I'm Going Home/Merry Christmas

Hey Abyss,

It is the night before I head back to the Maritimes and I am all prepared. I spent most of the day cleaning my apartment, except for my dishes which I am avoiding at all costs currently. I don't know whether it is the christmas spirit alive inside of me or perhaps my tired body, but I am really looking forward to being back home for two weeks.

I have done most of my Christmas shopping and now just have to figure out how to fit all the presents and two weeks worth of clothes into two carry on bags....

I like to travel as light as possible, I have this suspicious feeling that the airline will always lose my luggage. This trip I am putting my faith in Porter, mainly because you get free food and alcohol. The flight back to Nova Scotia is quite quick from Montreal (only about an hour and a half) and so it is a strange sensation to be in two different provinces in such a short time. I don't think that feeling will ever change for me.

This week was a real gift. We had a lot of final core classes this week, and Nina Lee Aquino staged a reading of David Yee's play Safari with us. It was well received last night and now we just have to wait on the new AD's decision as to whether or not she wants us to mount it as the opening show of our season next year at The Monument-Nationale. Let's hope.

This semester has been so enlightening to me as both an actor and a person. Sherry Bie (the outgoing Artistic Director) is such a wonderful woman and I am sad to see her go. She has pushed me a lot over this last year and a half at the school and I can see how proud she is of my whole class. She is such a selfless woman, and a true artist. I feel truly blessed to have experienced her the way I have. She will be deeply missed.

I am heading to the closing performance of Three Sisters tonight and will say my holiday goodbyes after the show. On that topic, I want to wish you a Merry Christmas as I will be focused on spending time with my family and my beautiful girlfriend over the holiday, so I wont be posting until the New Year.

Here is to another year in the life of a Would-be Actor in training.

Merry Christmas Abyss.

Sunday - A Day of Rest?

Hey Abyss,

Things have been busy over the last four weeks. I can't believe how quickly things are moving, but at the same time I am very anxious to get home to my family and friends in the Maritimes.

My classmates and I had a Christmas Party last night which was great, we had so much tasty food and I felt rather classy with my ugly sweater and glass of Whiskey. All I needed was a cigar and I would have been ready for a segment on the Art of Manliness. Of course being surrounded by all the food and Christmas music playing in the background made me a little more homesick. I am really looking forward to the break this year. The last few weeks have been especially draining, energetically.

The two weeks we had with Tanja Jacobs were interesting, to say the least, I felt I had the most fun in the last few days we worked with her. After those days I am quite interested to see how our process goes after the break.

We then worked with Yael Farber for the last two weeks, she is an intense woman. And I mean that in the best sense of the word. I learned a lot from her, she is a very generous and focused person and offered such wonderful insight into the characters that we were working with. The spine of the last two weeks were the text from After Miss Julie by Patrick Marber, and so it was a very fierce exploration, if you know Marber. The class was very sacred to me so I won't delve that much further into it, but I feel that it was exactly what I needed right now in my journey here at the school.

Another NTS moment that I won't soon forget.

We have been bombarded with many little projects lately, that have to be continually percolating with us at all moments of the day. This has made it hard to come home and relax, but everything is changing next semester because we start to move into productions for the next year and a half. As I stated in earlier posts; we have three studios shows next term.

The Seagull Directed by Tanja Jacobs

Solo Show Directed by Adam Lazarus and Jodi Essery

? Shakespeare Directed by Joe Ziegler

I am completely amped to start doing some productions, they are not fully fledged as they are still explorations but we do have public performances which is exciting in itself.

Today, in a couple of hours in fact, I am filming an audition for a movie that is shooting this summer, it is very much a shot in the dark considering it is an open call but I feel that there is no harm in submitting. I'm nervous about it because this is my one shot, its not like a regular audition where there is option to be directed. I submit one take.

Other than that there isn't really anything else going on. We start working on the staged reading of our text that David Yee has written for our class. I anticipate that it will be a fun week, I have some remaining research to do on the text before tomorrow though.

Wish me luck.

Night Abyss