Today's assignment was to travel to a variety of places in small groups in SL, interact with each other, with objects, and with the environments they encountered. I supplied them with 12 landmarks, available from a small obelisk at the Greek Theater.

At various points I heard some gleeful laughter (and tales of being invited to an SL wedding and a singles party), so I am assuming that the pedagogical goal was in fact reached. I wanted to end the class with some discussion of the activities the students had done, but a) since several students went to the computer lab and seem to have disappeared at some point prior to the end of class, and b) since a live music event was happening and I wanted to expose them to that, I am holding the discussion over to the next class.

My only concern was that the musician playing in Rosslyn would have become very excited when the sim was full (at 40 avatars), and then suddenly a chunk of the left quickly at 2:15 SLtime. I did send an IM with that info to Johannah Oh, so she could pass that on to the performer.

I visited the Greek Theater site on Sunday, 10/21. I had not been there for awhile, but Jenene Lemaire asked me to stop by and give her any notes. I tleported in behind the seating, so then flew up to check it out from the air. My first comment: breathtaking. The look of it far exceeds my expectations, though I knew Jenene and her building partner Talliver Hartnell would do an amazing job.


See photos at: http://www.musofyr.com/Phorkyad/GreekTheatre/GreekTheatre.html

As I suspected, the start of the new academic year put an end to much of my Second Life.

Or did it?

On October 6, I did an encore presentation from THE FUTURE'S PASSED, with audio tracks from SONGS FROM THE ST. VITUS SCHOOL OF DANCE. (See www.cafepress.com/musofyr--I got MY t-shirt today....Megh's art work looks excellent on the shirt and the the books TFP and IDesire.) At the end of the performance, I brought Thaylon Singh (my real-life collaborator on several of shows) on stage and played DJ for some of his audio CD tracks. Both of us were well received, and in fact then got booked into the Club Moonlight Riviera for the 19th of October.

So I like the idea of being a successful poet in SL. And I continue on the academic side, with next semester's Theatre Technology course, coupled with the continuation of my Greek Theatre project. Check out these links!

http://www.musofyr.com/Phorkyad/GreekTheatre/GreekTheatre.html

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribunereview/news/westmoreland/s_531669.html

http://www.second-life-info.de/sl/imagining-desire-phorkyad-acropolis/

Nope. Not finished with SL just yet!

It's not so hot when your flight is delayed, and you must pay $8 to get internet access to kill some time. However, it gives me a chance to update here.

I am returning from a theatre conference where we discussed theatre in SL. While THE PERM itself was not covered in any detail, we had a major debate on whether virtual performance can be theatre. Best part was the guy who felt that the show with all the multimedia was really theatre while this "Second Life stuff" is not. Oh well.

In the meantime, when I return, I must begin thinking about the SL Symposium on Creativity. My topic is Poetry and Theatre Performance in SL. Part of the presentation will be Megh and I performing a new work called "Gestus," based on SL gestures. Oh, yeah, add that to the to-do list as well!

I get lost between these entries and forget what I wrote about last, so I may have mentioned this. I submitted a grant to the FFRC in SL to create a Greek Theatre and stage a production of THE BACCHAE. I am gratified to discover that there are a number of people very wiling to collaborate on the project since they find me "respectful" and a lot of fun. Always glad to get positive feedback on my normal behavior!

I have now done a proposal for an NMC Symposium on Poetry and Theatre Performance in SL, and a grant proposal to create a Greek theatre and an in-world production of Euripides' The Bacchae.

Some materials are here--check the links at the bottom for more.

http://www.musofyr.com/Phorkyad/SLPerformance/SLPerformance.html

We opened THE PERM on Friday, and after two performances on Friday and two on Saturday, the show is finished. Or so I thought--Misty said that several people have already suggested a revival.

Though the first show (yes, on Friday the 13th!) had a rocky start with audio, we reconnected and started over again. Then everything went well. Clearly, it was some bad vibe with that first attempt; the other three performances went well, with no major audio glitches. (Okay, one actor did start to hack, cough and choke, so much so that the other actor, states away, wanted to heimlich her), and at one point the second actor lost her place and began to read the stage direction. But these were minor problems!

In addition to a comment about low audio (one person), one person suggested we not have the pose balls visible. But, as I said in the director's notes in the program, it IS SL, and we are not trying to pretend it's RL. Otherwise, we had very positive comments, requests for membership to the DRAHMA group and desires for info about the next show and auditions. Not just yet, though. My next SL theatre-related enterprise is the NMC Symposium for which I sent in a proposal today: Poetry and Theatre Performance in SL.

Some of the recurring questions we had were: 1) Were the performers in the same place? (Answer: one in Florida, one in North Carolina, playwright in California, and director in Pittsburgh.) 2) Are the participants involved in theatre in RL? (Answer: Zayante and I yes, Ludo somewhat, Misty not at all.) 3) What are the differences between rehearsing RL and SL theatre? (Answer: I don't have all the physical resources I usually have at my disposal; all is handled through voice--which, incidentally, is how I held auditions as well.)

So now I turn back to two poetry books and a CD release. Megh is working on covers, and I have finalized the line-up for Imagining Desire; The Future's Passed (the anthology of my own poems) is already loaded into a THiNC book and ready for cover and to go to press.

Current Mood: relieved

I think I might blog more often if I didn't feel pressured to come up with song titles for subjects. So I declare a moratorium on that.

Anyway, we have passed the deadline for submissions for Imagining Desire but I am holding off for a few days, since someone promised me a poem but he has not been online for awhile. I will have to delay the release anyway since I can not attend an old RL friend's wedding and bring out a poetry book on the same day. So the new release date will be 9/8.

The Future's Passed and Songs from the St. Vitus School of Dance are proceeding. I manage to snag some photos of school buses, and of course our schoolgirl event last week netted some good photos.

In the meantime, I am turning Faust's Study into more of an outdoor performance venue, and have a "Pets and Poets" events planned for Thursday, 7/5.

As for The Perm we had some major advances today, adding blocking and discussing costumes and hair. Everyone is adding in ideas, and I will be putting down some poses later today. I also want to compose some background music in GarageBand.

We had the first rehearsal today for Zayante Hegel’s play, The Perm. She and I had discussed presenting it months ago, and I said, when The Absence of Shadows was released I would get to this. And so we are!

Zayante has created a set for it, with salon chairs, mirror and a sign, and salon chairs for the audience. This was our location for our rehearsal, with voice supplied by Skype conference call, which worked quite well.

I started with some comments from the playwright, who told me to tell the actors that it takes place outside of South Park, CO and is based on a real-life conversation overheard at a hair salon. Having said that, I suggested generic American Southern dialects for both, and we read through it.

After the first read-through, with the play lasting 14 minutes, I gave some notes about internal pauses, character ideas, and definitions of phrases. (Ah, who knows what “Submarine races” means anymore?)

Key things to deal with: can I slide music under some of the speeches? (And how are we getting the audio in-world? That confronted me this morning when I awoke at 7:45am.) Also, we have to make sure the actors are always active, so they don’t go limply “away.” Otherwise—except for that nagging problem of being interactive (which would make it true theatre), I think we made a very good start today.

While waiting for more submissions on Imagining Desire, I decided to finalize the poems for the anthology of my own poems, The Future’s Passed, and the audio files for my CD, entitled, “Songs From The St. Vitus School of Dance.” The other night, Meghamora and I went touring for places to take some photos of me for the bio photo, and she has .pdf-ized the text for TFP.

I have also arranged an in-world event to obtain photos for St. Vitus:

Thursday, 6/28 at 4pm SL Time: Come dressed as a schoolgirl and be photographed by Meghamora Woodward at Faust's Study (Changmi 69, 61,119) for Phorkyad Acropolis's upcoming RL CD release, "Songs from the St. Vitus School of Dance."

Note that appearing and dancing (to the cool tunes of KONA Radio) constitutes your agreement for you to be photographed and your image to be used. If you do not want to be photographed, please do not appear.

Faust's Study is a place for Poetry, T-Shirts, Alchemy, and Intelligent Conversation. And we hope, MANY schoolgirls!

We had the major release party and then...exhaled. I kind of forgot marketing AFTER the fact. So I am trying to do word of mouth, KONA Radio (http://75.126.100.42:8030) is running spots for Faust's Study and The Absence of Shadows, and I need to do a poetry reading and drum up some business.

I am also actively soliciting submissions for the new anthology, Imagining Desire, as well as working on my own anthology, The Future's Passed. Meghamors Woordward has agreed to design the covers for both. At the same time, I am also doing a companion CD (entitled Songs from the St. Vitus School of Dance) that features me reading some of my poems and, in fact, SINGING on one of the tracks. I do not sing in public so this is quite a step for me.

More info will be on my "real" website so that people can listen to audio tracks, or read more about the origins of some of the poems. Why write a simple poem, and then not take the opportunity to hypertext explain it??

A reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer has contacted me for more information, so I hope to continue to get the word out.

Current Mood: optimistic