For those of you who haven’t already heard, I am here in Italy for a 9 month tour. I am working as an Actor (woo hoo!), touring around Italy (again, woo hoo!) doing 1 hour shows in English followed by a half hour workshop (where we sing songs and play games with the kids). For the younger kids we do stories like the 3 little pigs, Peter Pan and Robin Hood. For the older kids we do sketches (one is adapted from the bon qui qui sketch on tv). I am in San Remo (a beach town known for it’s festivals and its casino) for 3 weeks and then we will be put into groups of 4. We will be given a mini mini van, a map, a navigator, a set, costumes, props, a laptop and an ipod and we will be sent on our way.
So far, I have been in rehearsals for 3 days.
I am staying in a really nice hotel, and we have rehearsals in a beautiful ballroom that is in the hotel. I know more Italian than most of the people here, so I have been helping everyone out. Today I helped another group at the police station get their codice fiscale (which is like a social security card for Italy) — I translated ‘city’ (which sounds like cheetah in Italian) just by guessing. It was really fun. There are 32 actors (10 are boys), from the US, Australia, one from New Zealand, one from South Africa, Canada and England. Everyone has studied Acting, dance or theatre in Education and have lived away from home at some point. So the youngest is 21, and she is mature. We will be put into groups the end of this week or early next, and I think I would be happy working with any of them, which is nice (better than camps last summer).
Everyday I am learning the scripts and blocking, playing theatre games, teaching for non-native english speaker games. Today one of the guys tried to teach us Chinese, so we could know what it felt like for the kids watching the shows. We start at 9, have lunch from 1-2:30 (pasta, then a meat and vegetable, then dessert) then we finish around 6.
