Did you know that the etymology of the word “passion” comes from the Latin origin “pati”, which means “suffer”? – With this new understanding, we can begin to view the word passion in a new light and start to graft new shoots onto an ancient wisdom.
Monday 19, October 1998, 30,000 feet in the air on United Airlines. Location: somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Dear David- As we reached 30,000 feet and we get the all clear by the pilot to be able to move about the cabin, I push my little button on the side of the armrest and recline my seat to the 2-inch…
Monday 19, October 1998. Los Angeles, California to San Francisco, California. Dear David- There was a knock at my parent’s front door and when I opened the door I was greeted by a tall blonde FedEx messenger standing there holding a courier envelope addressed to me.
Tuesday 22, November 2016, Cotai Ferry from Macau to Hong Kong Central. Well, Sweetheart- today I headed to the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong to meet Benny, the shoe maker to discuss footwear for The House of Dancing Water.
Being torn limb from limb in Australia, Sydney’s live music scene is in a war against broad sweeping measures to protect people from a harmful minority but offering them no place to go.
That time my manager called to ask where I was and I was stuck on a pontoon in the middle of the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park in London. Yeah, that time.
Working for a major arts festival in Australia I spent two festival seasons managing all the casual crew. There was over one hundred of them going to 30+ venues. In general, they all turned up on time, where they were meant to be, tick, job done. But on occasion I would get some very interesting phone calls, emails and texts about why someone didn’t turn up for a shift.
Chairs.
No one really thinks about chairs, they are just there.
You are probably sitting on one while you read this. Where did it come from? How did it get there? Who else has sat on it………?
After working at sea on cruise ships for over 7 years now, I have learned the best ways to juggle my family and friends in my real life back at home in the United Kingdom and my relationships with friends in my ship life out here.
We’ve all been there. Working on a show, it’s all running fine and then BOOM! Murphy’s Law gets involved and things all start getting crazy. It doesn’t matter what department you are in, you will at some point get hit with a problem that you need to fix in the next minute or it is going to have some sort of effect on the show. Sometimes you make it, sometimes you don’t. Allow me to regale you with a few of my personal disasters.
Oh, the Glamour!
When non-industry people find out what I do, there are a few standard answers that recur regularly.
“Oh! You’re an actor?!?” Uh… no… which then leads to disappointment and confusion.
“Oh! You’re a scrub nurse?” Theatrical arts are not a big thing on the Malaysian peninsula, at least not among my family.
“You’re in theatre? How glamorous!”
When I was asked by the creators of this community to contribute to its birth, I was surprised, honoured and baffled. Surprised because Anna knows how obnoxious I can be and yet she has given me a rather large audience to annoy – she, and by extension, you, may live to regret this choice.
While listening to coaches and performers over the years, what had struck me the most was their decision-making process. The key to executing a stunt perfectly, and more importantly, safely, was commitment.
My nightly commute home from work includes walking past the line for a Las Vegas nightclub, and wondering why so many young women have such terrible friends that let them leave their hotel rooms looking the way they look.
‘I have struggled all my life to conquer amateurish technique, and now that perhaps I have mastered it, it seems too late to make any use of it’ – Ralph Vaughn Williams
This in itself is the ultimate paradox of mastery.
Cruising is a billion dollar industry and, with over twenty million guests sailing worldwide throughout the year, the opportunity to perform for large captive audiences on a nightly basis can be an exhilarating prospect!
As an avid travelling event production person, I have learned some valuable skills over the years. Like how to pack: I can’t do it without packing cells from Muji, I start packing a few days ahead of time to get myself culled down enough, I have learned that some things are just worth buying when I get there.
I took to writing almost immediately after my father passed away in late 2012. It was originally a way to explain to a large crowd, thru social media, what exactly had happened to him, to explain how I had come to find out he had passed.
Anyone who is fortunate enough to have landed their first professional gig in the arts knows that feeling, the elation you feel when you receive the call and the job is yours.
When people discover that you work on cruise ships, they are usually intrigued. A slew of questions follow: How did you get into that? What are the crew quarters like? Can you get off in the ports of call? Does it pay well? Do you get sea sick? How long are the contracts?
Editors Note: Noelle Croner, originally from the USA, lives in Macau, China. Noelle plays “The Dark Queen”, a lead character in “The House of Dancing Water”, a 250 million dollar aquatic mega show in Macau. Noelle writes about her transition from the USA to China and the impact it had on her personal life. Through journaling and writing, she worked through the changes in her life and continues to write regularly. This poem was performed by a group of artists for a charity show in Macau to raise funds for a suicide support hotline in the local area.
It’s 12:55pm and you’re sitting in a busy café in Melbourne waiting to meet a friend. Just off a flight, you are really struggling to stay awake, but you will not let jet lag bring you down. You sit there wondering why you didn’t choose to go to Mexico or Hawaii instead. Somewhere you could have sat on a beach in the sun reading a book.
Theresa and I have always been animal people. We love animals and they seem to like us back. As a result we have wanted to adopt pretty much every animal we encounter.
We stopped talking about our wedding. We stopped blogging. We stopped dreaming. What about the invites we had sent out? How would we explain it? What could we do? We went to a bank for help – they literally told us to change careers.
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