Radio Free Xsnania

I realize I've been running on silent for the past couple of weeks, and for that, I'm sorry. There's a couple of reasons for this. One is that rehearsing for The Prometheus Myth and trying to write Strange Dreams... has kept me busier than I naively expected it to. It's not so much that I have no time to write here, it's just that the time I do have I spend either sleeping or catching up with people I really love, so I just haven't had any impetus to write.

Strange Dreams... is coming along nicely. It's hard to say if it's exactly where I thought it would be at this point, since I really didn't have any idea how to begin crafting this piece when we began, but my friend Shiny and I are writing stories and sharing them, and those stories are engendering other stories, which in turn bear other stories, and so forth. In short, the basic idea of the show, that we create our world through telling each other stories, is proving truer than I'd ever imagined.

The Prometheus Myth is also coming along nicely. In fact, fuck that, it's easily the most interesting and amazing piece of theatre I've gotten to work on in a long, long time. We had our one person leave the show already (there's always one in a show like this) and have spent the last two weeks working intensively with a Lacoc (sp?) movement teacher to learn to move as a group, create still but dynamic scenes, etc. It's been a little like military training, except the movements have been a lot more flowy. But the basic elements--not standing out from the group, being in the scene without dominating the scene, using all senses to make yourself aware of both the space around you and the people in it--is very military. I love it.

Last Saturday, our head puppeteer introduced us to Zeus, a six-foot bunraku puppet with a fully articulated face and hand. It's amazing. I got to play. And we get to do this until May.

The other big reason I haven't written is that in my off time, I've been really sick with some kind of creeping nasty cold that's kept me up coughing all night. It's slowly subsiding, and I've been resting a lot and drinking plenty of tea and sleeping at seven every night, but it's still lingering. Even as we speak, I'm drawing up a hot bath for myself to hopefully suck some of this cold feeling out of me and loosen my lungs a bit. Then an early bed time for me, I'm afraid.

Stupid disease.