Week 3

Well here we are week 3 of Blogging. What a long ass week its been. Good, bad, or indifferent we made it through.

Monday started the week off on a very busy note.  Meetings from 9am to 4:30pm with Tech starting for Dance Workshop at 4pm.  Surprisingly the meetings of Monday went rather well.  The one that will have to be followed up on is Show Assignments for next year.  Now I understand the desire that someone has to allow the incoming first years to have say in what they do but for all of the rest of us that are returning students this train of thought is rather frustrating as we are not able to plan, look forward to, or work on the shows.  Instead we have simply put a bandaid on these by assigning a SM representative to run meetings.  It just becomes more frustrating when you see that all of the other areas of the department are able to set who is working on what when we all have first years incoming. 

Tuesday was a nicer day in the sense that I had less planed but was a heavy hitter homework day.

Wednesday brought another full busy day of meetings and tech.

Thursday was the day of catch up.  Catch up on things around the apartment with laundry and dishes as well as catch up on show work and boy is there a lot of that to go around.  When you are in production for three shows at a time there is a SHIT ton of stuff to do and only one of those productions can be considered a minor production.  The goal for Thursday was to un-bury my inboxes since I consistently had 15+ notifications all week long that were action item emails.  Well at the end of the day I got closer but wasn’t quite able to fully get there.

Then came Friday which started off with a last minute meeting at 9:30am with my advisor.  Come the end of the meeting I left thinking boy that was a waste of a meeting.  Nothing like getting lectured to first thing on a Friday morning on a total of two things.  The first being something that doesn’t really have anything to do with me.  It was concerns from a student about another student that was not me, so I was like the 3rd party student getting questioned about it.  That was a bit off and I was like whoa IDK what you’re even talking about I’m fine.  

The second topic was the more frustrating of the two.  “When does a SM arrive prior to a rehearsal and how long do they stay afterwards?”  Now if you know me you I’m sure you have come to know that I have been doing theatre since 8th grade.  With that I’ve been involved in theatre for almost half my life now and I’ve been doing Stage Management from the very beginning.  I have learned a lot since I first started doing theatre and I have most definitely learned back in High School when the appropriate amount of time to arrive early to a rehearsal and the needs that need to be meet at the end of a rehearsal before I leave.  Now I’m not saying that I’m an expert here by any means but I would definitely say that I understand what is needed.  Now in this early Friday meeting I heard that it was practically blasphemy that I wasn’t in a room 15 minutes prior to a “run”.  In fact someone was shocked that I wasn’t there 30 minutes prior to.  Now hearing this I sit there and I’m like yeah ok.  I could see those being proper times for if I was doing a full 2.5 hr play that had lots of presets that needed to be taken care of and it was the only thing that we were doing that day.  Now this wasn’t the case at all with what was being called into question.  It fact it was so vastly different.  The team as a whole knew that we had just completed a full run of a 64 minute piece and that we had just finished with all of the notes dancer or tech related.  We had deemed before we broke for dinner that we would all be back in time for what each individual needed to prep for a hopeful 8pm places for a second run.  Well when we final broke for our “meal break” it was around 7:15pm. How in the world is an individual expected to eat outside of the space (per policy) in only 15 minutes.  They aren’t.  When trying to explain circumstances to my advisor in this meeting was futile.  He wasn’t listening nor making an attempt to listen.  So I do what I do when this happens.... shut up and let him finish so I can move on with my life.  It would be nice if my advisor would actually look at the circumstances of something and accept them for what they are.  Not every fucking production is the same and should be treated as such.  Each production is one of a kind and as they can all be approached with the same tactics/rules/policies one should ultimately adapt what they are doing to fit the individual specifications of that production.  There is no rule of thumb in theatre.

The rest of my Friday and weekend have been spent in performances for Dance Workshop and what I joy this process has been.  This particular team has been wonderful to work with in every way and makes me look forward to the time I will spend with most of them again during the Spring Dance Concert.

Enough ranting and raving for now.......