Winter 1/4 and RECITAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Dear friends, family and supporters,
Winter quarter has come to an end and I write to you on a peaceful day from my sunny living room in Evanston. I am grateful for the sun, and even as a woman who loves the winter, I am grateful for the warming weather and the promise of spring, or new life, renewed energy and the promise of the future that come with this season.
This past quarter was full of growth for me. Fall quarter was really intense: between moving, starting school again and some challenging coursework, I stretched my mind and my body to their limits. I told myself grades didn’t matter, but all the things I was learning were so inspiring and I wanted to do all the work! Alas, the struggles of the American university system, especially the quarter system, and maybe especially at a rigorous school like Northwestern. Anyone who knows me knows I do not back down from a challenge lightly- and it is never the challenge itself that makes me back off. For me, this requires a mindset shift, my perceiving that there is a better way to do something that also requires less heavy lifting. I am happy to say that in winter quarter, I found my better and easier way.
The first few weeks of the quarter started much like the fall quarter had been. Then, I realized I was over functioning. There were readings and assignments for classes that, though valuable in a certain context, were not necessary for my development at this point in my life/studies/career/whatever-this-is-that-I-am-doing-now. I am in a different place than my classmates, as I am sure they are all in different places from each other. Ah, the beauty of grad school and the beauty of how life experience affects your motivations and priorities! So, I stopped doing the extra work that was not adding to my growth in the areas I am prioritizing most.
This was a miracle for me. I started prioritizing singing every morning. My singing, my understanding of singing and of my own voice, and my motivation for my own repertoire and projects took off. I was able to play again. I was able to do enough for my other classes that I was getting a lot out of the courses and the reading (the ones I did for my own sake). And I was keeping up well still in discussions and class morale (two areas in which I excel). And I have been sharing the word of this with as many overachieving Northwestern undergraduates as will listen.
I was enrolled in Level 4 Improv with Second City this past quarter which was a wonderful way to get another kind of play back into my life regularly and to continue my pursuits in comedy. It was also a fun way to meet some new people who also love improv, and to be around professional adults as peers again. This was surprisingly nice, but makes sense since I am around mostly students in their late teens and 20s throughout the week and there is appropriate social distance with faculty. I wasn’t able to sign up for Level 5 yet because of financial limitations, but I am hoping to be able to join up for the third term of the year.
I was able to focus more energy on growing friendships and investing in old ones. I made a couple of weekend trips to see friends- my cousin Joanna in Peoria and my friend Janice, who was performing in Madison. These were great little getaways for me. Sometimes the mind just needs a long drive! I was also intentional about meeting up with friends from last quarter and starting to initiate more social gathering with my DMA cohort. Much of this is the reason that I decided to stay put for spring break- a hard decision, because I long to see my friends in NYC and fam in PA, but a visit from my Dad (who got to see my Improv 4 class show!) and seeing Janice in WI definitely put some gas in my tank. I realized I wanted to use the opportunity to catch up with some old friends and invest in some new ones. And that has been going well to plan, with the added bonus of getting my butt off the couch to see some improv shows in the city.
The other reason I wanted to stay is because I have committed to the first of what I hope will be many projects/explorations of improv and opera (a term that I am starting to resent a bit because of its social implications, when I mean it for its unique artistic capacity for music and story-telling. I will save the rest of that rant for a paper.) for my initial DMA degree recital.
Mark your calendars! Sunday, May 25th at 2:30 PM (Memorial Day weekend) in the Galvin Recital Hall at Northwestern. I will be presenting Poulenc’s one woman opera of Jean Cocteau’s play La voix humaine. It is a masterful collaboration of prose and music to tell a heart-wrenching and very relevant story of a woman in the mire of heartbreak. Rather than performing a translation, or giving translations of the French text, I will be performing a character improvisation with the audience before and during the opera. Want to know more? Come see the show! Or watch the live stream. Or, ask me to read the paper I will be writing on the process, project and success or failure of the first iteration of it thereafter. My hope is to perform this work more, so if you are interested in what I am doing and or potentially hosting a performance, please be in touch.
How I plan to realize this project will involve much more than simply learning and memorizing and presenting the opera as a recital, and thus I want to get as much of that leg work done as quickly as possible so that the role really becomes second nature. Already, people around Evanston are probably wondering: who is this woman mumbling to herself in French? Maybe I should walk around in a t-shirt advertising my performance on the 25th! Perhaps needless to say, this is exactly the kind of work I have been longing to do with this degree and I am thrilled to have finally committed to this initial performance and to be devoting so much of my focus and work to it now.
I am looking forward to spring! May yours be full of new life, adventure and finding yourself prioritizing things you need and love and thus contributing to a healthier society in general. We need that!
With Love,
Marie in E-town
