Hello Internet, today is Friday, May 1st – happy May Day! (It’s spring time and also let’s celebrate labour unions! More info on May Day here because history is awesome.)
Turns out today is the day that a couple of pieces of content go live.
1) Flop
Flop is a podcast started by two super-awesome friends, Lynn Panting and Mark White. Lynn is a dancer/choreographer/dance instructor/business owner/theatre artist/artistic director and Mark is an actor/writer/designer/architect (no I’m serious, he is for real an architect), so when I started talking about all of my job-hats, they were pretty sympathetic ears. They are also best friends and they’ve been wanting to start a podcast for a long time, so when all of a sudden they were offered some spare time, they went for it.
I’m very lucky to be the subject of episode 5. What’s so great about Flop is that it celebrates those times that we have fallen on our faces as artists, and the things that we learn from those experiences. It’s easy to pretend that we never fail, but of course, without failure we can’t learn. Failure is a huge part of what we do, and in the performing arts, we often in front of others. It’s embarrassing and scary and we like to skip over those moments when we are sharing our stories, but they can be some of the most formative moments of our careers and deserve to be recognized and… maybe celebrated? Yes. Celebrated. Let’s celebrate them.
You can check out all 5 (and future!) episodes of Flop here, and check them out on Facebook and Instagram.
2) Goon River: Hang Gut Head
Some very old friends, and a couple of newer friends, and I are making this thing. Let me see if I can describe the thing (I tried at the end of the podcast, but I bet I can do a better job here with some forethought).
Goon River is an improv game. There’s a good description of it here. Basically it’s a series of unscripted monologues and the story develops as we go.
In quarantimes, this is not really improv. What we’re doing is recording and uploading a monologue, in a set order, and watching each others’ submissions before we record the next video, so that we’re all developing the story together. We have improv guru Patrick Dempsey (not this one) to help us through the steps/best practices of the game, and once a week we get together to recap what’s happening, but we *never* discuss what will happen. Super-brilliant composer and all-round awesome dude Kyle McDavid made us a theme song, Pat made some opening and closing credits, and then Paul Power (of Power Productions) cut our monologues together and episode 1 is launching TODAY at 4pm NDT. There will be a new episode every Friday until we stop making them.
It’s good fun and worth checking out. Featuring the brains and faces of Pat, Paul, Jamie Pitt, Matt White, and Michael Worthman and available through Power Productions’ Facebook page and YouTube channel.
So: go-live day! These are both semi-permanent pieces of the internet, so I hope you enjoy at your leisure.
ADDITION: Here is Episode 1. Keep an eye out at the above links every Friday at 4pm for follow-ups!