Sparknotes

Hey. Look how many times I posted in October. Now how often I have posted thus far in December. This is nuts. Blaming this on several factors, including school, being sick for a THIRD time in as many months, trying to maintain a dating and social life, and dancing. Let's recap what you've missed.

Dancing... There was a competition on December 5th in Manchester. I was all excited for this one, because at the Nottingham comp the week before my partner and I pledged to practice all week and get really good at our routines. We've been doing fairly well with no practice and were excited to see how we would do with a lot of practice. Well, we didn't practice because Thom was sick. Like, really sick. Like, he was texting me to tell me his fever was so high he kept fainting and hitting his head. We waited till the end of the week for any improvements, but I pulled the plug on us dancing. He needed to rest without feeling pressured to be better by a certain time, and he just started a new job and they were pressuring him enough. So there I was Thursday night, a comp Sat morning, and no man. Well, as fate would have it, that morning the team captain's partner also texted him to say she was so sick with what is probably strep that she couldn't talk or swallow food. So, otherwise partnerless, we banded together. This is good though, as my reputation of being a partner stealer (four partners in as many comps) who blags her way through all comps (never had more than a week of practice with a given partner, and people here don't practice like in America, for four hours at a time, sometimes accompanied by a screaming Russian barking unintelligible orders at you) was kept in tact. We had a great time. It was hilarious and fun. Now, said boy has not danced with me since, so perhaps it didn't go as well as I had thought... but I'm choosing to see that as coincidence and not that I either intimidated him or corrected him into hating dancing with me. See facebook for the 100+ pictures of us from the comp.

Dating... I should take this opportunity to state that the above mentioned team captain is my boyfriend. His name is Ian (even though there is a Higbee girl golden rule "Never trust an Ian"), he is from Canterbury (insert Chaucer joke here), he has a silly accent (that's a joke in itself), he made me dinner on Thanksgiving and took me ice skating on my birthday (awesome), he's team captain of the ballroom team (and is a pretty good dancer), a tutor (what we would call an RA, lives in a dorm and takes care of the little freshers (wanted to be placed in freshman housing like I requested when I was an RA at Maryland)), is getting a PhD in engineering (smart and not an artist!!) and best of all, he is what he would call "sensibly sized," or what I and all of America would call "damn short" (finally a man who isn't a foot taller than me! Oh happy day!). So, basically things are awesome. I am committing just about the biggest faux pas that an international student in an Erasmus program can make by dating a local... oopsie :)

School... The group project is done! Done!! There were lots of problems with tech week, the quick version being that our department didn't reserve the studio room for us as they had promised, so tech days had to be greatly shifted around the availability of the studio space and the classes that were going on in there. For my group we had a ton of technical elements to work out, but we were the least affected by the schedule issues. We did have to recruit Ian to help with the tech when we realized it was going to be a two person job, and the man whose job it is to do the tech for the department wouldn't be able to do it all himself (no shock there, he is also an Ian, and you know how Ians are...). Ian was a trooper and happily stepped in to help us (more than happy, I've never seen someone so excited to have to go to tech rehearsals or wear blacks or bring down the house lights. I guess technical theatre looks more glamorous from the outside. Or he is just awesome). Well, the one man job turned two man job turned into a one man job when, unbeknownst to us, the tech guy taught Ian how to do everything and then sorta bailed. So Ian saved the day, running three projectors from three computers and generally being awesome.
The performance was at 9:30am this past Friday. I've mentioned a little of what it was, but basically it was an exploration of how dance, photography, dance photography, site specificity and translation, can all interact and work together or against each other. Wow, the things my brain comes up with... What we did was run around campus for two days, looking for interesting spaces. Then three of us would dance in/on the space in an improvised way, trying to interact with the environment in unusual ways, and the fourth group member took photographs. Then we took the photos, chose about 200 from the over 900, arranged those photos into a "movement score," and translated them into a performance we could do in a black box studio. We had the movement score projected behind us for the audience to see, we explored different choreographic methods of translation in different sections of the piece, and we took and projected live photos for comparative purposes. It was nuts. But it was well received and pretty fun. We just turned in all our work and documentary materials and hopefully will get feedback soon. See our facebook page "SWAN ANTAGONISM" for more information and the photos.

Now I have one more paper to work on, and then I am done with this semester. I will be home soon, in time for Christmas with the family. Then off to Amsterdam! I received my housing information just the other day. Yeah, it is IN THE RIVER! You'll also note if you route a path from there to the University that you pass no less than three "coffee shops" and the Sex Museum. I am on some kind of strange journey.


Shout out to Ian. Seems only right, since I said he was "awesome" about four times in this post. And he just tried reading the post in his American accent, always hilarious, so he deserves it.