New Business: VPI

The Gender Relations Center has started a Violence Prevention Initiative(VPI) this year that has put together several events throughout the semester.

The goals of VPI are to:

1) raise awareness about violence in the local community,
2) increase understanding about global violence,
3) promote the healing of survivors of violence,
4) raise funds for local non-profit agencies invested in violence prevention and service to survivors, and
5) serve as a flagship for violence prevention at other Catholic colleges and universities.

I am a member of on a subcommittee within VPI responsible for planning a VPI festival that we are going to have at the end of the year.  What that means for me is weekly meetings at the GRC with the rest of my committee to brainstorm, plan, and organize for the festival. Right now, I’m not really able to give away any more information, but hopefully the festival will turn out to be a great event.

Other events VPI has put together include a dinner featuring a panel of students and faculty to discuss sexual assault, and a writing workshop for writers to explore issues of gender and violence.

The Trip to Riley

The seven of us left South Bend at 6AM in one of the University’s nicest vans to perform at the Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. Google Maps was right; the trip only took us about 3 hours, which gave us a lot of time to kill between about 9:30 and our 11 o’clock start time. Luckily we had a few things we had to do to prepare for putting the performance in a space that we hadn’t rehearsed in.

Riley Atrium

Now this picture to the left from the Riley website is actually a great shot of the space we were working in, but as I know from experience, it’s a little difficult to interpret what you’re actually seeing. The door in the center looks like the original facade before an expansion. We weren’t sure if this was the actually the case or not, it might have only seemed like that to us because we’re used to seeing that in the stadium. To the upper left are twin glass elevators; at one point we caught a guy glued to the glass watching our show. I don’t think he knew we saw him. To the upper right you can see balconies on the second and third floors. As the woman from Riley explained to us, some of the kids aren’t allowed to leave their floors, but they were still able to watch us from up there. As you can see from the floor space shown, there really isn’t any good open performance space; the narrow part in the lower right is actually a wheelchair ramp.All the floor space you see in the picture we used as “backstage” to enter and exit from, and we performed in some relatively open space in front of that. There was a smaller triangular space on the other side of the ramp that worked pretty well for an “offstage” so we managed to utilize as much of the space we had to work with as we could. The key element of space that you can’t see in the picture is the fountain that went around two sides of the room, and added such wonderful back noise to the already challenging acoustics.

Our audience was probably about 30, but we also caught the attention of a lot of the staff walking by. Most of the kids were in the under 10 age bracket and had a staff member hanging out with them. A couple of them were in wheelchairs but for the most part they were all mobile and active. A couple of them approached us after the performance to say hi or take a picture with us. They seemed to relly like the performance, not so much the plot or the characters, as much as the fact that a bunch of people in cowboy hats were talking to them, they didn’t seem to know what was going on but they all had smiles on their faces. A lot of laughing at us more than laughing with us.

The fan favorite part of the show was by far the entrance of Buster the Evil Pig. At one point, Buster is trying to count to six, but gets hung up trying to remember what comes after three, and this kid right in front held up four fingers, hoping to jog the pigs memory. My other favorite reaction was from a very little boy, also in the front, who watched the whole show with mild interest, but during one of my lines about “Giant radioactive ants eating and smashing everything in their path and making strange noises from their antennae like AWOOOOGAH! AWOOOOGAH!” he went nuts and got super excited. It was pretty adorable. One of the most bizarre reactions wasn’t from one of the kids at all. About a third of the way through the show, this rando wandered right through the middle of our show and up the ramp, then, noticing one of the props that I had left up there, waved over the woman working there. She wanted to make sure that the staff was aware of the giant red tubes of plastic dynamite that had been so cleverly concealed in the middle of the wheelchair ramp. Luckily the staff was more amused by the woman than concerned about anything s. he wanted to draw their attention to. We couldn’t understand how she walked right through the middle of us without figuring out there was a play going on.

Overall, it was great experience, even though it felt over and done with pretty quickly. I only wish that the acoustics could have been better, but it didn’t seem to effect what our audience thought of the show, so maybe it was for the best.

New Business: Othello

This semester, my buddy Steve and I are directing Othello in an effort to revive the Shakespeare club which hasn’t mounted a show since Tempest my freshman year. We’ve been rehearsing for about a month now, and I’m having a blast with it; our cast is great and I think our approach is relatively fresh. We’re setting the play in the civil war and trying to produce the show as an American tragedy. The biggest change that we’re making from sort of the standard model is moving Desdemona away from this image of angelic, naive perfection, and trying to make her more modern and real for our audience. We’re also maintaining a lot of the comedy, which I would argue is inherent in the script. The show goes up around the weekend of April 16th, which is that Thursday, but we haven’t finalized which nights we’ll be performing yet. Still, I’m very excited to see what we come up with over the course of the next month; I have a lot of faith in this being a strong show.

Spring Break

That’s right, you heard it here first, I am officially on Spring Break. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean a tropical destination. I decided to stay in the Bend instead of going to Florida, so I’ve got a week of sleep, MK, and cleaning ahead of me. The big thing that I’m doing is working on a Children’s Theatre piece that a group of us are going to perform at Riley Hospital in Indianapolis on Friday. I’m playing the highly touted role of Goofy Lester in Cucumber Phil, a simple play about farmers having a tough time dealing with change and outsiders. We did a few run thrus of the play today, and my only concern is that I’m might be more entertained than any of the kids watching. I’m excited though, I haven’t really done anything like this before.

New Business: Day Job

I actually started this last semester, but I took on a job working as a research assistant for one of the professors of the FTT Department. Right now he is working on two books, both of which are textbooks for computer programs designed for the theater. The book on AutoCAD, which set designers can use to draft their sets, is nearly finished. My job was to go through and edit it, checking mostly for errors in the exercises prescribed in the book. The second one is on WYSIWYG, which is a program for lighting design, and so far all I have had to do is become familiar with the program to help him begin the book. I also do a little office work for him; this week I am organizing his receipts so he can do his budgeting for the year. Not very glamourous, but its good for me, and again makes me look responsible on a resume.

New Business: CCC

I figured I would attempt to start a series of posts talking about some of the new things that I am up to this semester. First up, I am now a part of student government at ND! I serve as a member of the CCC, which stands for Club Coordination Council. The main purpose of the CCC is to manage the budget for the money that the University gives out to all of the different clubs, but we also help to keep the clubs organized and informed. Basically in the spring of each year, each club makes up a budget and asks for a certain amount of money to be allocated to them from the club fund. Our job is to go through those budgets and recommend how much each club should actually get, based on their need and organization. I serve on the Performing Arts division, so I work mainly with theatre groups, dance groups and choirs. It’s fun for me because I get a chance to really pay attention to how performance groups are financed, but also, according to one of the girls in my division, it looks really good on a resume, because the budget we manage is close to a hundred thousand dollars.