Harmonic Hope

Harmonic, Hope and Passion: these three words will define Cast A’s tour and who we will strive to be in the coming months, years and decades.

It’s been yet another whirlwind of a week as we race towards our first performance Friday. It’s hard to believe that in five days is opening night. We’ve been in Denver for three weeks and already we’re scrambling from song to song and dance to dance. While the performing arts workshops have dominated our days it’s been the various cultural education and leadership workshops that have had more of an impact and showcased the type of people that are on this tour. Yesterday we had our first cast meeting and we designed our cast flag. Before we could work on a cast flag we had to come up with personal flags. Here’s my basic design:

After we created our personal flags we got together in our home teams—(in case I haven’t already told you-- our home teams are made up of 10 or so students whom we’ll meet up with periodically throughout the semester to vent and provide support for one another—a mini family). We came up with a list of words to we wanted to represent. We then boiled them all down to their core to three words we nominated.

Here’s our list; Selfless, profound, loyal, fruitful, growth, serve, diverse, hope, help, movement, love, progress, inspiration, calm, flexible, patient, miracles, ripple, steadfast, enduring, compromise, understanding, legacy.

And here are the three words we thought were at the core of the list and nominated to the cast; Selfless, Legendary and Harmonic.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty cool that the words we spent an hour discussing had such integrity. (Yet another word we’d all like to embody). Some images from of our flag creating day!

This is Toño from Mexico-- he's our tech/band leader. He's not crazy. He's just crazy!

My hand's the green one... the yellow is Alanda Joy's from Canada-- we made a heart :-)

Unfinished... but you get the idea. :-)

And now… on with the not so random events of our week! I spent most of Monday contorting my body into strange positions at high-speed intervals as I reviewed the Gypsy dance. On Tuesday I worked on a number of short musical numbers I may be singing as well as a short scene—the only real theatrical speaking scene in the show. It’s pretty cheesy. Basically it’s a two min scene cracking jokes about interesting world facts: fun, but silly. Wednesday we had an interesting leadership seminar designed to help us discover what types of leaders we are and who we may want to be. Thursday I tied my brain in knots as I started to learn the lyrics to Jai Ho!

Here’s a taste of what I have to memorize... Aaja Aaja Jind Shamiyane Ke Tale, Aaja Jariwale Nile Aasman Ke Tale

Luckily that evening we had a break from all the crazy mind numbing events and focused on enjoying some local cuisine while befriending a bear!

 

This is Pascal. He is Swiss.

Pascal befriends wild animals...

Like his roommate Walker from China! (Walker is our class clown)

Friday I had to do the Jai Ho dance while we were staging. This dance not only ties your brain into knots but your fingers and feet. The best part was that there were still 45 seconds or so of the song I hadn’t been taught how to do. Thus my flailing was especially frenetic. (On Saturday we reviewed and learned the rest of the dance.)

Today is Sunday—our host family day! Naohiro and I thoroughly enjoyed sleeping in after a week of chasing down busses at 5 am and the continual fun yet exhausting experience of learning new choreography. It was a lovely lazy lounging morning followed by a frantic feverish bouncing afternoon. We went to an indoor facility called Jumpstreet. Imagine a massive gym with a floor of trampolines surrounded by walls set at a 45-degree angle that are also made of trampolines. Now add a score or so of twisting, tilting, flipping and flying children and you have jumpstreet. To top off our evening Nao and I join Michele and her host mom—Pam—to see the film Black Swan. Not exactly the joyous ending to the afternoon I’d hoped for (not sure why I expected that) but a well put together film nonetheless.

(Quick film recommendation; check out “The Way Back.” It’s the story of three men’s escape from a soviet prison camp in Siberia during World War II.  They traveled over 4,000 miles on foot with next to no food. They traversed Siberia, Mongolia, China, Tibet and the Himalaya mountains to reach safety in India. Amazing story and film. Wonderful cinematography.)

As always there are more stories to tell! But for now I must sign off—sending you all my love and hopefully a video or two from rehearsals this week-- ~danny