Year in review Part 3
I moved into my new place with Shamus Reid. It was quite a lovely place. Fringe benefits included a maid service twice a month, a big ol’ flatscreen TV, and a wicked stereo. I continued work at the Shadbolt where sometimes the call was to tech a kids show. Conversations were as such:
Me: “So what do you want?”
Dance Lady: “I want a blue background”
Me: Ok, Blue cyc. Anything else?
Dance Lady: “Lights up and the beginning and then down at the end”
Me: “Ok. I’ll go get a book.”
I was assigned to be the in-house tech while Re-zil-yent: An Urban Ballet was in residence in the Studio Theatre. I got to shadow videographer, Jamie Griffiths. It was a fantastic experience. Videography is an area that I have had very little experience with but now I can see its potential and hopefully use it to my advantage. I also received some work on Granville Island which was great. A lot of technicians that I met up there were really great to work with.
I got to check out Final Fantasy (not the videogame) and the Bloc Party at the Orpheum. I was in onstage mob during the Bloc Party’s last song. It was wicked. I saw a preview of a play called Skydive. Amazing. They used these dance machines that were kind of like a camera crane but for people. They gave the actor the ability to do things like fly, float or walk up the wall. One of the wonderful things about it was that the company who produced it is a paraplegic theatre company and one of the actors had no control of his legs whatsoever but with the aid of the dance machines he could appear as walking or flying. It was fantastic to watch but I can only imagine how he felt while doing the play. Famous Puppet Death Scenes was another treat and I can only imagine how much better the puppetry could have been if it was viewed from a proper angle. There was one point where there was the death of a whale and it was a framed whale eye closing and it looked so real I would swear that there was a blue whale backstage. Wow. I also managed to pick up a lighting design gig for an amateur theatre company.
Kaya and I kept in very close contact and I grew excited for her visit in March.
March was really busy. Worked on 3 different plays amongst some random tech work. Kaya came to visit on the 2nd. Yay! I had a blast while she was in town. I only wish she could have stayed longer. We went to see George Clinton but that’s a whole other story. Good show nonetheless. We gather every Newfoundlander we could and went to a karaoke night and not even one of us got to sing. It was lame but we still had a blast as we walked arm in arm down Main Street singing the Ode to Newfoundland. I met a few of Kaya’s friends from B.C. We went to Victoria for an evening and thing out with her friend Steve and spent the night tripping out in residential Victoria. It is a very pretty place that reminded me of home (I was only in the residential area). My dad showed up in B.C. on his way to a conference in Indonesia. I was really homesick the week before Kaya showed but between her, dad, and Victoria the sickness went away pretty quickly. Kaya left again but in another month I would see her in Quebec so I took solace in that.
I got to check out Final Fantasy (not the videogame) and the Bloc Party at the Orpheum. I was onstage with the Bloc Party with a bunch of people for the last song. I saw a terrible Camera Obscura show Dad came back through Vancouver and we paid through the nose to go see a Canucks game but it was well worth it as it was something we had wanted to do together since I was a kid except that it was not the Canadians but there is still time for that. I continued working with the Re-zily-ent folk who were all quite lovely and great to work with. I ended up running the lighting board for them and man what a crazy show to run but I totally kicked its ass every time (after a lot of dress practice). TV on the Radio, were awesome and their harmonies are just as good live as hey are on the record.
My lighting design kicked into full gear. The director went out of town for 2 weeks so a run-through became really difficult to see especially because my work schedule was pretty heavy and my workplace and this theatre were on opposite sides of Vancouver. I worked from a videotape with minimal director feedback until a couple days before tech. I hung. They cut the risers. I re-hang and focus. They add a chandelier. I refocus again. They move the stage down 5 feet and widen it by two feet. I refocus again. I can’t say that I was overly happy with the results I achieved but I certainly learned a lot through the experience. Mainly a rolling with the punches attitude. A newspaper review did say it was adequately lit. I’ll take it as a compliment. I really do not want to do amateur theatre again though. When you rely on volunteers for crew you can get a pretty desperate crew the kind that make you believe it will go faster if I do it myself… and in a few ways it did but it took a lot of time away from tweaking that I had wanted to do. I question my color choices and wish that there had been a few more hanging position in the back. I also have no good pictures of this show as they got some schmo to do the photocall. Ugh.
I did my best to clue up and have fun when I could this month and a lot of fun came out of it. I got to go back to the Capilano suspension bridge which was my only memory of Vancouver other than my father throwing up on the side of a road with a migraine or me puking up pink because of a bad reaction to red cream soda. Buzzed my head but a hole in my ear. It was freaky. It seriously took me an hour to build the courage to go into the hair salon on top of the months of hmm’ing and haw’ing about in. I’m totally happy with the results though. Sweet freedom.
I had a lot of fun in Vancouver but I also felt really lonely at times. I found that the people were kind of closed off to new people. Sometimes I did not feel ‘hip’ enough. I missed my island where I could strike up a random conversation on the street. A paper put it as “Vancouver. A beautiful city on the edge of a rainforest where saying ‘Hello’ is like attempted rape.” The trip, however, did give me some perspective on the world outside of Newfoundland. A lot of social issues became clearer to me and this made me a lot angrier at a lot of the injustice within the world. If I ever produce anything there will probably be a strong social theme running through it. My Dad even commented while I was there that I was “too much of a socialist.” It was not meant as a dig just an observation as he falls somewhere in between. I said “Good. Perhaps you should start listening to me now.” He laughed. It was good to find out that I can pack up and leave and then start afresh somewhere else and find work to boot. It was very reassuring for my future if ever I should have to do such a thing. People were incredibly happy with my work there and it was a good boost to my rundown ego. I learned that I was very good at selling myself and networking. Those are good skills in my field. All in all I think I grew a lot as a person there.
I left B.C. on the 9th and departed for Thetford Mines again after an intense week of cramming in as much fun and goodbyes as I could. I got stuck in Montreal for the night and hung out with Greg Ryan and Justin Avery. On the 10th I was reunited with Kaya. I stayed with her for the next two weeks and tried to be the best Househusband I could be. I tried. The joyous thing about the trip was that this was one of the last steps before Kaya and I live in the same province again. We did what we could to have fun in Thetford. We hung out with co-worker and friend, Serena. The three of us went to a karaoke night filled with old dudes. We rocked the bar as best as we could and even got people dancing from time to time. My computer was being a pain and had to be reformatted…boo. Kaya and I went to Montreal the weekend that I was flying out. I finally managed to get a good look at the city. Love it. I would like to live there someday but first I need to learn some French. I found the language barrier crippling. We had a great time visiting friends and staying in our medieval suite (decorated basement). My trip to Quebec was a wonderful calm before a storm.
I was so unbelievably happy to land in St. John’s. When I was away I was surprised by how much I missed Newfoundland and by the end of the Vancouver adventure I was aching to get home. All the plays in that Anglo-Irish Drama course suddenly made sense. Through most of them there was a theme about the lure of the island and I was certainly feeling that. The first day I was home it was beautiful and sunny. I decided that I should take a walk downtown and ran into people that I haven’t seen in months, struck up conversation with people on the street, and wandered into pans for that evening. Ahh it was so good to be home. I went to see Belly Up that night I believe and then ended up selling shirts for Artistic Fraud for two nights. Belly Up was great and it provided me a good opportunity to work my way back into the theatre community. Paul Pope tried to wrestle Mark White and I. It was weird. I love Newfoundland.
Even more to come next week.
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