| 1530hr
Mood: calm Fact of the day: There is a town in Michigan, USA called Singapore! event of the week Annual General Meeting of SSA. which I'm going to miss. damn.
It was amazing, to step onto the stage today. I finally decided to go join the tech crew for the opera in our local theatre - I'm supposed to work the flyer bars. And today was the first rehearsal.
When I arrived at the theatre, the lights crew was testing the lights (duh) and I suddenly felt very out of place. The whole theatre was dark, there were only those 3 guys sitting in front of the computer, discussing about the lights to be switched on. Where was I supposed to go? What was I supposed to do? I suddenly became very self-conscious and I realised perhaps I made the wrong choice after all. When I finally met the people I'll be working with, I became even more convinced that I shouldn't be there at all.
These are people who have worked in the theatre for the last 2 years at least, most of them opera/theatre/dance majors. What about me? I'm an engineering student! Later, when we were just waiting for cues, a fellow crew member (she's a senior in theatre and gets paid for working in this opera) asked me, "So, what's in this for you?" And I was stumped. I had no idea what made me want to do this opera. Long hours, boring job, obnoxious opera singers...and I'm not even paid!
Possibly because I'm such a mystery there, most of the people there don't feel that comfortable around me anyway. I don't really want to talk to them either, so instead, I just chose to listen to what they say. They discuss about the courses they have to take, like costume designing, the other performances they've worked on, the lecturers, and so on. I don't have an opinion on any of these anyway - then why speak? So throughout the whole rehearsal, I kept to myself, I became the shy little cindy again and just did my job. I just felt like theatre was not the place for me.
During break, the other people went off to grab their dinner. But I didn't feel like it, so I just stayed behind. And I wandered around the stage. So many things look sort of familiar. I know why there is a railing just right behind the white stage background, why there're black curtains even behind the main curtains. I know why they keep the props where they keep the props, why certain lights are angled the way they are. These are little nuggets of knowledge that I've picked up from two years in Huang Cheng and somehow, they just all came back to me. The theatre seemed a little dusty, perhaps because of the lighting. So as I looked around the backstage, I can almost imagine those days when I used to work backstage, at World Trade Center, where there was a very nice sea view at night; or at Victoria Theatre, where the basement was kinda cold, but much bigger.
Will I ever go back to those places? I really doubt it. Those days working on huang cheng were wonderful, but they will never come back to me. I thought I could bring something back by working on the opera, but apparently, it's just not the same. The people are different, the kind of performance is different, the place is different, and heck, I'm different too!
Sigh...it's probably not a very good idea to work on the opera, to remind myself of those memories only to upset myself again.
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