Season Completion, House Circle

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday December 19, 2009 – Season Completion, House Circle

Full company gathered at Bob and Jaxie’s place for thoughts, recapitulations and observations regarding the season just completed. As always, these meetings begin slowly and a little awkwardly, but once there is a little momentum great stuff appears. Very good and useful observations from all around the room. We took care to stay with the current season, and avoided having the meeting morph into an opening planning meeting for the next season, but much of what came up will have strong bearing on how we go about working in the rehearsal period for Season Nine.

We acknowledged the contributions Igor has made to the production, and welcomed Mary Beth to the performance team. Shortly after noon, we declared the season complete and the break begun. It will be a short break (I keep thinking of it as a “power nap”), and then we will have 9 weeks of work before many of us head to Italy for the GC completion course and OCG special project. Opening night will be shortly after our return.

I dashed home to meet my afternoon student at 1pm. At 2pm the House Circle (or triangle, as the Greg/Christina/Mary Beth trio has been dubbed) arrived. Staying with the theme from recent weeks, we worked on developing an ear for the significance of notes and note combinations through the exploration of diatonic arpeggios. Today it was seventh chords in C Major. Interestingly, this week the trio grasped and managed a certain command of this one rather quickly, and so we made it much further than I had anticipated. And again, the free circulation at the end of 90-minutes of this kind of focused work had a very marked presence of intention and musicality that was not in the opening circulation of the day.

Sounds like the House Circle will be continuing to meet through the holiday break.

My commitment to maintaining a Tuning the Air journal is completed with this post. Over the break I will make decide whether or not to recommit for the next season.