There are a selection of roles which need to be filled in order to complete the performance. 

 We decided it would be best for the people who created the puppets to control them, as they're the most familiar with their movements and control. However, Hannah has too many puppets to control with ease, if she was moving all the ones she created she would have had to jump around a lot which would have become distracting for the audience. Due to this, I offered to take up the role of controlling the dock workers, despite apprehensive feelings towards performing in front of a crowd. 

Final Puppet Design and Practice

Deimante was the leader of the shadow puppet design portion of the project, and used her own style to create the different puppets that will be used for the shadow performance. She used a white paper for most of the puppets during act 1, as the emotions there are a lot softer and lighthearted and dark paper for the more darker subjects. Considering they will be used for shadows these differences won’t show up a large amount but they may still show up in slightly lighter/darker colours. 

VidCon sound check....

As I come across footage from VidCon I will be sure to share.

This comes from Stacy, who was there for Nick's sound check on the morning before his performance.

Thanks so much, Stacy, for posting it.

Also entitled, You Probably Shouldn’t Leave Your Sheet Music on the Stand at Home

Exciting things are happening, but, as frequently happens, they bring great stress with them. For me, that usually leads to an increase in absentmindedness (which is usually at pretty significant levels to begin with). From this comes the following tale:

A few days ago, I was scheduled for a solo performance during…

Lessons on Teaching: Part 1

In the past few years, I have had the privilege of observing performers at a variety of music festivals-primarily with participants from local schools. If you hang out for an hour or two, you can learn many valuable things about how to teach and what students in the area are learning.

It’s fascinating, and takes hardly any time at all. I spent the day at a music festival a couple of weeks ago and…

Due to an upcoming audition, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to know when a piece of music is ready to be performed-and when a musician is ready to perform it.

As Hamlet said, “The readiness is all.”

If only we could tell when we are ready.…