SABBATICAL ADVENTURES

The poster And so it came to past, after a pandemic, several setbacks, challenges, injuries, and personal matters that Moderna Suspiros finally made it to the stage.   "Lo tuyo es puro teatro" The show only had two showings but there were beautiful, fun, exciting, and filled with an audience that laughed, cried, and ate bonbons.  "If you don't know, Google it!" Why two showings? Because it was part of my sabbatical proposal so it needed to be done to fulfill such promise.  "I'm your hostess" Those who saw the show love it, those who didn't see it, wished they could have (or so I've been told.) "Y la noche era de lentejuelas" And I couldn't done it without the help of the Drama Department, and those working behind the scenes!  Thank you! The playwright/actor, The Director, The Crew! And there are plans to have Moderna Suspiros travel and share her wisdom. Those plans are in the making. More posts about it will be coming. All ma...

  That's right! After a six-month absence, the director and I are reuniting to make sure the production of INTRODUCING MODERNA SUSPIROS: A Fable Based on True Event... We Think takes place. Yes, it has been a long way coming and lots of things have happened. The director, for example, who was scheduled to arrive two days before our week of rehearsals will now be arriving two days later-something to do with a faculty strike in his institution.   And then we have the issue with my ankle. The ankle, which still  hurts, but it is doing much, much better, may or may not be ready for high heels. The doctor put me on a boot for almost a month. Then I got cortisone injections, two of them, because my tendon and my nerve were damage, or are damage. I don't know any more.  Have the shots worked? To a certain extend, yes. I'm able to move a little faster; I'm able to walk a little longer; I'm able to see that my foot is no longer swollen. Those are the good things. The ba...

  Wear heels they said! You will look good in heels they said! It's easy they said! And yes, it is fun to wear heels, but if you are a person who isn't used to wearing heels and suddenly you have to wear heels, there has to be practice because "practice makes perfect..." and also brings injuries.  Going into details is not necessary but things have happened and well, see for yourself: I have a colleague that usually wears high heels, very high heels, and she doesn't walk on those high heels, she glides on them. How does she do it? I have no idea, but it is clear that it won't be me any time soon.  Let's hope for a quick recovery because we have a show in one month!

Measurements We had a costume fitting just a couple of weeks ago. The the fitting also included shoes, of course. It has taken me a while to post about this matter because the fitting, although exciting, was also a little bit of a disappointment. Don't take me wrong! The costume fitting fulfilled its purpose but the results were less than desirable.  I was excited about trying the different costumes and also nervous because what had been imagine the director's head and my head could and would look very different in reality.  After some laughs about undergarments and how to wear them I finally was able to get on my first costume. It look good, and I felt good about it too.  Colorful right? Well, this costume was costumed made for me and I got it while I was traveling in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Colorful, a little heavy, and expensive. But it simply worked like a charm! One down, two to go! The next costume is what we area calling the "main costume." The character ...

Normally, rehearsals for a play take between four to six weeks, sometimes longer depending on the complexity of the production and the company's budget. A one-person show usually rehearses for a minimum of four weeks. However, due to the busy schedules of both the director and myself, the one-person show will only have two weeks of rehearsals. To complicate matters, the two rehearsal weeks will not happen consecutively. The first week of rehearsals already took place, while the second week will be six months later (in December.) The show will be presenting to an audience on December 8 & 9, 2023. One of my personal goals before starting the first week of rehearsals was to memorize the script, which is a challenge because my ability to memorize lines is not as sharp as it used to be. It's called "getting older." Surprisingly enough, by the end of the week, we did two full "run-thrus" of the show without a script on my hand.  This doesn't mean I did not...

Before spending my sabbatical days in Italy learning about Commedia dell'arte, I was already working on a one-person show, also as part of my sabbatical. I spent six months writing a script and having dramaturgical meetings with a theatre director.  I wrote about   the development process  of the play and also about  the staged reading  in two different posts that were done before going to Italy. The stage reading of the play happened in December 2022 when I flew to Ohio to meet the director at his homeschool. After that reading, the project was put on the "back burner" because my time needed to be dedicated to preparing the sabbatical trip and the trip itself.  Now that the sabbatical trip has ended and I'm back home, the focus is on "wrapping up" the sabbatical, which includes working on the one-person show once again.  For five days, from 10 AM to 6 PM (with an hour break in between), the director and I will come together in order to "put the p...

Seventeen dollars and fifty cents well spent! My sabbatical trip to Italy comes with many different stops and visits to different cities and towns. To help me organize my thoughts and visualize the trip, I bought a planner. The last time I used one of these was in the year 2002, exactly 20 years ago. Wow!  Photo by  Andrew Pons  on  Unsplash I have finally bought my airplane ticket. I will be flying from San Francisco, California to Venice, with one stop in Frankfurt, Germany. It's going to be a very long flight.  Airbnb Logo I have also reserved my quarters for my first stop. I will be staying in a "cute and modern" apartment in Venice, apparently a 10-minute walk from Piazza San Marco. The reviews (as early as September of this year) give the place excellent marks.  In the 3D Google map, the location looks like an abandoned building.    Why start in Venice ? Because of their carnival. And the carnival, even though its o...

Because this was a staged reading, no set was needed. The director, however, decided that the image of the show should be present as a visual. He also added two music stands and a box that served as a "table" to hold a few props.  During the staged reading, the audience was very responsive. I could hear them react and laugh. And as expected, the lip-synch songs felt too long and they were a challenge to perform, especially without actual costumes and props. Before the reading, we told audience members that they could stay behind once the reading was over because we wanted to hear their opinion. After the reading, some audience members stayed and we had a lovely 30-minute conversation. In the end, the audience said the lip-synch felt a little too long and that shortening the length of the numbers would benefit the script. Our hunch was correct.  To sum up the audience's impressions, the show made them feel as if "I was in someone's living room," "listeni...

I've arrived in Wooster, OH as planned. In the next two days, I will be giving a workshop on "solo performance" and preparing for the staged reading.  The artistic director of Teatro Travieso is also a full-time faculty at The College of Wooster . His theatre company does a lot of collaborations with the drama department at the college. That relationship allows Dr. Noriega to use the college's theater spaces for his own projects. This staged reading of Introducing Moderna Suspiros will take place in one of their performing spaces, the Shoolroy Arena, which is a performing studio that holds about 100 people in a "black box" theater-style space. The Shoolroy Arena Theatre is located inside their bigger theatre complex known as "The Freedlander Theatre."  As I walk around campus I see a few posters announcing the staged reading: One thing about the image is that the idea for the show came from me but the image helped me solidify what the character a...

Where I Work Fall 22 has become the semester to fully work on both, my sabbatical play and the planning of my sabbatical trip.  So far the one-person show has had three different re-writes, it has been read by three different theatre professionals: a theatre producer, a dramaturg, and a playwright, and by two closed friends who are university professors.  Once they all read the play I met with them, either in person or through zoom. I listened to their impressions of the script; we discussed the themes, the messages and character(s) and the goals of the story, and I listened to their suggestions. Afterward, I wrote a new version of the play and I was finally able to give the script a title:  Introducing Moderna Suspiros .  The play is "a comedy about a wannabe Latinx drag queen who is reflecting on life and love after COVID. The show intertwines music with the experiences of a man who laughs at life despite adversity and aging.  This latest version of the script...

Photo by  Vlad Hilitanu  on  Unsplash I am creating this blog as a means to document my sabbatical work, which is divided into two parts:  1: A trip to Italy in relation to Commedia dell'arte and its characters and  2: t he writing of a new play based on the "Commedia dell'arte findings.   Officially, my sabbatical was supposed to start in the spring of 2021 with the trip to Italy and then, in the spring of 2022, I was going to write the play. But then the pandemic hit and the sabbatical plans were flipped and adjusted to the situation.  The trip to Italy was postponed to Spring 22, thinking that by then things would be back to "normal." This meant that the writing of the play needed to happen during spring 21 and instead of writing a play based on "Commedia," the play would now be either a multicharacter play or a solo piece and either type of play would have to be a collaboration with a Latinx Theatre Company.  Two Latinx theatre companies came ...