The New World of Civid-19

 

Well 2020 the year of Covid-19 is finally over.

I had thought, hoped, that I could have caught up on my Blog posts but it never happened.

I couldn't get my mind on my Blog and funny stories of the past when there was this new uncertain crazy world flying all around us.

My brother-in-Law, who had been declining fast to the ravages of dementia, was one of the early victims of the virus.

It brought it too close to home.

After the school closed down in March it became a waiting period to see what the world would through at us next and I never seemed to get a solid grip on getting anything new done.

When school began again this fall it turned out that we had only one production to work on.

We recorded a stage reading of Voices of Freedom Summer—A Reflection on the Turbulent Summer of 1964 and it was streamed online.

My students set up eight music practice rooms for the filming.

Extra furniture was cleared out of the rooms and “Green Screen” material was attached to one wall.

A video camera, lights and a microphone were added to each room.

Each actor also had ear buds so that they could hear each other and be cued when to begin.

All the wires ran out to the hall were it was all recorded.

After a week of rehearsals and recording the sound and videos were mixed into the final product and posted online.

It was not live theatre but gave our students a good experience.

My stagecraft students worked on setting up the rooms and making changes as needed.

The biggest addition to the rooms was adding panels to deaden the sound.

Carpet scraps and blankets were attached to small flats and placed in the rooms.

A segment with all the performers wearing masks was recorded on the Mainstage and used at the beginning and end of the piece.

For much of the semester my students worked on small projects on the stage and in the shop.

We built a new rehearsal table, re-built another and cleaned the stage and shop several times times over.

At the end of the semester all classes went online and I had my students watch a variety of tech videos.

The spring semester is going to start with online classes and hopefully move to face-to-face meetings early in March.

This spring we are planning to do our Festival of Ten, XII.

I am not sure what format we will be doing the 10 ten-minute plays.

They will most likely be filmed with the current plan is to do some, if not all, on the stage with the actors wearing masks.

We will have to wait and see as things seem to change fast in these days of Covid-19.

It became clear to me early on in the pandemic that live theatre, with many people sitting close together in theatres would be one of the last things to reopen.

Let us all hope the vaccines work and we can get back to a more normal world.

Theatre in the age of Corvid-19

For everyone the past few months has not been anything like what we had hoped for 2020 to be. 

As a Theatre Educator I had been busy as usual working on music concerts, theatrical productions,

teaching classes and supervising student projects when the world changed.

Our production of Stupid Fucking Bird was selected to go to the American College Theatre Festival
in Maryland

and our students came back a few weeks early in January to rehearse and make necessary
changes for the tour.

The Festival theatre was different than ours so a few set changes were needed and blocking modified.

After just a few short days of rehearsal the set was packed into a truck and the cast and crew were off.

The performance went well and all our students did a great job.

The truck with the set and costumes returned just a few days before classes began.

The experience was very positive to all the students involved and this gave a general  energy boost
to the department as the new semester was underway.

Even back at the start of the semester stories of this new Virus was popping up in the news.

Our first sign that things ahead were going to be different is that our first music event had
to be postponed because of bad weather.

It put a little bump in our plans but we moved on.

Our first play of the semester was Crimes of the Heart, it would be the third time we have done
it on the Mainstage and the students have also produced the play twice in the Black Box. 

It had been twenty years since our last production so it was not too fresh in most people's memory.

The production went well, the cast worked hard and seemed to enjoy working with each other.

My Stagecraft class, only 5 in number, worked hard to get the set done.

The set was a little late getting finished but all the students came together and pushed hard to get
it painted

and the last details done.

In the end it looked good and the performances went well.

As the weeks of the production went on the Virus was more prominent in the news and various
plans started to be discussed.

By the end of the production we were a week from spring break and it was clear something
was going to happen.

Each day the reports got more dire and plans changed, sometimes several times a day.

We had one last concert before the school and state shut down.

The last thing we did before the shutdown was the rescheduled cello/piano concert from February.

It was very good, almost bittersweet, as we all knew that the world was about to change for us all and we would not be back for a while.

.So here we are two months later.

We finished the semester with a hastily put together distance learning program and our plans
for moving forward are ever changing.

Our future production plans have changed several times and I bet that they will change
again before school resumes.

In the words of the old Chinese curse:

May you live in interesting times.

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