Today is the first day of my third week back at school. It's been a rough transition for sure, but having a lot to do with the drama club, homework, and stage managing The Shape of Things at Champlain College has helped; also, the news that I've been accepted to study abroad next spring gives me something to really look forward to! Hopefully this week things will start looking up.
One interesting thing that's been going on in my Directing I class is the introduction of devised pieces of theater. We started working on a piece last week. It's hard to explain exactly what a devised piece is, but I'll do my best. It is when a group of people who have a statement to make or something to say get together and combine movement, music, cound, and dialogue to tell a story. It is fascinating to be a part of one: you start with certain moments to build from and go back to, and inbetween add obstacles and challenges to the various kinds of movements. We started out walking around the stage, and started changing our pace and direction and grew from there into a sort of improv dance piece, but not completely random with the repetition and other obstacles we were given. It is very interesting now to have 7 of us in the class working together to make decisions and all be the directors for one piece, and challenging as you can imagine, but definitely unlike anything we've done before. I'm hoping to do a devised piece as a Drama Club performance at the end of the semester.
In just a few minutes I'll be heading off to rehearsal at Champlain! Traveling off-campus for rehearsal is a bit of a drag at this time of day because of the traffic, but it's interesting to be stage managing somewhere other than St. Mike's, and getting paid is a really good thing at this point. Some of the rules are a little different than an Equity stage manager might expect (so it's a good thing I'm really flexible, and still a student besides!) It seems that these first few weeks of school for me have been all about blurring the lines and changing the rules, not only with theater but with friends and how I do things. I never thought over the past two years here things could have changed this much, and there have been times recently where I've wanted to be somewhere else, but I look around and know I love this school no matter who my friends are and how things are run. It can be frustrating, especially given the concerns I am now aware of as an upperclassman in the theater department and the President of the Drama Club, but I'm doing my best to keep people involved and try to show them what it means to need theater. 
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