Friday, February 22, 2008

Oh, February!

Hey!
Ginny and Amanda here. We just wanted to keep all you faithful readers out there tuned into what's going on in our humble home, the BSC theatre. After the excitement of Taming of the Shrew, the student-directed one-acts, and the two productions during interim, it may seem like things have been pretty quiet around here. Nope! This semester is one of the busiest that the two of us have ever had!

After we closed Our Town, both of us dove right into new productions. I (Amanda) am working on our spring musical, Sondheim and Furth's Merrily We Roll Along, which opens at the end of April. This production is a little different from most of our other ones. We are putting it together through a class, technically called Seminar in Theatre. That means that instead of coming to rehearsal every night, we meet to rehearse as a class in the afternoon twice a week. During this month, we have also had night rehearsals four days a week, in order to learn our music and our staging. We've all been in rehearsal a lot over the past few weeks! Starting next week, though, we will only meet during our class time, which leaves the theatre open for the other productions going on this semester, the Spring Dance Concert next week, and the two operas, The Telephone and The Consul, which take place in April.

Also coming up is our annual trip to SETC, the Southeastern Theatre Conference, in Chattanooga. Several BSC students are going to professional auditions at the conference, and others are going to attend seminars, make job contacts, and interview for technical positions. I am attending the conference as a part of our Miss Julie project. The students and professors who worked on that show and went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last summer/fall are leading a seminar about our experience. I'm excited about telling other theatre-people how we took our original production overseas!

Ginny here has also been pretty busy this semester. She's on the props crew for the operas, and she's taking a couple of important theatre classes. One of these is Intermediate Acting, which is a pretty challenging and intense acting class. Her first project was to find someone interesting, interview her and ask her to tell a story, and then try to act out her story. Ginny chose a girl who was really different from herself. She had to really figure out how to use her body and her voice to become someone else. That's not very easy! With that first project complete, now the intermediate acting class is ready to move onto scene work. We'll have to wait and see how that goes!

The other class is one that both of us are taking, Introduction to Stagecraft. This class is a mix of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors as well as theatre majors and non-theatre majors. We just finished our first two projects today. First, we had to design our own theatres. It was pretty fun, because we got to pretend that we had no budget, so we could create whatever we wanted. Ginny's group designed an off-Broadway style theatre house called the "Way the Heck Off Broadway Theate." My group created a 750-seat combination proscenium/thrust theatre called "The Runkefeller Center." Fun! We also just finished a sewing project, where we learned how to do basic sewing- you know, like sewing a button and making stage drops. That lesson would have been helpful when I had to sew what seemed like countless prop money bags for our production of Urinetown last year!

We also just had our Theatre Scholarship Day last Saturday, when we got to meet lots of prospective theatre students when they came to audition for Theatre and Musical Theatre scholarships. It was great to meet those kids, who came from all over the place, even if they were a bit nervous!

Ok, that's plenty long enough for now, don't you think? I feel like I've been typing for decades! We'll check in again later!

- Amanda and Ginny