onward, and opening myself up to opportunity and possibility however it decides to present itself. I am so blessed now, as compared with last time around (unemployment circa 2008/9): the network of people in my life is so much larger, the job market itself is healthier, I have a greater variety of skills to draw on and now there's a crazy cat and an intense boy in my life. And most important of all, my brain is in a better place...I no longer feel inadequate and useless. There is some floundering in my absence. This actually occurred exactly a week ago, last Thursday, 3/29/12. Best day of my life. The moment I walked out of the building, I felt like an oily veil of fear, doubt and chaos was lifted and I could see more clearly than I'd been able to in a LOOOONG time.
But of course, now I'm unemployed, and have to figure out what to do with that. I'll be okay for a little while, and an even longer while if I am able to collect unemployment (which may be an uphill battle, but I have smoking guns and am prepared). Of course, I remember being unemployed last time, for over a year. It was really hard. Specifically on the psyche and spirit. No one could come out to play, and many days morale was so low that I didn't ever make it out of my pajamas. The job market was so bad I just got discouraged and at points, just stopped submitting my resume because it felt like it was just getting lost in the email void, never a "We've received your resume, thank you" or a call for an interview or...NOTHING. During that time, I sent over 150 resumes/cover letters out and got TWO interviews. One led to a 2nd interview. But otherwise, nothing. This was where it started - my devaluing of myself, that is. I had just come back from grad school where I had excelled - 4.0 for three years straight, while consistently meeting all my assistantship hours and participating in a variety of theatrical productions in multidisciplinary capacities - and an outside job to boot. Then I got back to Seattle and suddenly, I was nothing. No one would hire me. Many in my previous theatrical network had left town. The economy tanked. Finally, I got hired at a small theatre, mostly because I'd designed brochures for the AD before grad school. So desperate was I to have gainful employment at that point that I accepted the low salary and dove in with both feet, despite knowing the AD was a "challenging personality". I did okay for the first year and a half or so. But then the AD got sick and things started to go downhill, in terms of everything got piled on me and the Education Director. Lots of work, but no more compensation. And by the time she returned, I was dancing perilously close to complete burnout. I hung around through the summer with a bad attitude, and things seemed to get a little better in the fall - interesting projects to publicize, fun outside people to work with. But despite hiring an assistant, new and more complicated work got piled on...but still - no added compensation, no word of how I was doing, nothing. There was never any catching up - I was always a hamster in a stationary wheel. In the month preceding my dismissal, things had started to come to a head...and the funny thing is, my getting canned had more to do with getting OTHER artists at the theatre some kind of small budget than anything to do with my own salary. Now that I'm gone, I see how I've allowed my love of theatre to be taken advantage of and how I've allowed myself to be devalued and more importantly to FEEL less than or mediocre...something which started while I was unemployed and persisted through this roller coaster employment situation. Well...no more. I'm hanging up my gloves in the Carolynne vs Carolynne fight. I have some mad skills. There are a ton of things I'm actually quite GOOD at! And instead of wasting all this energy feeling like I suck at everything, am going to expend the energy celebrating those skills and honing them even more. GO ME! As I was driving home from Olympia this afternoon, it occurred to me I could use my unemployment as a great jumping-off point for this blog that keeps stalling. Make a commitment to myself to either get out of the house at least once each day or do something significant at home that has to do with honing these skills. And now that I actually have the time to write...here we go! I initially clicked on someone's "Pinterest" link in Facebook because I (silly, silly theatre person) thought it might have something to do with Pinter, as in, Harold Pinter, well-known (and recently deceased) British playwright famous (infamous?) for writing in long pauses.
NOPE. Didn't have anything to do with Pinter, but in fact is yet ANOTHER new social networking site that has to do with PINNING. This sort of made me cringe. ANOTHER ONE? Shit. And because I'm in PR, I have to keep up with the kids, so I can't exactly ignore it. SHIT. So, I asked for an invite. Not sure what that whole thing is about...are they trying to make it feel exclusive? I dunno. They sent me an email saying I was on the waiting list, then a couple hours later, I got an invite, and I joined. I haven't entirely figured out what it's about yet, but so far, I'm thinking it might actually be a useful site for an artist, especially a visual one, but helpful for theatre projects as well. Basically, all you do is put a "Pin It" button on your bookmarks bar and any cool picture or page you find anywhere online, you can pin, and it will put it in a specific bulletin board you can categorize. I have these categories so far: Foood!, Horror, Books Worth Reading, Mythology & Folklore, Spaces and Places, Typography and I am Dead of Cute. Predictably, I've put more pins on Fooood! and Books Worth Reading, so far. Also, haven't had much time to think about it, truthfully - this has been one HELL of a week - both HELL (tech) week and just a HELL week. But I can see it being useful for a collage artist such as myself, and one who likes to compile image bases for projects. Not sure it will work for PR purposes, but I guess time will tell. We shall see what we shall see...I will try to continue to keep up with the kids and figure it out. I'm still working on Twitter, have definitely gotten comfortable with Facebook and blogging (HA!), but Google + still hasn't taken off for me. I suppose I ought to check in soon and see where we're at in the show, so I can go out for curtain call, during which I have more stage time than my whole part! I have to say, it is hard having such a teensy part. And not out of any need to BE A BIG STAR or anything like that, but because I really enjoy acting, and there's really not enough of it for me in this play. Even if I had one meaty scene, that would be fine. But just a few lines without much to do other than get the information across quickly and truthfully...it makes me miss getting to really dig in and be present with another actor. It was especially poignant during the eSe fundraiser the other night - I was reading a love poem with another woman - she read in spanish and I read in english, and we did it as though we were reading the poem to each other. Midway through, I realized they had just voted for same-sex marriage here in Washington State just one day before, and that somehow hit me and reading through the rest of the poem with that in mind bumped the stakes up that much more! The audience cheered when we were done.
Here for this show, I'm just onstage and out, delivering a message. There's not enough meaty in there for me, and way too much time sitting on a cold floor in the wings, walking around the corner to get on and offstage, and hanging around backstage. Argh. I don't think I ever need to do another tiny role like this again - though the director said some very lovely things in the opening night card she gave me tonight, and everyone in the cast has just been lovely to work with, a REALLY GREAT group - there's just not enough acting in here - don't feel like I really get to flex my muscles. I guess it's a great exercise in humility. Now I have to come up with three to get caught up. What a trying day it was today. What a trying economy we're living in. I miss my job at Cornish College - I was NEVER, EVER stressed out there. As I wait backstage, I am hoping the Universe will see fit to send me a life preserver of some kind. It doesn't have to be huge, I am happy to take my own actions, I'm not lazy, but something I can recognize and grab onto. Whatever that may be. Maybe I just need to dream a little bit...it worries me that I've been too exhausted even to dream. Between the job, the rehearsals, the shows, the eight hats I wear at work, the boyfriend, the kitty, the paying of all the bills...there's just not much time in there for me, whereas at one point, there was copious time.
I feel envious of people who just quit everything and travel the world. I don't think I could do that. Or could I? Could I just drop everything and take off? I'd have to figure out someplace to leave the kitty, for one thing, and either sell off nearly everything I own or find a place to store it. There's the idea of applying for a Fullbright...don't know if I could do that as a student anymore, since I'm now 4 years out of grad school. Don't know if any of these are necessarily the answer, either. I just know I need more time to rest and dream. I need more time to cultivate my own projects. I need time to freaking EXERCISE REGULARLY again! Something's gotta give around here, and really, I know what it needs to be, I just can't financially do it right now without some kind of lifeline. Are you listening, Universe? Please. Anything recognizable would be AWESOME! With the 16 minutes left in Valentine's Day, I just have to gush for awhile about the fundraiser I was part of this evening with eSe Teatro: eSe Amor: Great Works of Love.
For starters, I wore ALL RED. I usually wear black on Valentine's Day, but I went for red this year. It's my 2nd Valentine with a Valentine, and my Valentine came to the fundraiser to celebrate with me as I did double-duty as a performer for the event. They went ALL OUT, it was a smashing success - congrats to all involved - it really was an extravaganza. As someone who's gotten used to the "toothpicks and duct-tape" approach of Stone Soup, it was nice to be part of something that pulled out all the stops to begin with, and exceeded its own expectations because of it. The Bullitt Cabaret at ACT was transformed into a sultry speakeasy with food art on naked bodies, seductive South American dance numbers, singing sirens and erotic literature and poetry. We were all dressed to the nines in floor-length gowns and glittery jewels. (and I MUST give a shout-out here to Kaitie for loaning me that Curly Girl book - I did the whole "leaving my hair in the gel cast" thing all day, and when I shook it out as I was getting into costume for the performance, it behaved EXACTLY as I was hoping it would!) It was SO much fun! And it was inclusive. That's something I've loved about eSe from the beginning - they've never felt cliquey or exclusive to me - I've always felt very welcomed, which is not a natural state for me, as the weird kid not many people liked during school years, and I still feel a measure of that in Seattle's uber-icy and too-cool-for-school theatre scene. But not when I'm working with eSe. Which makes me want to work with them more, not to mention the interesting projects they're continuing to do. I guess I am a Seattle Latina taking stage tonight. Also, to mi amor, hell has frozen over with this serial spinster celebrating a SECOND non-single Valentine's Day. Thanks for the duck eggs and everything else. <3<3<3 I've always felt a little sheepish calling myself "Hispanic" or "Latina". I'm mostly a whitey - my ancestors all came from Europe - it's just that some of them came by way of South America afterwards. In high school, probably because my Dad wrote that we sometimes spoke Spanish in the home on some form, I was invited, along with all the other hispanic students, to a special field trip away from school. I decided to go - what better than an excused absence from the daily routine of classes?
In Boulder, Colorado, "hispanic" meant mostly "Mexican", and there I was, surrounded by a sea of Mexican Americans and probably a few illegal immigrants, and the folks leading the assembly were talking about La Rasa and Hispanic Power. Once again, I felt weird and sheepish, like some kind of imposter - though no one treated me as though I didn't belong, and there were a few other classmates at the rally who I'd known in some cases since elementary school and hadn't known they were hispanic, because they, also, did not "look" the part. But I also secretly liked feeling included as someone a little different from the other Boulder whiteys. Since then, I've put "Caucasian" and "Hispanic" on forms where it was allowed, most often feeling a little sheepish and a charlatan. It wasn't until graduate school, a few years ago, that I started to really consider what this all meant. I was working on an oral presentation for my dramaturgy class that focused on "Pan-American" playwrights. I began researching several contemporary playwrights who self-identified as Latino and discovered that many of them had similar backgrounds to mine - one North American parent and one South American, brought up in the USA, etc. Also, there is a stereotype about Latino and Latin American playwrights that I realized holds very true for my own work as a playwright - the focus on Magic Realism. In short, if these playwrights could proudly call themselves Latinas, why couldn't I? Fast forward a couple of years later when, out of grad school for awhile, I was invited to perform in Luis Alfaro's Electricidad (a barrio take on the Greek Electra) with a budding new Seattle company called eSe Teatro, made up of a group of mostly American Latinos. Were this company in Boulder, or San Diego, it would likely be made up, again, of Latinos of mostly Mexican descent. But here in Seattle, I performed with folks of Peruvian, Cuban, Nicaraguan and Ecuadoran descent, to name a few, in addition to Chicanos. The striking thing was that, oddly, more than with any other theatre company or group I'd ever worked or socialized with, I actually felt like I belonged. They were not cliquey, and it didn't matter that I didn't "look" hispanic. I speak some Spanish and I've got a Uruguayan background, that was good enough for them. The more work I do with eSe and the more they invite me to events and readings, the less weird and sheepish I feel about calling myself a Latina and the more I feel like there's a place for me in that rich patchwork. Tomorrow night, I get to take a brief break from Young Man From Atlanta tech madness and go perform in both English and Spanish at eSe Teatro's fundraiser, eSe Amour: Great Works of Love. This is the 2nd time I've had the privilege of performing with eSe, and they've invited me to read in two or three readings as well.
Some folks might not know about me that I'm a first generation American on my mom's side: she and my father met while he was doing a stint teaching basketball for the Peace Corps in her country, Uruguay. Half of my family lives here in the States and speak English; the other half live in Uruguay and Argentina and speak Spanish. Though we always spoke English at home, I am bilingual, as a consequence of living in Spain when I was three, and attending a Spanish pre-school there. Apparently, I came home one day speaking Spanish, and that was all she wrote. It has been in my head ever since. The only chance I've mostly gotten to speak it, however, has been during visits to my relatives in Uruguay, and occasional vacations in Mexico and Spain. Once we got back to this country and I was a teenager, however, it was not cool to speak Spanish. My parents tried to persuade me to take Spanish language classes so I could learn to read and write in Spanish - they said it would be an easy A. I rebelled and took French. They would parade me in front of their friends and ask me questions in Spanish. I would answer in English. And so on. By the time I was an adult, I figured any fluency I had was pretty much gone, since I never really spoke Spanish all that much, and even when I went to Uruguay for a visit, my parents and siblings were with me and I talked to them in English. One Christmas while I was in college, after visiting my immediate family in South Africa, where they were posted, I flew back via Uruguay for a week. This time, I had no one to speak English to and I had to dig back into those language centers of my brain and dig out that fluency...and it was the strangest thing when, after a week of speaking only in Spanish, I was starting to think in Spanish. My mother phone me from South Africa the day before I was to fly back to the States to check up - she spoke to me in English...and it took me a moment to switch back. What an odd experience! It really hit home that once you have a fluency in a language, it never really goes away - you just have to take it out and dust it off for a few days and it's forever in those language centers of your brain. I've since visited Uruguay twice more without immediate family, and had this same experience of my Spanish returning after a day or so of constant use. This copious amount of time to sit around and wait makes me realize it's been quite a long time since I've had a really tiny part in a play. Meaning less than a minute of stage time total. My first role back in Jr. High when the bug first bit was such a part - I had lost out to Laura Culberson the role of Dagmar in I Remember Mama (John Van Druten) after a series of callbacks where the director couldn't make up her mind. As a consolation, the director created a small, one-line walk-on role for me in the second act: "Hotel Guest Child".
The next thankless role was my first year at Colorado State University in Brecht's Mother Courage, when I played "Scene 8 Woman". I got to wear old-age makeup and collapse from hunger after saying my one line, which I still remember: "There's nothing doing here either. Let's go". In a German accent no less. It was actually an important role for me at that point in my college career, however, as I got to meet and bond with other folks in the theatre department that I wouldn't have otherwise met. I ended up winning a department award for that role - can't remember award's title, but it had something to do with fulfilling your tiny duties and having a good attitude about them. Other small roles occurred. I had several with no lines but way more stage time and movement. A non-speaking fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream; an non-speaking attendant in Antigone...and several small roles in Romeo and Juliet. I took up crossword puzzles during this run. That was in 2002. 35 shows under my belt since then and all of them either leading or meatily supporting. And here we are at the Young Man From Atlanta with a four-line role and not much else to do but sit backstage and write in my blog! The director mentioned it'd be pretty thankless, but I DO still get to be part of this ensemble. I still get to speak some Horton Foote, however little. I don't make a habit of accepting tiny roles, because they're usually not offered to me. And there's something about getting to ride through the journey of a character through the a whole production of transformation that is extremely satisfying as an artist. I likely won't do it again unless there is some exci |
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