Updates!

Sorry for not writing for over a week. It's been nutty and waaay overbooked. Yesterday I performed downtown in a collaborative performance piece on bicycles (see the whole project described on a very pretty website here). It's a four-weekend series dedicated to celebrating the summer in visually interesting outdoor space.

Quite the blast. We did three shows throughout the afternoon, starting in Logan Square and working our way downtown to finish with a show on the white marble of IBM Tower. The airshow was finishing, so sometimes our bicycles formations were happening under fighter-plane formations, which gave the day an interesting parallel quality. There were six performers on bikes (of all types, which made for interesting challenges in rehearsal) wearing blue with tape decks (think 80s pushbutton) strapped to our backs. Each tape deck was recorded with one of the half-dozen or so instruments of an electronic symphony. Each tape had four minutes of silence followed by four minutes of ambient music, followed by a cue, then our symphony started. So we all gathered at the site, pushed Play, then rode away in random directions until our tapes started playing music, then turned around and rode back to the site. We rode in formations for a while, did some tricks on bikes in sequence and formation, then dismounted and slow-danced with our bikes for a bit. Then we got caught up in our excitement and ran off, lifting each other and jumping in the air, leaving behind bikes, helmets, and tape decks still playing the last bit of the music.

Our middle audience, at the Aldi in Wicker Park at Milwaukee and Leavitt, was the best. There were a lot of people on bikes along Milwaukee who pulled over, several cars pulled in to watch, and lots of folks just putting their groceries in their cars stopped to watch and smile. One guy almost drove into the middle of our formation, but stopped and watched til the end, which was the best outcome given that he could have gotten huffy and honked or something. All in all, a lovely day.

And I've been cast in a new show with Shapeshifters Theatre Company, which is the company in residence at the Irish American Heritage Center. It's called the Day Patient, written by a doctor, about the ethical questions encountered by a staff of medical personnel when a patient comes in for a day procedure and lapses into a coma. It'll run late September through mid-October at the Center, which is a bit out of the way but easy to get to from my house (relatively). So it's good to have a new show to do.

And it's strange to be working on a medical drama when my own life, job, etc is filled with medical drama of a different sort. I'm seriously looking at my career right now and planning for the future. I'm not going to blog about the particulars yet, because way too much is still up in the air. But great changes are in the works, and I'm excited and a little scared by the possibilities.