Revving up
Oh, hi friends!
I’m finally home after two weeks away, which feels like both a very short and very long time. My musical collaborators and I were at the New Musicals Lab down in Newport News, Virginia. Early on, we were asked about our goals for the residency. Our answers: write more, revise more, hear our work in the mouths and minds of actors, record demos, and uhh, anything else would be a bonus.
And guess what? That’s exactly what we did! It turns out that defining your goals to someone else who’s sitting there with a pen and writing them all down will kick you into high gear.
We worked with six stellar actors from Christopher Newport University, who brought great insight and depth to our musical Fever Dreams. We rehearsed and rewrote and made major storytelling leaps. We recorded seven demo songs and heard our work performed for an audience — a real live audience! — in two cabarets. We tried our best to make our work better, and actually succeeded??
I know being in such an immersive environment might not happen again soon (it’s a rare privilege to stop literally everything else in your life) but these two weeks felt like a much-needed creativity booster shot.
Only two months ago, I was telling a friend how stuck and sluggish I felt, how nothing seemed to be moving, and how I couldn’t see what was next. So this is a reminder, as much to myself as to anyone else, that it is possible to get unstuck, unsluggy, and to move once again.
Fever Dreams is all about how art can provide a window of hope during periods of immense loss and change, with meditations on life and moving into the future.
How funny and perfect that the message I was looking for was sitting right there in front of me — in the work — all along.
Maybe your own perfect message is out there looking for you, too.
"Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking."
— Henry David Thoreau, "Walking," 1861
From this Lit Hub essay on the link between great thinking and obsessive walking. (h/t the great Aliza Rabin)
I enjoyed learning that Charles Darwin was an introvert and spent hours circling a path he named The Sandwalk, which shaped his identity as a thinker and offered revelations about his theory of evolution.
Over the last few weeks, I found the mornings I walked to campus to be energizing ones — you see a tree, skirt by a gardener, steal a word for a lyric from a banner hanging overhead. You never actually lose anything by walking, do you?
How Many Lemurs Have You Seen Today?
After the lab, Colin met me in Richmond and we headed down via train to Durham, North Carolina for a weekend adventure — a LEMUR adventure.
The Duke Lemur Center houses more lemurs than anywhere else in the world — except Madagascar, of course, the only location where lemurs are actually found in the wild.
We met these ring-tailed lemurs on our walking tour through the lemur forest (!). We were told to keep three feet of distance at all times, but that the lemurs don’t always respect that boundary. FINE BY ME. I love lemurs.
Highly advise following @DukeLemurCenter on Instagram (or visiting in person, of course!) as they’re about to start their very own Olympic-like Lemur Games.
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara