The People I Work With

So far I haven't really discussed the company that I'm working with here, or how amazing they all are.  I was compelled to write this after this VIDEO became available.  This is some of the apprentices here singing a song that they wrote about the "Barefoot Bandit," who was the subject of the ensemble project that we did here.  The ensemble project was a collaborative, original theatre piece that our company did starting from scratch.  Ours ended up focusing on the Barefoot Bandit as a means to explore ideas of legacy in the digital age.  Watching this video just reminded me of how amazing the people I am working with are.  Sometimes you can forget, because we have all become such fast friends.  But every once in a while it doesn't hurt to step back and think, damn, each on of these people has a talent way beyond the norm.  We recently had a little showing, because the playwrights who will be writing for our show in the Humana Festival came down to see us.  And everyone did something just extraordinary.  So what I mean to say by all this is that I am blessed to be around these people, and I wanted to give them their due.
On this theme, there was recently the first round of Solo Mios.  Solo Mios are solo performances that every apprentice gives either in September, October, or November.  The September group blew me away.  We saw some absurdly creative poetic rap theatre by Jordan Brodess, a beautiful dance piece by Devin Olson, a monologue juxtaposing the unpredictable and unfair nature of death with the strict form and function of boyscout knots by Brandon Peters, a piece concerning the consequences of growing up female by Ellen Haun, a piece about loneliness and forgetting by Daniel Desmaris, and a hilarious monologue about the nature of the Beast within her by Monica Bergstrand.  Everyone got to do the kind of theatre that spoke to them, and wow did different personalities emerge.  I go up next round, and I'll write about that more as the time approaches.  Until then, I was content to sit back and bask in the theatre glow that this round created.