earworms

In spite of myself, I have the opening song of "Eve: the true story", a musical playing here at Calgary Fringe, stuck in my head. Yesterday, it was a very specific snippet from Benjamin Britten's opera "Peter Grimes" - which was with me immediately before our 6:00pm performance of "Old Growth" - *and* immediately after... right up until Eve came into my life. (if you must know, it's from the court room prologue, where Grimes describes how his boy assistant died at sea "among the fish". There's a moment of harmonic, melodic and orchestrational poignancy on "fish" that is apparently freeze-dried goodness to my swimming synapses).

We have two shows left at Calgary Fringe, both prime-time slots. That's all that seems to matter here, when it comes to crowd size: being at 8:00 pm. "Cam and Legs", the apparently astounding 5-star (sayeth the Calgary Herald) puppet show (I will miss it due to the kind of scheduling that sometimes inevitably happens at smaller Fringe festivals), has been having audiences of 25-30. Conversely, my somewhat dismissive reviews in this city (is this what happens when you take a button-pushing show about the troubling intersections of environment/economy to an oil city? Yes.) don't seem to be having any effect. If people are coming, people are coming. And we're getting lovely little audience comments up on the board outside the Lantern Church. (I post audience reviews HERE, FYI, btw)

And some really interesting in-person comments. When people like the show here, they REALLY like it. A lovely woman whom I had met on the grounds came up to me after our first performance and asked me if I consider myself a shaman. I told her my research has only been surface - that I suspect my character also took want he wanted from a few books and ran with it - and she said, I am on the right track. !

In Toronto I was talking to a friend who does clown work about my desire to undertake some clown training myself, and she said that she could see me devloping this trickster-persona that character-Alex puts on as a clown character. I've always suspected that my clown is a musicologist. I wonder what will come out in a workshop?

Speaking of workshops, I'm starting to gear up for my Tarragon Theatre residency in the fall. I visited Calgary Zoo as research for the script I will be writing about zoo elephants, and I already have two sprightly young actors who want to help me workshop the piece. Things are moving ahead. I'm at that point in the tour when I start pondering new projects.

Charmed life, eh? Sometimes. At the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary (in my neighbourhood here in Calgary!) FIVE deer came to visit me.

FYI, btw, and this is very exciting everybody, I'll be travelling to Haida Gwaii / the Queen Charlotte Islands next week, during my gap between Calgary and Victoria Fringes, and I'll be heavily documenting the trip. I will be going as close as I can to the place where "Old Growth" is set: the site of the Golden Spruce. And I'll be posting thoughts and pictures here.