Workshop, 3/6 (Day 215/365)

Lots going on today. First of all, I videotaped our hearing impaired students saying the Pledge of Allegiance for their announcements for Friday morning. It’s Exceptional Children’s Week, and all week students from different areas have been leading the pledge and also telling about famous people in the past who were or would have been in special needs classes. One of the hearing impaired students signed a couple of paragraphs about Helen Keller.

Their teachers originally wanted to narrate the video, but I dissuaded them. Well, OK, I forbade them. This is the kids’ moment, and I told the teachers I would close caption the video. What about the little kids who can’t read, they asked. Their teachers will read it to them, I pointed out.

Anyway, I spent a lot of the day editing the video in Final Cut Express, structuring it like the morning announcements, putting cheesy “news” music under the lead-ins, close captioning the Pledge and the Helen Keller bit. I even put photos of Helen Keller over the shoulder of the student, cross-fading between each one.

At Lacuna workshop (Dale, Marc, Laura, Melissa, and Carol Lee in attendance), we were productive as usual, although in a different way this week. I brought my worries about the calendar to the table, and we hashed that out. Part of my worries has to do with not knowing whether we have a place to perform this, and we talked about that. I know that our producing arm is working on it, but it makes me very anxious not to know.

To make a long evening short, we decided to keep working Tuesday nights (7:30 for those who would like to join us) for the rest of March, getting together our design concepts and choreographing the two staged pieces.

The first week of April is spring break, and many of us will be in New York City. And I don’t think I’ve mentioned that we will be having lunch with Nancy Willard! She’s coming down from Poughkeepsie, and we get to meet her! I’m still excited about that.

Then, starting April 10, we will meet Tuesdays and Wednesdays and begin dragging in the casts of Man in the Marmalade Hat and Two Sunflowers. Actually, on April 10, we’ll invite the members of the chorus to come and work on a little blocking/physicalization of their part of this thing.

Sometime in April, we’ll hold a weekend color-cut-and-paste session where we can build and paint stuff we need all at once.

We buckled down and got our What We Need and Who We Need done for Man in the Marmalade Hat. (Lurkers, there’s lots you can do. More than enough. Get to work.)

We realized that at some point we need to storyboard Sun & Moon Circus so we can deliberately produce visuals for the multimedia part of the concert. I also shared that I had envisaged staging “production photos” of that and other pieces for the multimedia, i.e., photo a kid tossing up a planet balloon and use that as a visual.

Carol Lee had done a different successive approximation of a sunflower, one using a glove. We’re still undecided between the glove and the crossbar on manipulating the sunflowers. She will work on those this week.

Laura wants to work on a prototype for the hedgehog costume. (Dale will start working with Laura’s mom’s kindergarten hedgehogs this week.)

Marc will work on design concepts for the Inn itself. We did decide that for May, we can get away with simple suggestions.

Dale will work on prototypes for the Toast Heads (the MMH’s marching band).

Melissa, were you working on something? I didn’t write it down.

Everyone is to work on visuals for the winter/spring motifs for the MMH’s banners.

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