Trust and Obey

Well, it's the fourth Sunday of Advent, and I am stuck at home with an awful cold. I'm sure it's been brought on not only by the season and weather change, but by the end of the semester. Gillian got sick over Thanksgiving. I think it's that when we give our bodies a break after working them so hard for so long, they just cease to function properly for a while.

I finished up my last show of the semester (which is indeed my last show of the decade, what?) yesterday. PHTS tech weeks are generally very intense, loading in Sunday, teching Monday and Tuesday, dress on Wednesday and performances Thursday-Saturday. It's a very condensed week. Well, this show, for various reasons, loaded in Friday at 9am, and had two performances that night - 9pm and 10pm. I was billed as "Lord of Sound", meaning that anything sound-related, I did. That was pretty intense because it was basically a concert, and even though we were in a space that didn't NEED amplification, the director wanted a move from amplified to unamplified sound through the piece. So this means that Friday, I disassembled the sound system from one theater, reassembled it in another theater, ran six microphones, figured out the switching patterns of how the mics moved around the space, did a quick sound check, and operated the board AND house managed for two shows. Last night, I reset the mics, set up the director's 4-track recording system (hooked up to both the board and a room mic) and attempted to simultaneously mix the show for the room and mix it on the recording for two shows. Then I struck the entire system from the space, and mostly reinstalled it in the space it came from. Mostly, because the theater managers in their infinite grace did not make me rehang the speakers. I love them.

To bring this whole blog full-circle, I would not have felt comfortable doing any of this had it not been for Montreat this summer. While I was into sound last year, I didn't know the first thing about systems and was terrified of microphones, so something this technical I would have ran away from screaming. While I still have a lot to learn, it's nice to know that I've got a lot of the basics covered.

Now that this show is over, I only have one paper and one meeting before the semester is a wrap. Most of what's been happening lately has been mining from what we've done this semester in order to help us move forward into next semester. My training starting this year in particular is moving from being about classes to being about projects (most of the classes I have are there to support the projects I'm working on), so it's less of the "semester ends, start over with new classes" feeling that I'd imagine normal college to be like (I've never been in normal college, so I wouldn't know), and more of a constant movement of using the previous project's lessons to further the next one. What's really nice is we have the opportunity to do more than one of these open-to-the-public shows. There are programs out there where you do a lot of "classwork" things and then you have your FINAL THESIS SHOW that's the first show that's open to the public... meaning you get one big chance to integrate everything you've learned. That's silly. It's the integration that's the hard part. And the best way I can see to get better at that is by experience, which you can very easily get at PHTS. I've worked on 20 shows at NYU so far, and I'd say that's pretty average for someone who's been at PHTS for five semesters. There are certainly those who have done more.

So, much like in the real world, the focus now turns to the next piece. I'm looking forward to it, largely thanks to a meeting I had yesterday where a teacher of mine gave me extraordinarily useful and thoughtful feedback, and helped reframe things I haven't known how to tackle in a way that they're possible and exciting. (I'M SO RIDICULOUSLY BLESSED.) I also have most of my design team tentatively lined up (tentatively due to the fact that we won't have a Production Calendar so people can't commit for certain until we do). I'm leaving this semester much more positively than last semester (as those of you who have been reading this for a long while might recall). And I got a comment in my post-mortem that I think illuminates why.

For these shows, we all have mentors who watch us in process and are there for us to voice our concerns and questions to on a more personal level than voicing them in class. Since they see how we operate in the rehearsal room and design meetings, they can give us specific feedback on what we're doing well and what we might want to think about as we move forward. My mentor mentioned how confident (but not cocky) I was throughout the process, and I nearly burst into laughter. Because I wasn't confident in myself. The moments before rehearsal were inevitably filled with me freaking out. However, throughout this process I did have complete trust in God that this was what He wanted me doing, so I did it. The two of those working together creates something very, very interesting in a room. Complete trust that God has given me these specific gifts and wanted me to use them in this way, so no matter how squirrelly I got, I'd obey. How freeing that trust is.