Year 2010

Hello and welcome back to my blog in the year 2010.

So I have started back with Stella Polaris after the holiday break, and it is very nice to be back. We have a full schedule ahead of us, and I am sure it will all come very quickly. I have posted some new photos as well and some videos.

There Is plenty of snow out here and we have performed outside twice which was an experience, and a great one at that. It somehow created more energy and fire within the performance.

We did a performance for a skiing competition which happened in the local town of Stokke, and we performed a street performance of 'Celebration of Life' and then a parade to the award ceremony were we did a fire show. This was my first performance in the celebration of life and the parade, I worked with the big elephant mask in the parade which is something I haven't worked with before, and it was a challenging task, to keep the movement of the elephant dancing and walking on the icy roads. the next performance was for Colgate, and this was a small performance in a beautiful location looking over the city of Oslo.

We are currently in training with a couple of programmes.

'Meeting of Dreams'
This is an improvisation training, in building characters and scenes. We are asked to prepare text and a skill, and we bring this to the session, and along with warming up and other technical training we go into a world were we discover different characters and situations. This is proving to be a very beneficial and personal experience for me, as you use your own emotions and experiences and put this into the exercises. I am starting to develop nice characters and also have started to learn the Accordion as my skill.

'Youth group training'
We are currently in training for a performance at a huge ski jump competition in Oslo. This will take place on 13th and 14th march, were we will do parade and performances to over 30,000 spectators each day. This is a big event for Norway and attracts many people to come and enjoy this weekend. the performance will include, many circus skills, Tissue, trapeze, acrobatics, juggling etc and also fire performance.
So we are currently training for this performance at present.

'Children's Theatre'
We have started the children's theatre, which is going very well, I am working with 2 others and we are working very well as a team. We have two groups, and we already have our shows in place, with one being performed at the local museum, and the other at the theatre base. It is nice to work with the Norwegian children and teach skills from Scotland, and teach them some history and language, which in return they teach me about Norway. The two performances will be in April.

We have just celebrated Stella Polaris 25th anniversary, which was very nice to be apart of. We had a lunch and watch films that were made whilst we were on our 'exchange of theatres' with Gardzienice in Poland.

The daily life of the theatre is a life I very much enjoy, from the programming of events, making costumes, fixing props, daily morning training in singing acrobatics, skills, dance and fire. I feel at the end of every day that I have worked and learned something new.