Working Hard and Having Fun!

Hi Everyone!

I know, it’s been a long time since you’ve had a blog post from me. I guess we’ve just been keeping busy by working hard and having fun! It’s so great to be back with everyone working on a show again, especially now that we have so much time! In the fall, we put One Man’s Trash together in just seven days. We did it! And it was pretty good! But we threw that show together so fast that it was just too fast. Now, we have three weeks! We are upping the skill level, changing things, adding things, cutting things, and growing things!

We are all living together in an AirBnb in Rochester. Every morning we wake up and collectively make our own separate little breakfasts, and then we go to Roc City Circus where we’ve been doing creation and rehearsals. We warm up together, and then start every rehearsal with group acrobatics. This mostly consists of throwing and catching Maeve, or making her climb to the top of a pyramid. Then we break up into smaller groups based on acts, and throughout the day we have a number of time blocks to work on other skills. Handstands, contortion, diabolo, various aerials, not to mention clowning! At some point we gather for lunch, and then closer to the end of the day, we all get back together for character work and club passing.

Week One was mostly skill building and act creation. Week Two is going to be a lot of show building, and finding ways to incorporate the ensemble into everyone else’s acts. Week Three will be running the show over and over again, a luxury that we didn’t have in the fall! I am excited to see how things turn out this time around.

Anyway, each day after rehearsal, a different pair of us is scheduled to make dinner for the group. While they are home cooking, everyone else stays a bit later at Roc City Circus to coach workshops and private lessons, and when they get back to the AirBnb, we all have dinner together! Sometimes we watch a little TV, or work a bit on costumes or set pieces, or wash some of our trash and recycling so we can use it in the show!

Since we’ve been so busy with rehearsal, we haven’t done too many extra activities yet (although so far we have nearly gone bowling three times and actually gone bowling once!), but when the show is done and we’ve taken it on the road, we will have a lot more fun bonding activities outside of work as well.

Alright, that’s a brief summary of what’s been going on so far! Hopefully that gives you a pretty good idea of a day in the life of show creation. More to come soon!

-Mariah Fraker