New Animal on Tour!

Hi Everyone (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!),

I'm sitting in my motel room in Golden, bantering with my tour roommate Amber Funk Barton and getting the summary of this evening's dance workshop. We (605 Collective) arrived in Golden yesterday evening after a long drive up from Vancouver. This is the first stop on a tour that will take us to Kitimat, Prince Rupert, Nanaimo, Toronto, Burnaby, Summerside (PE), and Halifax. The first portion of our tour is through the Made in BC networks of presenters. A friend suggested that I write about the tour, so here I am!

One thing I love about touring is seeing all the different venues - how they are built, what best practices the crew have in place, and learning their stories. The Golden Civic Centre has an amazing story, but I will write about that later this week once I have collected a few good photos. The company is in Golden until Saturday morning doing outreach events with the community before our performance on Friday night.

The show we are touring is New Animal and you can watch a trailer on YouTube HERE. It explores the inner animalistic traits in humans, has lots energetic movements, and is just fun to watch. If you are in the Vancouver area, we will be at the Shadbolt Arts Centre November 20-23.

Part of my preshow/running duties include purchasing, massaging, and washing lemons that are used during the show. The dancers tear them from each other's mouths and then basically have a lemon husk food fight. This morning our first outreach activity was a photoshoot with lemons, to imitate some film and photo content that was created with the dancers for New Animal. Jeff Harrison, the Technical Director, and I got to participate as well:

For this tour I am in a Production Coordinator/Company Manager role, with some ASM duties as well. My involvement in planning the tour began in August, and took up most of my time in September. Tour planning continues, since we will be on the road until early December, and schedules for the later venues are only now getting finalized. Some of the tour-planning things I do for the company are booking flights, booking car rentals, planning cargo transport, confirming outreach activities, confirming/booking hotels, and creating all the tour schedules. There's lots of excel spreadsheets. It's fun! (Honestly, it is.)

One thing I didn't anticipate in coming to Golden was the fact that many restaurants and shops shut down during October, in the slow season. Last night we walked over to a restaurant only to find that it is closed this week. (And only this week!) We found another option, but the city is pretty quiet when it's not tourist or ski season.

Today Jeff and I did the lighting hang and focus. Tomorrow morning I get a little bit of a sleep-in because the Civic Centre is booked for a community meeting, and then we finish with projector setup and lighting levels. The dancers have two outreach activities tomorrow: a mid-day outdoors "animal" photo shoot at the campground, and another evening dance workshop.

If you're in Golden, come by the Civic Centre and say hello!

Let me know in the comments what you want me to write about in future, or if you will be in one of our upcoming tour spots!

All the Best from the Road,

HQ

Plastic to Oil Technology

A few months ago my dad emailed me a video link that I proceeded to leave in my inbox - until today. It's not a new video - it was originally posted in 2009 - and I was surprised that I have not heard about it before. I'm the kind of person who rips the sticky part off my post-it notes before I recycle the paper (that sticky part can't be recycled) and who actually reads the newsletters from Greenpeace, and who gets frustrated with her parents when they buy unsustainable seafood. (Have you heard about Oceanwise?)

The video is called "Man invents machine to turn plastic to oil." In summary, the Japanese company Blest has developed machines that convert soft plastics into oil. The CEO, Akinori Ito, demonstrates the counter-top machine at 1:48 into the video. He then tells about taking the machine all around the world - educating children and communities about the potential of what we consider waste plastics.

The technology itself is not earth-shattering - large recycling plants have been processing plastics this way before, although not very efficiently. What interests me is the small-scale unit. Could low-income families around the world create new income streams by collecting and processing plastic waste? Would municipalities or businesses open up depots to buy back unprocessed oil from individuals? Could my cousin, living on a farm outside in Saskatchewan, process her own oil out of packaging and plastic products? 

I looked around the internet a bit, and found this article about the same process in Whitehorse, Yukon: http://yukon-news.com/business/plastic-to-oil-machine-comes-to-whitehorse  The community of Whitehorse installed a plastic to oil machine in September 2012 for a one-year trial. They realized that much of their waste was travelling overseas to be processed, using methods that may not be the cleanest. "The goal of this pilot project is to give P&M Recycling the ability to process plastics onsite, rather than sorting it and trucking it south, while producing enough energy to heat the 600-square-foot recycling centre." I am going to keep an eye out for updates on this project as we move into September.

Some thoughts that come out of this:How does the City of Vancouver process it's plastics? How far do they travel to be processed? Are we shipping out waste out-of-country?

Can this technology be used as the base of small businesses in the developing world? What additional technology is required to process the oil into diesel, gas fuel, etc? Could this even the playing field for countries that have less oil resources?


I hope the fact that we can cycle plastic to oil will not drown out the fact that plastic products are inherently wasteful and destructive to our planet. When you think about the amount of water, oil, and energy that goes into making a plastic water bottle, for example, it is absolutely obscene. 

The original article on Blest Co's device can be found here: http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/plastic-to%20-oil-fantastic/

What do you think? How would you want to see this technology used or not used? 

On the next tour I will...

I am spending April touring with the dance company Out Inner Space, working on their piece Vessel. My official title is Stage Manager, but on tour that job also includes production management duties like confirming schedule with upcoming venues and making sure everyone gets to their flights on time.

We are spending our first week at the Banff Centre doing a residency in the theatre to work out all the details of projections and lighting. I love working in Banff - they take really good care of you and the crew is awesome. In 2010 I did the Opera Stage Management workstudy program here, and I was back with the 605 Collective last February, so I have many good memories of "Banff Camp."And all the running around campus as an ASM means that I now know most of the shortcuts around campus.

It's only a few days into tour, but I find myself often saying "On the next tour I will [blank]." Some of the things are small and silly, but some are bigger. I wanted to make sure I remembered these, and maybe you will find some of them useful as well.

1. Schedule work around the dining room times while you are in Banff (we did this, but it's important).
2. Pack cube tabs. The hotel room will invariably have too few plugs for your phone, laptop, etc.
3. Bring flip flops so you don't have to walk to the pool in a house robe and combat boots (okay... this is mostly a note for me...)
4. Don't spend 8 hours sitting hunched over at a theatre production table. Ouch. Walk and stretch or come up with a better work position.
5. DO spend time chatting with the house crew, getting to know them better, and trading stories. I always learn so much from this, and I make lots of new friends!

Here's a good resource on tour planning from the Canada Council website. It's a good overview of some of the things to think about, but it forgets to mention that you should hire a Production Manager (cough cough): http://www.canadacouncil.ca/development/ontheroad/touringhandbook/

More updates from the road to come!

I'm Not Really a Blogger

Every so often I remember that I have a blog which I never use. Today, for example, I was reading an article that I found through Pinterest on "Managing your online persona." The first task was to Google yourself - which I did - and one thing that appeared on the first page was this blog. Let me say first of all that I love my name, and that I don't seem to share it (according to Google searches) with anyone else. I have a friend named Jason Smith and he jokes that his name is so common that it's the name used on sample credit cards (which is true).

I love writing - and I don't do nearly enough of it lately - but I generally prefer pen and notepad to screen and keyboard. Ideas transfer more smoothly from my mind onto paper, and there's no fear of the entire world reading my journal. Well, at least not until I write my memoirs, but I can't ruin the surprises before then.

Once in a while, though, there are things that cross my mind that I want to share with my friends/internet community. So I think I will attempt to use this space for that.

The article I mentioned can be found here: http://mashable.com/2013/03/09/you-will-be-googled/

Thanks for reading!