Mission Accomplished

So blocking is done. We finished Thursday. Since I am in every scene of the show, for three days straight, seven hours a day, I didn't get off the stage. My legs fell asleep a lot from kneeling. It's a big relief to have that done. We are supposed to be off book on Monday.

Friday morning I found out that I was supposed to perform for a drama workshop at the Northwest Missions Conference. It was supposed to be on a volunteer basis, but they decided that a scene from the show would be more effective than a sketch. So Vanessa and I spent Friday after teardown rehearsing for that.

It went well this morning. Tasha gave the same information we were presenting in that scene in lecture format. Then we did the scene, and the group talked about what information came across better, how much can be inferred from drama without actually giving the facts, etc. Then they broke into groups and improvised their own scenes.

After that was over, we opted to stay at the conference to hear Joanne Shetler speak in a formal setting (Friday morning she'd talked with us about our characters for three hours, and the night before we'd trapped her at the table with pronunciation questions). We had to sit through an hour worth of church before she got up to speak, which I found a bit odd. They took an offering and sang some songs and a woman in the corner danced (a little distracting) and finally Jo spoke. Her talk was great, as usual - we're already familiar with the story, but it's great to hear her actually saying the words that became my lines in the show. (We use some of the same gestures. That was heartening)

After that we went around to a few booths that looked interesting, and then went home. I worked on my lines this evening, and I've got everything fairly well memorized except for John 3:16 in Balangao, which became my lines on Thursday. Tomorrow I'm taking the afternoon off and catching up on my postcards, letters and emails. Every night this week has been spent in the script.