Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Trinity Shakespeare Festival Log. DAY ONE (May 10, 2011)

So here I am. Back to this lovely blog page I seem to inherently bombard with my useless and silly rants about my day to day life in either exotic or crazy awesome places. Was that a wordy sentence or what? I know my posts from Europe were a bit lengthy, but I must keep these short in order to continue sleeping and therefore working in the insane environment I seemed to have gotten myself into.

When I woke up today, I was excited and nervous at the same time. I have heard absolute horror stories of the Trinity Shakespeare Festval (hereafter, TSF) but I have also heard of the rewarding experience it offers. So being daring, I interviewed for the job with several other TCU students, and got the job! I'm working as a scenic builder and lighting technician for the show. When we arrived at the theatre this morning, I'm not sure if any one of us knew what we were in for.

First of all, after the main company meeting, my roommate and I (since we were so prepared and were already checked in) were sent to wait on a huge shipment of lumber. The trouble with that is, no one really knew when it was to arrive. So we waited for about 2 and a half hours (while everyone else was "checking in") on this lumber shipment. When it finally arrived (at 11:00 or so) we loaded everything into the theatre and went on our break. The break only ended up lasting around 45 minutes.

We first ended up working in the theatre doing something called "rehanging". It's a form of torture that makes people who aren't used to lifting heavy amounts of weight, lift heavy amounts of weight across the loading gallery. And we aren't allowed to let them go or someone could be hurt. Bad. Ok, so I'm kidding, it's not THAT bad. But what it basically entails is relocating all the borders/legs/curtains on a theatre's fly system to their proper location for the show(s) being worked on. It's one of those things that everyone wishes they could hire some robots for.

Once the work resumed in the scenic studio, we were sent to build giant portals that would be used in one of our productions. BY THE WAY, if any one needs any information on the festival, visit http://trinityshakes.org/ for anything you might want to know. Anyway, these portals were about 32 feet long by 6 feet wide. They weren't a simple task to put together. We had about 8 or 9 people working on those until the end of the day when a good amount of work was completed on their main structure.

Tomorrow (at 9:00am) holds many surprises as to what exactly will be done for the continued building and producing of these Shakespearean works, but for now, off to slumber. Goodnight.