Phew!

What a day! Meetings and emails and meetings and emails.

But…. Awesome things happened. So much stuff happened today that I feel like it was more than one day! Where to begin…

Okay… I’ll give you the highlights.

Tatiana and I had a great meeting with Erika (one of the full-time students) this morning regarding what her job will be. I might have mentioned in one of my earlier posts that there are 7 full time students at Es Artes who come all day Monday-Friday. There are another 20 students who come either afternoons and Saturdays or only on Saturdays. Each of the full-time students will be shadowing in an area of production. Erika is the student who is shadowing in the area of Production Management/Technical Direction. So we had a meeting to discuss what she was going to be working on in the next couple of months. She will be shadowing Tatiana and myself as we go through the process of putting this production together. We had a great talk about the skills needed to be effective in this kind of role – communication and problem solving; and some of the most important considerations when producing a production – time, money and personnel.

Tatiana came up with the idea of having an exposition in the front room that Es Artes is currently using as a rehearsal hall. The audience would walk through this display to access the auditorium (courtyard). This display would contain background information on Lope de Vega and the play, information about all of the various areas of a production, bios and pics of the Stratford volunteers, and finally testimonials from all of the students. We decided this morning to make this a mini-production that the students are in charge of preparing all on their own. eg. Erika is the Production Coordinator and will oversee the other students. The 6 other full time students will act as designer, set carpenter, lighting and sound etc. The rest of the students in the school (apx. 20) will then create the content for these displays under the guidance of the full time students. The will have a small budget with which to accomplish this and they will have to run it exactly like you would when creating a production ie. create schedules and costing analysis etc. for everything. While this is going on they will be shadowing each of the Stratford volunteers in their roles and seeing how this works in a larger production. It has the potential to fail horribly but i think it will actually work out brilliantly and give them the opportunity to take complete ownership of an aspect of the overall production/audience experience.

Later in the afternoon we took a mid-day break to go and do some shopping for some necessities and while out Koky took us to the mercado where we ate some very yummy fried yucca balls that are drenched in this brown sugar sauce. They are called nuegados (the e is supposed to have an accent but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to do that on this netbook – oh how I am missing my Mac!)

Our day ended with a lovely conversation with this British/Scottish couple that are staying at our hostel until Sunday. They are travelling the world over the next 2 years! Fabulous people! Amazing conversation about their travels thus far and our experience working with this project.

Enough for now!