Blogging: writing for yourself as if someone else was listening.
Category Archives: metablog
I want a new WordPress theme
but I don’t know which one. This is a warning, I guess, that you should get un-used to the green. It’s driving me bonkers. I’ve been avoiding blogging because I don’t like to look at the site. So gray – like the sky most days – and the font is too teeny. I want to do something radical and replace the entire thing with a styeleless setup. White background, plain text.
That’d be good for a blog about style, right?
navel-gazing
I have had a little blurb titled “Who Am I?” for a long time on this blog, which always says that I write here about style. I think that’s true, but I want that blurb to now reflect the fact that I am moving my focus in life towards writing. I’m going to revise it, for the third time, and I wanted to document that here.
WHO AM I (v.1), Year-Of-Freelance-Assistant-Directing-Edition
My name is Dara Weinberg. I’m a transient writer and director. I write here about style: the way we rehearse, the way we perform, and the way we live by doing both.
I revised it again when I moved to Chi-town,
WHO AM I (v.2), Chicago-Edition
My name is Dara Weinberg. I’m a Chicago-based freelance writer and director. I write here about style, in art and in life, but especially in theater. Welcome.
And now I’m revising it again.
WHO AM I (v.2.1), Chicago-Edition-Markup
My name is Dara Weinberg. I’m a Chicago-based writer who’s directed a lot of theater. I write here about style: the way we write, the way we work, and the way we live while doing both.
I reserve the right to keep on changing, as we all should, but I feel much more comfortable with this as a calling card to the planet.
and I hope you can hear the italics on the word “hauntingly” – they are oh-so-intentional
I somehow seem to have italicized my entire blog. Perhaps this means the entire thing is
a) a footnote to my life
b) REALLY IMPORTANT
c) written in a different language than the dominant typographic discourse of the rest of the Internet
d) not supposed to be edited after 1 am.
My ineptitude in this area is highly ironic, given that my brother is now a web browser developer.
Lydia rehearsal, day 1
I think I’m going to take a different approach to rehearsal blogging than I did on GOLDA. I’m going to write all of my notes on my private, personal wiki, which only I can access, and I’m going to only pull out the most interesting parts for this.
I really want to find a way to rehearsal blog that no one at a theater can object to, and that preserves the privacy of the rehearsal room – but still lets me share some of the observations that I think can be publicly shared, and sheds light on what makes this process cool.
So here’s my second try.
If anyone from the DCTC is reading this, I hope that you find it to be acceptable, and if you don’t, let me know. But I do think it’s a good thing for theaters in general to have bloggers publicizing them, and my only goal in doing this is to bring more audience to the profession.
So, today, we had a props meeting, a design presentation & readthrough, and finished with exercises. And the exercises the director chose to use were:
1) Writing down what kind of a color, taste, element (earth, air, wind, fire) texture, weather, smell, mode of transportation, and landscape your character would be.
2) Twizzle – walking in a circle with the director calling out commands: stop, jump, turn, and twizzle ( a 360-degree turn)
This was great coordination and group work. The second time they did it, the three men in the cast (who are here – the fourth comes soon) couldn’t be taken out. I thought they would have gone on jumping and turning forever.
3) The basic trust exercise: stand in a circle and fall to each side.
I’ve never seen anyone do this for as long as they did. It was like watching a starfish forming and collapsing.
4) “Close your eyes. Think of two other members of the cast. Open them. Walk around the room till you can form an equilateral triangle with those two people. Go.”
And they came into unison on this after less than a minute.
It was all very effective for building an emotional bond between the cast members, and for letting the new words of the sixth draft just wash over them.
So I’m now getting spam blog comments,
Like this:
“Hello! My credit is awful (very bad) with credit score of 360. My family has financial problems. We need to solve them as soon as possible. My cousin advised me one site but how to know for sure whether it is reliable or not. I will be waiting for your answer. Please, help”
and a link.
Does this mean my blog has attracted the attention of enough people to be spammable? I’m going to take it as a compliment. Or maybe it’s just a spamming robot. I will be waiting for your answer. Please, help.
I have decided
to steal the way I’m titling posts from Ellen, who has a series of poems where the poem’s title begins the first sentence of the poem – sometimes the character name, as in,
Jennifer
is sitting alone, by the wall.
She does it better than I do, and I don’t want to steal it from her poetically. But as a stylistic device, I think this blog can use it as a homage.
(Can’t believe I didn’t have a poetry category before this.)
Notes, Notes, Notes
I’m about to “upload” a week of rehearsal notes. This all seems like quite a lot to dump into this blog, but I think it’s better to maintain my notes here than in a Word doc. For the following reasons:
1) It takes too long to open up Word.
2) When my computer dies (God forbid) but as it will, as all laptops do, my notes will be here.
3) Writing them in a blog will make me make them more interesting.
4) Feeling a little kerfuffled.
Dara Weinberg 