Progress

The in-between week is over, and things are happening once more! Some good, some bad, but at least things are moving forward. The bad things are pretty simple, little bit of injury, some person life pitfalls which are making the rest of my life a little more interesting than I usually prefer, but it’ll be alright. As for the good, there is some serious good.

I am playing Roller Derby again with the Men’s team up here, skating with them once a week and god it feels good to be on skates again. They are still forming their team and getting it together, so there is not a lot of hitting or really agressive skating yet, but we are getting there. We are trying to come up with a derby name, and it might just be “Pink” because that is what everyone up here calls me (I have pink tape all over my equipment). I really do love this game.

Circus update: I have a show! My work (Bounce Gymnastics) is organizing a show for March 20. Nothing big or fancy, but it’s still a show, and that is fantastic. I am going to have a 6 minute dance/trapeze solo, and I finally settled on an idea for the story of the piece and I finalized the music this afternoon. The music is “No Signs Of Pain” by Azure Ray with a little bit of extra stuff added from the movie I found it in (Mouth to Mouth). The piece is going to be incredibly depressing, and part of the sound that I took from the movie was crying. The theme is Kali, and our relationship. For those of you who do not know our history, I will give you the nutshell version.

We met the summer of 2008 doing a piece for Beth Braun (one of the leaders of Zuzi) for the children’s museum, and we had an instant connection. Then when I joined the youth company that fall, and she was there too, it felt like we had been best friends for years. We worked on the winter solstice show very hard, and had lots of pieces where we worked together, the foremost being Nightflight, which was a piece with two duets in it, me and Kali, and Scott and Audrey. The piece opening night was a disaster, and the trapeze swung out from under Kali before the lights even went up, and she broke her left wrist and right foot (or maybe it was the other way ‘round) and I had to improvise almost the entire piece without her. That night had a very large effect on me and still does to this day. So this is what I am writing the piece about. Our friendship and how it grew and then the night where she fell. My title for the music and for the piece is Nightfall (my clever joke, the piece she was injured in was nightflight, but she fell, so it became nightfall). I have rehearsal several times a week (only one of them is official, the others are me coming in to choreograph, because I am used to dozens of rehearsals for a show, not 4). Should be a very exciting time. Some of the girls in my class are also doing a piece, and other people who work/take classes at Bounce are doing pieces.

I am going to try to get a video of the show for my own records, but also so I can show people back home!

I went to see Avenue Q the other day, and it ranks pretty high up there of interesting things that I have seen, to be sure.

Due to the crunchedness of my schedule on Tuesday, I was unable to publish this blog on time, but now I can add Wednesday updates as well (it is Thursday at 1PM).

We had our first rehearsal for the show last night, and I can tell you right now, it is going to be an interesting time. I am used to Zuzi, where the people in charge know what they want before they come in to rehearsal, and they tell us what to do and we occasionally put our ideas in. This is not what it is like. Nobody had any idea what we wanted (I would have brainstormed before, but I was under the assumption that Francia had it figured out) and it was a cluster… you know what. Too many ideas flying every which way, and a lot of completely amazing ideas that were also completely unexecutable. So, as it stands, my piece is getting choreographed at an amazingly high rate, which I am very happy with, and I have no idea how the show as a whole is going to work out. Performances do have a way of coming together very very well at the last minute though, and I am counting on that.

I was Mr. Spontaneous last night though, quite uncharacteristic of me… I was coming home from work, and I got to Eugene Station to take the EmX back to campus, and I see Ken and Colton! I met Ken and Colton at the rave this weekend. Now, I don’t usually go to raves, but I was “hired” to perform there and do some fire stuff, so I did, and I met these two. So, complete coincidence that I would see them less than a week later. Well, they invited me to chill with them, so I went to their friend’s house with them and stayed till 1:00 in the morning. I took my bike on the bus, without knowing where the hell I was going, and the bus almost left without my bike – I chased it a quarter of a mile and actually caught up to it. I don’t think I have ever run so fast in my life. Well, 1:00 in the morning, I found out where I was, and rode about 3 miles back to campus. Did I mention that it was 1:00 in the morning and it was about 35 degrees outside? I was quite proud of myself.

Well, I got home, and promptly crashed… Woke up at noon for registration, only to find out that I am not registering until 5:30. So, wish me luck at 5:30!