Shameless plug time

In which our Diva is, well, shameless

Keep meaning to write nice meaty posts on a couple of topics, keep not quite getting to it. Until I manage it, here are a few things that have come down the pike since my last post:

Photographer Daryl Darko's new book Cemetery People is now available for ordering, and looks amazing! You can preview it on the linked site. I'm delighted to be featured among the eclectic mix of people captured by Daryl's lens.

From visual to auditory, Elgin OPERA is back with the "Festival of Singers" at Villa Verone from 6-8 pm every Sunday evening through August. I got all involved in setting up my new computer this weekend, and completely forgot to let you lovely folks know I'd be singing last night. D'oh! But I'll be back next week (July 24), and probably a couple of Sundays in August, contingent on my schedule. I'll confirm the dates ASAP.

Resonance is starting to gain momentum, with new cells popping up all over the place! So excited to see what stories the community will come up with to expand the world. The first Chicago video scene is now live, with more being planned for shooting as the summer progresses, along with in-character blog and social media content, and an experiment or three in storytelling in different media. We're currently looking for a logo design for the fictional record label that figures into our story. So here's that key question... Will you help?

In the meantime, you can see Beth and Alice get together to catch up on life since Alice moved to L.A., and compare notes on the early stages of their investigation. This was edited from about 20 minutes of improvised material, shot by the terrific Adam Daniels. The folks at Bistrot Margot could not have been more friendly and helpful, and we had ourselves a yummy brunch besides! If you're looking for a great meal in the Old Town neighborhood, you won't go wrong there.

It's the nature of guerrilla filmmaking that something will always go wrong, and in this case it was the input from our body mikes suddenly deciding not to work when we were actually shooting, even though they were fine when we tested twice! Our experiment with homegrown ADR was also, unfortunately, less than successful. I managed to clean up a lot of the traffic noise, but it and the music at the restaurant still definitely intrude on the scene, so you might want to watch with the captions turned on. (Click the little "CC" near the right-hand end of the video's control bar.)



Onward and upward!

It's here!

In which our Diva is available on podcast and DVD

Two and half years after our time at the Icebox Inn (not unusual for an indie feature), Cyrus: Mind of a Serial Killer is out on DVD today! I'm honored to be part of such a knockout cast, and proud to have played sidekick to the fabulous Patricia Belcher.

My friend (and fellow Resonance collaborator) Mary Czerwinski is co-host of DVD Geeks on Fearless Radio, and she was kind enough to invite me on for a brief interview to go with their review of the flick on this week's show. Check out the podcast on their site. Mary and John have the skinny on the new releases every Monday night, and I can guarantee you they know their stuff!

Speaking of Resonance, we're planning plots and plotting plans for new Chicago story content and clues in a couple different formats. Look for a link or two by the weekend, and be sure to follow the Twitter feed or Facebook page to keep up with the latest developments.

Do you believe?

Things are moving fast in the Resonance world today! As I type this, the summer party is probably still going strong in London, though it's fast approaching 1 am there. I'd be lying if I claimed not to have a pang at not making it over there this time, but it's been fun to watch various attendees tweeting about it, and I'm looking forward to more pictures and impressions once they've gone home and gotten some rest. (On balance, probably just as well I'm home this time -- besides having lots to do as the project moves into its next phase, it's a busy production time in Chicago, with lots of auditions and background work going on, and I don't need to be missing those!)

In conjunction with the event, lots of content has become publicly available today that wasn't before. The eight-minute mini-pilot, "The Morning After," has previously been presented at several events in addition to being shared with team members. Now it's at your fingertips in all its HD glory, ripe for the puzzling!



At the same time, the call for engagement from our audience has gone out on the main Facebook page, together with an FAQ guide to how to go about getting involved. (Click on the "Discussions" tab at the left-hand side of the page.) This includes a link to "The Story," a detailed summary of the beginning events in the core narrative (more than I knew before today, and I've been working on this project for months!), which  highlights opportunities to hook your ideas into the story.

Meanwhile, there's still some technical work to be done on the first scene in our Chicago story, but until then, we've posted a phone conversation between Alice (Mary Czerwinski) and Beth (me) that kicks off the investigation that will lead them... well, you'll just have to see, won't you?



If you want to make a "The Morning After," you need a full-blown TV crew under a kickass director like Colin Teague. But that's not the only way to start a story.

What will be yours? I'd love to see!

We Create Resonance

In which our Diva heads into a busy summer

Last week was one of my craziest ever, and that's saying something! It was funny -- as of Sunday night, my evenings were entirely free, but by Monday night, the calendar was a wall-to-wall patchwork of deadlines, auditions, day-job shifts, and a day as an extra on Boss, a new Starz series starring Kelsey Grammer as the mayor of Chicago. (I didn't work with him, but I did have a nice featured spot in the scene, and had a great time with the instant family they assigned me to that morning. You never know what's going to happen with background work, which is really the fun part.)

Bit more time to breathe this week, but still a lot to get done. In the midst of it, I came in contact online the other day with a writer/producer who was kind enough to share with me a draft of his script in development. There's a lot for his company to do before there's an opportunity to audition for the character I immediately fell in love with, and of course there are never any guarantees of anything. But it's nice to dream and to turn over this potential person in my head.

One week from today is the summer Resonance event. I'm not off to London this time around, alas, but I'm planning to be there by Skype. If you're in the UK, why not sign up to attend? You can meet the team, learn where we go from here and how you can help, and then tell me all about it afterward! :-)

If you're not in that neck of the woods (or even if you are), visit the Resonant Object Facebook page for instructions on submitting a video postcard to be part of the evening's presentation. It doesn't have to be terribly fancy; here's my team's contribution:

Ready for my closeup

In which our Diva is back in front of the camera

So that film role I mentioned in my last post? Already shot! It's spring, and things are moving fast. As producer and star Deneen Melody has pointed out, the on-screen appearance of Mother in Rose White is brief but dramatically pivotal, and her presence is felt throughout the film. Those few moments were some of the most intense emotional work I've yet done on camera, and I'm excited to see the outcome! Wishing lots of love and energy to the rest of the cast and crew as they continue working. This one's going to be special, I can feel it in my bones.

Check out the fun behind-the-scenes photos from Sunday's shoot over on the film's Facebook page!

No rest for the wicked, as I start dipping my toes into the producer pool myself, with the first Chicago scene for Resonance scheduled to film this Saturday. It's a half-day shoot on a very small scale, just a conversation between two characters that will form the first puzzle pieces of the Resonance narrative events centered in Chicago. But there's lots to do to be ready for even that! To keep abreast of local developments as the story grows and we move ever closer to the launch of public content, check out Resonance Chicago on Facebook.

In the meantime, as an appetizer, the core team has launched wecreateresonance.com, a new home for sneak previews and tidbits. Spread the word! Something is happening...

You have no idea who you are

In which our Diva has a resonating good time in London


"Something is happening." Tantalizing words on the front page of the Resonance website, and the name of the event held in London last Friday to celebrate what we've been building for months (or longer, for a few of the core team).

Annie, Dorina, Phil Marriott, Barry Pilling and I enjoy the
party. Thanks to Dorina for the photo!

Various "cells" of the project came together at Paramount, 31 stories above Soho, to share glimpses of their work. The beta version of a smartphone game app that will draw real-world locations into the
Resonance world (and which involves the "bee" graphics that now include the one I customized to represent the Chicago story, with the four stars of the municipal flag). The first comic story (yeah, eventually I'll accept that everything's a "graphic novel" now, but in my old-school fangirl brain that term still has a more specific definition, and I'm not quite there yet). Language and history background pointing up the global reach of the narrative being built.  The first live-action scene featuring ancillary characters created and fleshed out through the process that, now that the framework is created and tested, will soon be expanded to new communities.

At my little table, my Yank accent and I gave a peek into the wiki set up for my team to facilitate collaboration on the story we're building, a mystery at the nexus of Chicago politics, business, and organized crime, which will stand on its own as well as linking into the central narrative of Resonance and the trail of the mysterious Object.

Funny thing about explaining things to other people: it's often a great way to clarify things for yourself. What began as simply the best tool for the job -- a centralized place to develop characters and story elements -- has become a microcosm of the "open source narrative" philosophy of the project. And not just because the MediaWiki engine it's built with is open source software.

With each person's contributions, and especially the links between them that are so easy to create in the wiki format, the framework of the story grows stronger, the picture more complete. At more than one point in the afternoon presentation, I watched someone's eyes light up in comprehension, as they realized why a concrete notion of what Resonance is has been so hard to come by, that the nature of the project is that it is becoming more concrete through the contributions of the community.  Up to now, there's been a relatively small team, creating and testing a framework that will allow for the right balance of creative freedom and coherent storytelling. The framework into which we'll soon be inviting the wider community to come and create with us.

But there was more than that to talk about, in a room that buzzed louder by the hour with the energy of people from disparate disciplines, with a myriad of skills and resources to bring to the table, if they choose to help. Some arrived confident in what they had to offer and needed only the right place for it, like the virtuoso of simulated documents whose artistry I hope we'll be able to make use of for online clues and filming props.  Others didn't realize their own potential, a little stuck in workaday notions of "what I can do" or "what's useful." ("You have no idea who you are." K might mean something else by it -- or does she? Give the trailer another look and you tell me -- but the line keeps running through my head in multiple contexts, both within the story and with the real people I meet.)

It's this latter category who particularly interest me, and who I'm convinced will ultimately form the backbone of the Resonance community.  I talked a bit about it a few days later with the project's creator, Tom Hill, over Starbucks before we each rushed off to our next appointment, about how easy it is for talented people to get lost in the shuffle in the conventional entertainment-industry way of doing things, and how this project represents another way.

I mentioned a while back that my particularly eccentric and eclectic background has turned out to be more tailor-made for what I'm doing than anyone knew when I sent that first email -- and I don't just mean the stuff I'm qualified to do for a living. Gaming and fandom and a DIY mindset are no less important ingredients in my perspective than acting and writing.

Our story centers on a force that has inspired human accomplishment for millennia. Accomplishment comes from the recognition and development of potential. Which is also a darn good way to go about telling a big collaborative story. Pretty cool, huh?

There have been a lot of people in my life who helped me (not all of whom are still with us), whom I was in no position to repay directly. But that's not how it works, is it? The people who give what we need aren't usually the ones who need anything we have. But someone else does.

Helping to build the Resonance community gives me the chance to put others in reach of opportunity. That's as exciting to me as the storytelling work itself. I hope they take that opportunity and run with it, as far as they can, to a place where they can offer opportunity to the next bundle of potential. It doesn't get any better than that in my book.

It was quite a long day and evening coming straight off an overnight flight. By the end of the party I was cracking that I hadn't been in a bed in long enough that I couldn't do the math, which wasn't entirely true, but across six time zones I certainly didn't want to do the math!  With the buzz in the air, though, and all the warm cheerful bodies right in front of me who'd previously only been names online or faces on Skype, I hardly even felt tired until close to midnight.

Hate to disappoint the railroad folks,
but I don't think he'll fit in there.

The rest of my week in Britain was a bit of a whirlwind, but not as intense as that! And of course the rest was vacation, all visiting with friends and exploring museums and sights. Though there was still room for a chuckle at spotting our hero's enigmatic moniker on an electrical junction box. More proof that Resonance is everywhere! ;-D

Do you believe?

Rockford rockin' and London calling

In which our Diva is getting out of the house in a major way

Whoops! Been neglecting the blog again. As I'm sure you can guess, it's because I've been all kinds of busy, mostly with Resonance, Scarlet X, and Elgin OPERA. I'm proud of my work on the opera website (and had fun writing the trivia quiz you'll find in your program if you go to the February 12 gala), and we're getting ever closer to when I'll be able to start pointing you to the results of all our work on those first two.

In the meantime, I'm told there are only a few spots left at the VIP after-party for the Raymond Did It premiere in Rockford next Friday, February 11. They might even be sold out by now, but if so, you can still get your ticket to the premiere at the Aegis Studios online store.

I had a great time on set last summer, and am looking forward to getting back together with the cast and crew and seeing the finished movie in all its big-screen glory. It's unapologetic in its unrated old-school slasher-flick-ness, so if that's not your bag, I totally understand. But if it is, and you're in the area, it would be fantastic to see you there too!

After that, things get even more exciting, as I'll be packing to jet off to London the following week! I'll be meeting up with lots of Resonance folks I've thus far only communicated with by email, social media, and/or Skype. Which has been good enough to facilitate collaboration on loads of very cool storytelling (which really will be going live in the near future -- believe me, I can't wait either!), but there's no real substitute for face-to-face human contact. I'll be in the UK for a whole week, which will (I hope, at least!) be just barely enough time to visit with several friends I haven't seen in years, and a couple I've yet to meet in person at all. Our small, small world seems dauntingly big sometimes, so there's nothing like the chance to shrink it down again for a little while.

To keep abreast of Resonance developments, be sure to sign up for the email newsletter on the official website, follow it on Twitter, or "Like" the Facebook page. The Chicago "cell" (where we're developing US-based storylines) also has its own Facebook page and Twitter feed. Something is happening... Will you help?


In the midst of all this, I've finally gotten around to reading The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's bestselling history of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. The book is billed as a sort of parallel-track account of visionary architect Daniel Burnham and serial killer H.H. Holmes, and it does focus primarily on these two men, but along the way there's a complex mosaic of other figures and events linking the Fair to all manner of things going on in the world at the time, some of which resonate rather startlingly with current events. It's a cracking read, and I wish I'd gotten to it years ago when everyone was still talking about it!

Collecting hats

In which our Diva is never quite sure where she picked them all up

On a shelf in my spare room closet, there are four hatboxes full of vintage hats, mostly from the 50s and 60s. A few belonged to my grandmother. Several more (and two of the hatboxes) came from a friends' parents' garage sale a few years ago. And there are a couple I honestly don't remember how I came by.

I seem to accumulate metaphorical hats in much the same way.

I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't love to have a higher proportion of gigs where I'm simply an actor.  Where I can give all my energy to showing up and playing my character, confident that all the other details are someone else's job and that someone else is doing it. But that's just not the career I get (at least so far), and mostly I'm okay with that.  Though occasionally I think I should have kept my big mouth shut before it uttered "I could..." *wry g*


Of course, if I haven't learned to do that by now, I don't think I'm going to. Way back in 1994, when arts organizations having websites was just a novelty, I put together the first one for Rosebriar Shakespeare Company, my second home for most of the ten years I lived in Columbus. A couple years later, I did the same for BalletMet Columbus, where my then-day-job was in an unrelated department of the admin office. Appropriately for a nationally-respected company, they've long since moved on to a far more sophisticated and professional site than I know how to design.

Which didn't stop me from opening my big mouth when Elgin Opera's need for an updated and integrated web presence became more obvious every time I tried to plug an event to my plugged-in social circle. Mind you, I can't complain about that one since (a) we got an infrastructure grant this year to pay me for it, and (b) at the end of a frustrating few months, I now know how to make Joomla do a number of things I didn't previously know how to make it do. Yay, knowledge!

For Scarlet X, I actually could have gotten away with just being an actor. And I could pretend that's what I'm doing, pretend it's a better-endowed project where a very small team isn't trying to do the work of a much bigger one. But you know what? They are, and they deserve credit for it. I'm not the only one stepping up to the hyphenate plate to make this thing happen. This weekend, that meant a bit of copywriting for the website (coming soon!) and promo materials, and discovering that capsule character descriptions (60 to 70ish words) are harder than they look. Still, I was here, I'm decent at slinging words around, and this way we're closer to having a website I can send you to. Everybody wins!

And then, every once in a while, a project happens because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool DIYer who can't keep her volunteering hand from shooting into the air. That would be Resonance, where my rather eccentric and eclectic mix of skills, interests, and thought processes happened to converge in just the right way at the right time to land me on a bus going some very cool places indeed. (About which I still can't really tell you anything, but there are a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff that will start bearing fruit soon. Promise!)

There are stories to tell, stories I believe in. And when they need more from me than just acting, they feel that much more mine, that much more like home. I'll take that trade.

Overtones

In which our Diva is polishing her holday repertoire

Yesterday I was asked on Formspring what was the most challenging song I've learned to sing. I answered that it was a tossup between the Gounod Ave Maria and "The Finer Things" from Jane Eyre, but as I think about it, it's really no contest. That Ave Maria just fills my heart and makes me cry every time, if it's sung right.

And oh, it's that "sung right" that's the kicker. The deceptively simple melody -- based on a keyboard exercise from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavichord -- leaves the singer completely exposed, with nowhere to fudge in the slightest on breath control/support and placement. Its tessitura calls for the most support, smoothness, and control right across the passagio of my particular lyric soprano voice.

In less technical terms, there's a killer ab workout going on that the audience (ideally) never sees.

You can sing it without feeling like you've done fifty crunches, and it may very well even be pretty, but there'll be something missing. (I'm looking at you, Hayley Westenra, much as I love a lot of your stuff. Though you get closer than some.) But when the mind and body and heart are in tune, and the natural instrument is Kiri Te Kanawa's, you get this.

I haven't sung it since the Elgin Opera holiday party last December, when I had a little bit of a support issue (there's only so much I can convince those gut muscles to do what I tell them when they want to clench up because I'm cold) that led to a little bit of a pitch problem, but made my mom cry anyway. December has rolled around again, and I'm singing at Villa Verone on the 5th and the 19th, so I'm working on getting it back up again.

All my adult life, the word "resonance" has been very personal in a rather literal way -- all about the bones and spaces in my body and head, and how sound spins inside them and out into a performance space. As you can see in my previous post, my relationship with the word is growing, to encompass not just the exciting project I've gotten involved in but the principle of physics that gives the project its title.

Which is, of course, the exact same thing as that personal sense I started with. The continuum of microcosm to macrocosm, in scientific or mythic terms, has always been a fascinating concept to me, and a mental image that winds through all my creative endeavors in one way or another. So when I ran across this awesome Flash toy illustrating the scale of the universe, I thought it was the coolest thing I'd seen all month. You might or might not be as childishly gleeful about it as I was, but you should definitely check it out and play with it. Slide the control and see what those words you've heard for units -- and maybe some you've never encountered -- look like in clear, cartoony color.

I've been pulling it up to play with at least once in a day, just because it makes me smile. And in a weird way, it'll be in my mind when I'm directing breath and muscle and magic to resonate from the small spaces in my body and out into the restaurant.

Song for Today: Self-evident, of course. My all-time favorite recording is Michael Ball's. It's not perfect, or even necessarily the closest to the ideal I have in my head (and there is a very clear ideal in my head, one that no real singer has ever quite sounded like), but my emotional attachment to the piece began with his performance on the 1990 holiday album recorded by Broadway and West End performers as a benefit for Save the Children. It's interesting to me that my ideal is a purely classical soprano, but I prefer Ball's rendition to those of straight-up operatic tenors.

Dunno what that means. But I know what I like and how it makes me feel, and that's knowledge of value too.

Surprises, secrets and serendipity

In which our Diva alliterates, ruminates and collaborates

In modern popular culture, our modes of storytelling, and of talking about stories, place a high premium on the element of surprise. We're all about the twist, the stunning revelation, the "everything changes." Creators of hotly-anticipated projects pile safeguard on safeguard to keep their story details under wraps, the spoiler mill works even harder to get the scoop on leaks, and some fans eagerly snap up those leaks while others are hard-pressed to avoid them.

With all this going on, it's hard to remember the twist isn't everything. (Even when people think it is. I seem to be the only person on the planet who liked The Village on other merits and didn't care that I saw the "twist" coming a mile away.) Not every story  is "ruined" if we know or can easily guess what's going to happen. Sometimes it's just as rewarding to watch how it gets to a place we fully expect.

And sometimes it really does matter. Sometimes there's a mystery, a puzzle, a picture best built gradually, piece by piece.  When you're part of telling that kind of story, you get really good at keeping your mouth shut, at keeping track of what you're allowed to tell whom and when.

For the second time this fall, I've been all cryptic lately about a new endeavor. The cryptic will be with us for a while, but I can at least stop typing Sooper Sekrit Project. (As amusing as that may be, if only to me.) Resonance isn't a whole lot shorter, but it does sound cooler. And, courtesy of a serendipitously-timed email I wasn't even sure anyone was going to read, I'm now part of its development team.

For the moment, that's all I can really say. But I was excited about the possibilities of the project before I was ever in contact with anyone involved in it, and now I've found them very much kindred spirits. I'm in, not quite on the ground floor, but certainly the first floor, of something that promises to be pretty huge. Perhaps more to the point, it's something I can't wait to see, and I get to help make it happen. Does it get any better than that?

Lots to do in the coming months, but before you know it we'll be asking: Will you help?