neeeeergaderg

I should have brought my big fluffy robe to school with me. Because it would help me feel a little less like crying today. Why? Because I have less than a week to come up with some brilliant design for Romeo and Juliet and I want something to wrap around my body and encase me in some kind of comfort. Maybe that's why I also really want to buy that Tenth Doctor coat.

RIP Opera Project

After a long hard struggle, the Opera Project at CalArts has finally breathed its last. It went into a coma three months ago, when it was brutally beaten in a back alley by the School of Music. It awoke again, a week later, but it was never the same. It had trouble communicating. No one quite understood this new opera. Only a month later it was on its way home from the hospital when the School of Music struck again. This time, it wasn't so lucky. In a series of risky operations and intensive life support assistance, they were able to save it, although it never woke from its coma. Finally, after months of anguish, difficult conversations, and a variety of proposals, the family pulled the plug. The life support system was cut and the Opera Project is gone.

May it rest in peace.



(only...what am I going to do?)

Bählamms Fest by Olga Neuwirth

That is the title of the opera I am to design in the spring. So exciting!!

Here is the only description I can find of the opera:
"It's impossible to summarise the action except to say that bizarre, horrific things happen: lambs and a shepherd get their heads ripped off, animals speak, and one of the main characters is seduced by her husband's brother, Jeremy, who just happens to be half man, half wolf (though which half is which is never made clear). The cast list contains roles for a spider, a bat, a cooked goldfish, the skeleton of a rat, and Henry the Dog. It is a typically surrealist dream world, whose sheer strangeness and compelling dramatic pacing are vividly evoked in Neuwirth's music. Her aural imagination has always seemed exceptional, and here the webs of sound with which she surrounds the voices (which speak as much as they sing conventionally, and are frequently subjected to various electronic enhancements) are compelling. The ensemble writing for 21 players also includes a prominent part for the Theremin, the early electronic instrument, now almost extinct, which was given immortality by the Beach Boys on Good Vibrations. Here its unearthly timbres lend yet more sense of dislocation to many of the textures in the opera."

Here is a clip of the music:

opera

They told me what the opera is to be.

And it includes:
dysfunctional families
ritual slaughterings
sexual perversion
werewolves
the waking of the dead


I was wrong. The opera is going to be bloody fantastic. I need to learn to trust Ellen's judgment a little more.

tear down this wall

I am, as of late, realizing how many walls I've built up around me and through me, to the point where I cannot move. I am not Lynne when I am at this school because I do not share my full and true self with very many people. There is not much truth remaining in the stony version of me. It's no wonder I feel so alone when I do not reach out to others myself. I'm just scared is all, because I care too much about what they think. I'm scared of getting hurt...again. The healing is so hard and so arduous. Yet what is life, but suffering? If I were the honest version of myself, I would just love. That's it. Love.

Funnyhouse of a Negro

The last play of this semester's CalArts season is Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy.

When I first read the play, I didn't get it. But seeing it...it reminds me why we do theatre. This performance that I experience tonight was so good (SO GOOD) that I feel completely speechless. I was on the verge of tears during their curtain call.

Design, direction, and acting were all cohesive and spectacular. The story (or lack of story) hits you hard in the gut and makes you think.

This is why I do theatre.

good night, and good luck

I sit alone in a dimly lit room typing away at the nothingness of the internet. I say nothingness because despite the hours and hours we devote to it, it gives nothing in return. We may feel like we're a community on these various social networking sites, but it's mostly a facade of timewasting. At least that's how I've felt over the past few months where my own personal internet exchanges have felt severely lacking in some way.

I heard a quote one Sunday at Cornerstone Church. Francis Chan said it, but he said someone else had said it originally, but I don't remember who that someone was supposed to be. Nevertheless it goes something like this: If nothing else, facebook proves that lack of prayer is not for lack of time.
Begging your pardon, but that was severely paraphrased. I know I wrote it down somewhere, but I can't seem to find it.

I suppose I could say that it is for lack of time that I have not updated this blog or my other one. I was quite busy with assisting on Hellzapoppin, the mainstage show at CalArts this fine fall semester. It would appear that it was when I received a break and finally allowed myself a moment to relax that the illness I have felt lingering in my body for the past month decided to spring up. Headache, sniffles, slight sore throat. It's only the beginnings, but I still have hopes that I might be able to beat it away with a big stick.

Hellzapoppin. An entertaining show that lacked coherency and tried to do to many things at once. I wished to feel that communal sense you get when you work on a show and get to know the actors and such, but since I was assistant and not designer, that didn't really happen the way in which I wished it to. I suppose the stress of trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing in my costume classes too would effect that. The designs I'm producing are not the designs I usually produce. I'm bored with the historicity of the class. My designs lack character. I am not investing myself in them as much as I should and this might have something to do with the high turn over rate of each project.

Suffice it to say that going to grad school is tough (not that I expected it to be easy). I think I expected it to be tough in a different way. Which way, I'm not sure. Sometimes I feel like the other people here are really just pretentious bastards hiding behind a facade of intellectualism and critique. But there are many who are not pretentious bastards and those are the ones I befriend more often.

And now I will change the subject and talk about Darren.

This is Darren:
Darren is my boyfriend.

Darren and I met online. The first thing he messaged me about was how Han Solo is a "witty gunslinger archetype." We've been going out for about a month now. I like him, he adores me, so it all works out. So....yeah. Don't really know what else to say about him.

Guess that's it for the life update. Until I have more to post to this silly thing: good night, and good luck.

Oh, and happy thanksgiving.

where my peeps at?

Something I'm just completely baffled by is that the other first year MFA costume designers don't seem to want to socialize together. I've tried organizing dinners or asking to do things on weekends and there's always this attitude of not wanting to or simply forgetting.

On the other hand, the set and lighting designers are all very friendly and want to socialize a lot. I've hung out with a group of some form or another 3 times this week. That's 3 times more than any other week this semester. I have a feeling that these people, rather than the costume designers, will be my network, my group, my homies, my posse.

Things are better when you've got a posse.


On that note, I think I should mention the insanity of this Friday evening. We went to an Indian restaurant (Karma) to celebrate Simon's (he's a set designer) birthday. There were ten of us. We had a wonderful time, talking and laughing, etc. The true fun began when we returned to the design studio on campus because Miriam (puppetry program) had decided to make a cake for Simon. This was no ordinary cake. They made the cake look like a big oak tree with angel food, tootsie rolls, and ho hos. The cake was featured on a piece of cardboard alongside a pile of cornflakes to simulate the sound of crunching leaves for the little action figure wrestler turned scarecrow to walk on. The design concept was to bring autumn to Simon since Simon is no longer in Philly.

This is CalArts.

I'm so glad that I'm here.


In other news: I joined NetFlix. Yay.

grad school musings

I have a class entitled Graduate Play Analysis. It is formatted quite similarly to the 20th Century Drama class I once had with Dr. Delaney. This class continuously provides wonder and strife for me.

Strife: I feel like the professors (this is a team taught class -- there are 3) are wasting our time with silly questions and obvious answers. They encouraged us in the first week to really work hard and dig deep into the texts, but in class, we barely skim the surface of possibilities. I learned more about Chekhov's The Three Sisters at Westmont than I did in this class. Utter disappointment.

Wonder: I am continually amazed by the marked intelligence and eloquence of my fellow classmates. Each week we are assigned to reflect on one of the provided questions about the play and post it on our class's wiki site. 250 words each. My peers, these colleagues of mine, discuss topics I would not have thought of myself and do so with such clarity, creativity and conciseness. They make me glad I'm here and I so wish to know them better.

arrived...

...and only mostly unpacked.

At least the bed and the clothes are done.

Oh.

I've
been
accepted
to
CalArts
holy
shit


I am in shock. I was not expecting this at all.
And when she said I was accepted, all I said was "oh."

humph

I guess that if you want to go with a yin-yang worldview that there are bad things that go with the good things and vice versa. Even though there were many good things that had happened yesterday, it ended very very badly. My stomach performed some really impressive gastronomical pyrotechnics. I was up about every half hour last night, throwing up absolutely nothing even though my stomach thought something was there. I'm really grateful to God that at least today I can stomach crackers, 7-up, and half a cup of noodle soup. I am also very very grateful that I have a mother who doesn't bat an eye at all this and has taken care of me so well. I can't imagine what it would be like to live alone and go through all this.

I'm just a little nervous because I've been trying to contact the costume designer at CalArts with whom I am supposed to interview with tomorrow. I've called her and emailed her. I need to move my interview to later. All I need is a day. There is no way I have the energy to finish up my portfolio tonight or the ability to drive out there early tomorrow morning.

things that are good

Talking with people
Knowing someone is praying for you
Regaining hope
Regaining perspective
Feeling a little less pain, a little less numb
Letting go
Trusting in Someone Bigger than you

And...
trying not to freak out over my grad school interview next week.


This passage completely convicted me this week:
This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.
1 John 3:10, 16-20 NIV, emphasis mine

kindness of friends, love of God

Terribly sorry to anyone who has missed me either on here or in comments. My life got much more interesting this last week in the form of Santa Barbara, President's Ball and a mischievous puppy. Said puppy is Tyler's dog, who chewed through my power cable, leaving me semi-computer less until the one I purchased from eBay finds it's way through the circuits of the postal service and into my arms. This also means that I cannot finish my grad school apps b/c my essays are on my dead computer and I can't plan my trip to the East Coast until I apply and set up an interview with Boston U, which means I can't request work off yet. The only thing I can do is write my fundraising letter for my Ireland trip.

I confess, I do like the break from worrying about grad school things. Once you accept that you are completely powerless to change something, it's almost freeing. Maybe God was giving me a gift of freeing me from worry for a few days. Why can I not do this with everything else in my life?

I ruined my back while in Santa Barbara. I went for a run on the beach and ran too much. Now my sciatic nerve is causing hell and my butt muscles rarely stop their spasmatic rhythms. Stretching, ice packs, heating pads, pain killers, they help. But then when you wake up in the morning, you have to start all over again because sleeping makes it worse.

Sunday I had had lunch with Elizabeth, one of my favorite people in the whole world! We talked about my play, what works well, what doesn't work well. We talked about life and grad school and our first theatre roles, the awful children who taunted us in elementary school. We talked about other things too that gave me things to think about and a spark of that unrelenting power of hope. However, this particular spark is not worth dwelling on, for it is another thing I cannot control.

Back to the dog - when I told Tyler's parents that their cute little dog chewed my power cable, they immediately offered to buy it for me and when I told them that the nearest Apple store was in Thousand Oaks, they gave me moeny and wouldn't take no for an answer. I was so blown away my their kindness. They have always been so generous and hospitable to me. I'm not used to it. I'm used to being the one to give that to other people. I think God is teaching me how to accept kindness. I think he's trying to show me that I don't have to be bitter and cynical against the whole human race as a selfish and ungrateful people and by showing me that, he wants me to see that his Love is a gazillion times bigger than that.

Another thing relating to this was going to President's Ball. I asked Tyler to ride along with him to campus. He commented at some point that night before we picked up the girls, that he thought it was funny because now he was taking three girls to the dance when he initially asked one. I pointed out that he was in fact not taking me, he was just giving me a ride. He then went on a rant about how people make the whole date to a dance thing too big of a deal, when it's just about having fun and enjoying the company of others. I agreed with him, but I did not say so. Because I didn't know what to say. After some reflection I understood it to be relating to this same problem of letting other people love me. To me, saying that he was taking me to the dance, that meant something...something in the way that I was more important than a shadow following him into a dance, more than a graduated resemblance of a person who once sang, danced, prayed, cried in that Gym, more than just along for the ride. I mattered as a person and his friend. I didn't say anything at the time because the emotion was too strong to understand. I want to be able to let grace, mercy, and kindness in from others, but I'm so afraid. I'm so used to taking my battle stance and fighting my demons on my own.

So there's a nice long post for you.

discouragement

I am not sure what to say. I'm a little in shock.

I went to CalArts today to visit the campus. I met with one of the costume profs. I don't even know where to begin in describing how awful this was for me. First off, she asks me why I like theatre. Uuuuuhh, right. So I give her my answer, it's the creating something out of almost nothing and calling it "mine." Nope, not what she wants to hear. Why do I like theatre? WTF? I thought I gave a perfectly reasonable answer! So then she tears apart my portfolio - my figure drawing is flat, I don't know how to draw or create something that communicates well. She filled my head with so many criticisms that I sat there completely dumbfounded and unsure of how to answer any question with clarity. Then she goes off on how she wants to see more of my fine art, because she sees potential in my fine art drawings (that's good right?), but she thinks it's really bad that I don't have any training in figure drawing, and that I need to go home, draw every day for two hours, copy the masters, and come back with a better portfolio. She gave me back my portfolio and told me to do it over! I didn't get to talk about my designs at all. That's the stellar part of my portfolio though! When I tell you about my ideas and how they are shown in my drawings and the finished product, I can really wow ya, but...nothing. She didn't even want to hear about that, apparently.

I came out of that meeting feeling humiliated, stupid, ignorant, uneducated, inexperienced, and lacking anything in the way of "artistic."

This does not encourage me to continue with my applications. I do want to do costume design, but at the same time I want to be apart of something purposeful and more than just entertainment. It really doesn't help that I've been questioning lately whether this costume design thing is really what I want to do. I have to do art, I have to do theatre. I want to do more than just design clothes. I want to dance, I want to write, I want to act! Oh, how I want to act. I'm a liberal arts woman of theatre. I want to do it all.

In other news, I got drunk for the first time Saturday night. I'm never doing that again, that's for sure. And I'm not going to mix my own drinks unless I have someone/somebook that tells me the right formula.

portfolio-ing

"Examples of work in theatre and/or film such as sketches, models, photographs of models, production photographs, rough sketches, light plots, blue prints of drafting, etc. (no slides or CDs, please). These do not have to be from realized production work.

Applicants in the area of costume design must include sketches for at least one script (15 minimum), including research, fabric swatches, and detail drawings, as well as five examples of figure drawing.

Include samples of your art work, such as drawings, paintings, models, sculptures, etc., or photographs of such art work (no slides or CDs, please)."


wtf is that supposed to mean?
15 minimum? Is that 15 sketches and only 5 designs? Do they want the full research to production photos lineup? So how much is supposed to be just prep work designing and fully realized? WHAT'S GOING ON??