"we've decided you're the murderer"
Today we headed out to the Wrights Hill Fortress, a WWII gun emplacement made to stop ships out in the Cook Strait and also a shelter - that was never used because they finished it in 1945. Funnily enough, it's actually in my suburb, but I'd never been up there. The guns are all gone, sold, ironically, to Japan, the country the place was made to try and stop, for scrap metal after the war, but it was still really interesting seeing all the old machinery, and things sounded different in the tunnels, and ~space~ was just really different eighty feet underground. I loved the displays of wartime propaganda and info on New Zealand's involvement in the war, possibly because I never took history at school so I never really knew much about it. My favorite part was this display of the money used in the countries Japan occupied, like Sumatra and surprise surprise the Philippines - the fifty centavo bill cracked me up considering it's usually a coin.
And then on the way out we took totally the wrong path and spent several minutes lost on Wrights Hill and started discussing who would die first and who would turn out to be the murderer because "this is how all the horror movies start: A group of college kids get lost!" We had brilliant plans to subvert some of the conventions and have all the gay people live: "WE'RE SAFE! Oh, wait, there's quite a few of us in this class..."
We also went to St. Gerard's Church and Monastery out in Mt. Vic, one of those places I used to always see from a distance (it sits on the side of a hill very visible from the waterfront) but never went in until today. Used to be a Redemptorist monastery, got bought by a Catholic missionary group with members from all over the world who live there together and do everything like cook and eat together too. Lovely place, and I say that as someone who's usually a bit of an awkward turtle in churches, but I felt oddly at peace in the chapel. (If a little awkward as my classmates ran around looking at everything while my brain was going "IT'S JUST A CHURCH" with a side dish of "I cannot fathom any theater other than Easter plays and the Nativity in here".)
And today we performed and what remains to our director's mentors. They liked it! Though we're going to be reblocking the whole thing six days before we open 8| because we suck at working with the thrust stage. And my notes were about my ongoing issues with articulation (wrapping your tongue around words so that people who haven't heard them before understand is hard) and "more sass", which I struggle with because before I got told to tone down the bitch and have more compassion and now I can't find the balance. \(o_O)/ But we're getting a field trip to the airport (and what remains is set in the international departures lounge at Wellington Airport) on Sunday, which I am really excited about because I've been demanding a field trip the whole rehearsal process! Admittedly half of my demands were for a field trip to a farm because one of the characters is a dairy farmer and he's being played by a priest's son. But hey! Field trips.
And then on the way out we took totally the wrong path and spent several minutes lost on Wrights Hill and started discussing who would die first and who would turn out to be the murderer because "this is how all the horror movies start: A group of college kids get lost!" We had brilliant plans to subvert some of the conventions and have all the gay people live: "WE'RE SAFE! Oh, wait, there's quite a few of us in this class..."
We also went to St. Gerard's Church and Monastery out in Mt. Vic, one of those places I used to always see from a distance (it sits on the side of a hill very visible from the waterfront) but never went in until today. Used to be a Redemptorist monastery, got bought by a Catholic missionary group with members from all over the world who live there together and do everything like cook and eat together too. Lovely place, and I say that as someone who's usually a bit of an awkward turtle in churches, but I felt oddly at peace in the chapel. (If a little awkward as my classmates ran around looking at everything while my brain was going "IT'S JUST A CHURCH" with a side dish of "I cannot fathom any theater other than Easter plays and the Nativity in here".)
And today we performed and what remains to our director's mentors. They liked it! Though we're going to be reblocking the whole thing six days before we open 8| because we suck at working with the thrust stage. And my notes were about my ongoing issues with articulation (wrapping your tongue around words so that people who haven't heard them before understand is hard) and "more sass", which I struggle with because before I got told to tone down the bitch and have more compassion and now I can't find the balance. \(o_O)/ But we're getting a field trip to the airport (and what remains is set in the international departures lounge at Wellington Airport) on Sunday, which I am really excited about because I've been demanding a field trip the whole rehearsal process! Admittedly half of my demands were for a field trip to a farm because one of the characters is a dairy farmer and he's being played by a priest's son. But hey! Field trips.