I'm pretty excited. the Kymeras got invited, a while back, to perform at CanCon in October. We've really, for real, started putting the show together and I can't wait to see the final product. It'll be the first Kymeras show in... frankly, in donkey's years. I'm really happy we're performing together again.
This being us, of course, we weren't content to go the easy route and just put together a show where Sean and I do poetry, Ruthanne and Marie do some stories, and they all have the same general theme. No. This being us, we started spitballing some ideas, and now we've got ourselves embroiled in a multiple-voiced, multiple-faceted, single-arc story that will take us an hour or so to tell: a story spun out of a beautiful poem Sean performed at our steampunk show a couple of years ago; a story about love and time travel.
It's actually been a long time since I wrote much of anything, other than blog posts and news articles, and it was hard and effortful and eventually encouraging to go back to it. To sit down in front of the computer and get through that horrible first fifteen minutes or so where you really just want to go open the Facebook window and look at your friends' posts and get frustrated that no one has posted anything fascinating in the twenty minutes since the last time you checked and . . . well, you know. It's not pretty. I sit there staring at the screen, write a sentence or two, then delete them again, then lose focus. Then remember I should probably check that the cats' water bowl's been topped up.
But, in writing for this show, I got to break through that phase and actually start creating again. The other night, I actually wound up staying up late writing (haven't done that in so long). And then I went to our first real show-structure meeting today, where we took the stories and poems we've been working on and read them to each other and started figuring out exactly what would go where, and I admit I walked in thinking, as I usually do, "well, I've brought a load of crap." But I knew I was going to have to read them out loud. It was hard to work up to.
Funny how reluctant I can be to perform in front of three friends, rather than a room of a hundred strangers. And before I read, Sean was talking about what he imagined my part being - I'm basically playing the role of a character in his original poem - and it didn't seem to match up at all. Which made me feel a bit insecure - here I'd written my couple of crappy poems and they didn't do what they needed to do and . . . ah hell. But then the others made me read them. And when I was finished, Sean said, "You need to get over this insecurity thing, that was perfect, that was exactly what I was talking about, it was beautiful," and a bunch of other nice things, and I felt a lot better.
And besides. . . Man, it's fun to collaborate with these folks. For some reason, Sean and Ruthanne and Marie and I collaborate really well. And we're at our best when we're putting together a show like this one - one that's a cohesive tale or an arc, one where there's a certain amount of theatricality and staging involved (in this show, Marie and Ruthanne will act as narrators: Sean and I will be in first person, inhabiting the characters of John and Evelyn, and there's some staging to enhance that idea). As we started to talk through the show structure and the stories Marie and Ruthanne were crafting, I caught myself thinking, "Wouldn't it be cool if we did X?" only to have someone suggest it a moment later, or have that facet appear in the story they were planning. It was almost uncanny.
So yeah - it is great to have the band back together. We're planning this show, for October 5, and a reprise of our winter solstice show for a house concert in December, and already talking about touring Evelyn in 2014. It's pretty exciting.
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