1. Associate Designer for A Broadway Christmas Carol. I sent an email with my resume and a link to my portfolio on my website to a local designer and he just happened to need some help on a show coming up. He didn't ask to meet me or anything, but offered me $200 to help him out of the show. The biggest lesson I have learned is everything really is all a matter of timing. He needed someone - I emailed him at that time. It's the same way in some of the opposite situations. You email people, but they don't need any help so they may not even reply.
Anyway, He was going to miss 6 hours of one of the days of tech so he offered to make me his associate instead of assistant. The show was a campy musical, rewriting famous Broadway songs lyrics to tell the story of a Christmas carol and the theatre had an Express (Theatre II board). So I considered saying no because I didn't want to get in over my head and slow down tech, but then I just went for it. And it was awesome. Brian, the designer, is awesome and laid back. The process was relatively smooth. The show was written before he left tech so I just got to play a little, finness, and fix notes from the director. One day when we didn't have much to do before a preview Brian sat down with me and gave me feedback on my website. Overall it was a great experience and I got PAID to do what I want to do.
2. The Artistic Director of Artists Bloc (an artist collective in DC I'm a member of) emailed me and asked me if I'd like to help out on a workshop production of a "promenade performance/installation/party/Happening" ( as he phrased it) that they were in the process of creating. It would not pay anything, but great people were attached and it was unlike anything that was going on in DC that I had seen so far. So obviously I said yes. We spent a week on the project. The 'creative team' (5 of us - director, writer, scenography (she's from Georgia... the country), and 2 of us assistants) set up the space and scavenged the theatre for props and things, creating as we went. Then we spent the weekend in the Kennedy Center rehearsing the piece with 30ish volunteer actors. We did one dress rehearsal was a very small audience and then another with a larger invited audience. It was a really exciting process - the kind of work I want to do - and I met a lot of really great people. It was great! I'm not sure how I got this opportunity. I met the director briefly when I became a member of Artists Bloc and ran into him at Broadway Christmas Carol (he is also a photographer). He knew I was interested in creating new work for Artists Bloc so perhaps that's why he asked me.
3. Then. I went home for the holidays for a week. I was offered crew sub ins (one backstage, one sound op, and one light op) for a couple of shows during the holidays, but it was really important to me to be able to go home so I said no.
Lesson I learned in the last few days of 2010:
See Theatre.
It's so hard to do because we're always DOING theatre and there's no time to SEE theatre.
But do it as often as you can.
You learn about your craft
You learn about who you want to work with and what theatres you want to work in
You meet people
You get your face known around the local theatres
You have something to talk to people about (or a source of flattery) when you want to work with them. (I saw your design of this show.. blahblah)
But most importantly
you learn about the work. we should be constantly learning about the work
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