Performances, forearms, rejections, directors week, May show theme, AND costumes & makeup!!! *phwhew!*

So yeah...as the title probably suggests, things have already started to get a bit hectic around here.  As we approach approximately one month until the end-of-year ProTrack shows here at NECCA, there is a whole lot of stuff that has been going on.  I've been meaning to write a blog post for a while, but I've been so darn distracted by everything lately that I haven't been able to find a time where I could sit down and comfortably write a blog post.  Well, anyway, here I am, figuring that I might as well write a new one before there ends up being too many topics to talk about.  Since it's been a little while (actually, it's frequently a little while, which is why my blog posts often tend to be so huge), this is really a six-in-one of normal sized blog posts blog post, conveniently structured in concordance with the title!   Yay!  Here we go:

1. Performances
On March 26 and 27, I had the wonderful opportunities to perform at both Brandeis University as a part of their Relay for Life in Waltham, MA and the Bindlestiff Cavalcade of Youth at Cony Island, NY.  I spent the week beforehand preparing a 4.5 minute single point trapeze act, which wasn't necessarily intended to be related in terms of style to my final single point trapeze piece for the end of the year at ProTrack.  I ultimately found the decision of having two separate single point trapeze acts beneficial for two reasons: 1. I'll now be able to use both of the songs I was debating over for my major (I used "You Don't Know Me" by Apparat for these performances, whereas I'm going to be using "Mission" by Beats Antique for my final performances at ProTrack).  2. It enables me to be able to sell both a static-height and dynamic-height act.  Initially, when I was considering the technical details of my major, I thought it would be best to make an act that didn't utilize the pulley system (which can raise and lower the apparatus) for sake of it'd be easier to sell and accommodate to more performance spaces.  Now that I have an a presentable act that is for static height single point trapeze, I feel much more free to work to my heart's content with the pulley system they have at NECCA, which has been great so far!

The performance at Brandeis was set up by one of my camp friends' mom, Marci Diamond, who is also a graduate of the university (as a sidenote, for those of you who don't already know, this is also the college I'm planning on going to after ProTrack starting January 2012).  I was performing with her, her daughter, Marisa, my two camp friend Llama and Doug, and another performer who has been training at NECCA some, Rocco.  We set up an aerial rig, put together an intro and finale in about five minutes, and each performed our pieces.  It was a lot of fun to perform and see my friends, and definitely nice to see how much everyone had improved.

The Bindlestiff Cavalcade of Youth performance is a simple sign-up-and-go one-time performance.  I figured it'd be a fun thing to do, not to mention a good start to beefing up the performance section of my résumé.  It was a fun performance.  There were some people from Smirkus camp that I recognized there, but nobody I really knew knew.  Regardless, below is a combo video of the two performances:

Auditions for L'École de Cirque de Québec

So, as probably quite a few of my Facebook friends already know, late Thursday through Friday I was in Québec, Québec with three of my friends from NECCA (one also from ProTrack (Morgan), and two from the Intensive program (T and Kirby)) for the L'École de Cirque de Québec auditions (in the rest of this post, L'École de Cirque de Québec is to be mentioned as ÉCQ, which is not to be confused with ÉNC, which is L'École Nationale de Cirque in Montréal, Québec).

Anyway, first and foremost, there was a lot of French, and like my 11th grade class trip to Spain, it made me really disappreciate the way that foreign languages were taught in high school.  Anyway, about said Canadian journey:

We left by car Thursday afternoon after a somewhat intense day at ProTrack.  The most ridiculous part about that training day was that during conditioning they had us do an ungodly number of frog jumps.  I literally got to the point where my muscles were simply giving out on me and I could barely just get myself even a foot off of the ground.  Afterwards, when I'd try to squat, my legs would completely buckle.  It'd felt like gravity decided to double every time I'd bend my knees.  While it was overall very fascinating from a physiological standpoint, it wasn't exactly the ideal state to be in the day before of a big audition.  Regardless, what is done is done, and I managed to go through the entire audition with absolutely ridiculously sore quadriceps.  Fortunately, I don't think it ended up affecting what they saw of me very much.

Anyway, the car ride was six hours each way, with the US-Canadian border to divide the ride in half.  It was a long ride, yet still very manageable thanks to being in a car with three absolutely wonderful people.  It pretty much rained/drizzled a good part of going up there (what else is new) but wasn't to the extent as to pose an impediment to our travels.

Progress - slowly but surely

Well, let's just say it's been a pretty crazy past couple of weeks.  Even just last week I recall myself having pretty much yet another mental breakdown about the whole circus doo da.  It's been happening to a lot of us at ProTrack at varying intensities.  These past two weeks, we've had presentations for both our major and our minor (one each Friday), and the development process for both was just incredibly stressful (particularly so emotionally).  For both, I just struggled with being satisfied with what I created.  I've really been trying to keep my expectations set high, because as a result of this training program I want to leave with an incredibly broadened, advanced skill set, yet at the same time it just makes it difficult when a lot of your role-models are ÉNC graduates and world-renowned professional circus performers.  Sometimes things that originally seemed inspiring can ultimately turn into something incredibly demoting.  During preparation for both of these presentations, I sent myself into a somewhat of a mental oblivion, for every time I would videotape myself doing a skill or sequence of skills, it would never be up to the standards that I had set up for myself.  My standards for myself are somewhat inordinately high, and I also feel like similarly for all of us, our standards increase as our skill level increases, always being one step ahead of our current abilities.  Once you finally master a trick, it no longer seems quite as impressive to you, and it's sometimes easy to forget the power a trick can have to just the typical bystander.  I was pretty aware of this anyways, but at the same time, it was still difficult to work through.  Regardless, both of my presentations came out satisfactory.  I still don't think they were spectacular, but for the purpose that they served I thought they were satisfactory.  I additionally got some nice feedback on both as a part of our peer-critiqueing process.

For my major act, I put together a bunch of tricks I had been working on, switched the song up, and experimented a bit with adding in a bit of floor movement.  A video is below.

An overdue update

It's honestly been two months since I've provided a worthwhile blog update, and to be quite frank, it most simply comes down to me being a bit lazy.  So, let me give you guys a rundown on the key things that have happened since I wrote in early November about how we were entering a new phase of ProTrack (i.e. - once we started show preparation).  I'm also including two videos in this post, so be sure to click the see more link if you're interested in watching them.

November 2010 - December 2010: Preparation for the winter show ("The Flying Nut: A Starry Night")

ProTrack got broken down into four groups, as decided by the staff.  The winter show is entirely staff directed, so all we basically are doing is performing in a show that fits the artistic vision of our coaches.  It's definitely a good experience for us to have, since things like that happen all the time when producing any sort of performance.  I got cast for the rope group (representing the element of earth) along with three others.  The other four groups were trapeze (representing the element of air), partner acrobatics/dance (representing the element of fire), and hoop diving (representing the element of water).

In November, we began our show preparation on Tuesday and Thursday mornings by training for an hour with our act for the show, and continuing as normal with the other hour in our general skill development rotations.  As we progressed into December, we would spend two hours each of those mornings working on the winter show, and, if I recall correctly, we also began to use Friday mornings for purposes of show preparation as well.

I finally decided on my major and minor!

Yes, you read that correctly.  I actually made a decision about my major and my minor!  We ultimately have to have at least a good idea of what we're doing for our major and minor acts for the end of the year before we do our winter show this December 18-19.  The deadline has been creeping up on me, and I've found myself to be very undecided about what I wanted to do.  Anyway, here is my final* decision:

Major: Single Point Trapeze

Minor: Aerial Chains UPDATE: Handbalance/Contortion/Floor Acrobatics (see bottom)

*yes, technically, if some sort of inspiration otherwise dawns upon me in time, they most certainly could change, but this is what I'm sticking to in my head for right now.

I had been thinking about doing single point trapeze as either my major or my minor for a little while, and as well had thought long and hard about the advantages and disadvantages of choosing two aerial acts.  Ultimately, I decided that yes, two aerial acts is what I want to do.  When I talked to Elsie about the notion of two aerial acts in my last staff liaison meeting, the said that it'd be suggested that one apparatus be a bar apparatus and the other be a vertical one.  She also mentioned the idea of using a custom apparatus, such as tippy lyra, a trapeze with fabric ropes, or a loop at the bottom, or really any combination of things you could think of.  Many of the apparatuses that I thought would be interesting ended up being either bar apparatuses (which would mean that I'd likely have to drop the whole single point trapeze idea), too complicated, or better suited for a duo act.  Ultimately, I thought to myself about chains.  Originally, I didn't think they'd be the best for a major or a minor because I found them so limiting, but what I figured was that since we have four solid months to be building these acts, I'll have a lot of time to experiment and see what works transferred over from fabric/rope and what new things can be invented that take advantage of the chains' inelasticity and weight.