The Bluebird Kickoff Reception

It still hasn't really hit me that I'm finally in college after all these years. And at this point, I'm not sure that it WILL hit me. In fact, this first week at Drexel has seemed to be more similar to high school than I could've imagined. My dad works in the Biomedical Engineering department here, managing labs and working on research projects, and so I've visited the campus enough times to know my way around this place better than most freshmen. In addition to that, a number of my friends from high school are also attending Drexel, so much of my free time since getting here has been spent hanging out with them, the way we did in high school, despite the fact that we decided not to room together so that we would meet more new people.

I'm even on my way to joining the same clubs that I was in in high school. One of the major extracurricular activities I did in high school was set crew for the school's yearly plays, musicals, and other performances. Set crew basically has the job of designing all of the set pieces for the performances - building platforms and rooms, painting and decorating everything, and making props look as realistic as possible. I also had a short stint on the tech crew at my school - setting up and working all of the lights, microphones, and effects (sound effects, fog, haze, lighting effects, etc.) - and I even acted in the last performance at my school before graduation - the first time I had been in such a performance since 2nd grade. Anyway, Drexel, of course, has its own theater company known as the Drexel Players, and I am very interested in joining it.

I heard through email and through various posters around the university that there was to be a "Bluebird Kick-off Reception" Thursday evening in Drexel's Mandell Theater. The reception was being held to introduce EgoPo Productions and Orchestra 2001, the professional theater group and orchestra who are the Mandell Theater's "Professionals in Residence" this year. What that means is that these companies will be working together with Drexel students to put on a production of a play later this year. The play, in this case, is called "Bluebird".

I went to the reception at 5:00. I was fairly excited because I had never been in the Mandell Theater before, and I was interested in seeing what it would be like. Also, this was a good opportunity to meet and converse with professional actors and musicians, as well as the Drexel Players, who, with any luck, I would soon be joining. The reception was being held on the stage, and that was exciting in itself because I was able to get a good look at the space I would be working with. I got some food and walked into the crowd of about 40 people who were milling about, talking to each other. I started talking to a student who, as it turned out, had designed the lighting for this event. He told me about what goes into designing the lighting for something like this and about how he set up the lights to subtly change colors and patterns every few minutes. After that, I introduced myself to a man who turned out to be the father of the director of the play, and he told me all about how Drexel used to be so different when he was younger - when they didn't even have a theater. I talked to him and his wife for a while and then the director introduced the head of EgoPo productions. He talked about how he had gone about setting up this union of EgoPo and Orchestra 2001 to produce Bluebird, and then he introduced the artistic director of Orchestra 2001, James Freeman.

Freeman talked about how he felt that the compositions of Grammy-winning composer George Crumb would be perfect for Bluebird, and announced that Orchestra 2001 would be playing a piece by Crumb for us that evening. The piece was called "Dream Sequence (Images II)". Freeman then displayed the sheet music and the crowd pressed in to get a good look at it. I must say, I have never before seen such an interesting piece of sheet music, and I don't expect to ever see anything quite like it again. Rather that being arranged in ordered lines, read left to right like a book, the music was arranged primarily in circles, with arrows pointing in all directions to link some segments of the piece with other segments in other circles. In addition to that, the circles were made up of a number of segments of music, and each segment contained multiple smaller segments of music, which, as Freeman explained to us, could be played in whatever order "felt right" to the musician at the time that he played it. The piece was written for piano, violin, cello, percussion, tuned wine glasses, and even included such "instruments" as "nonvocal wind noises" (aka whooshing sounds made with one's mouth). Freeman spent 15 minutes explaining the piece to the crowd, and then the orchestra got themselves situated and began to play. Throughout the 15 minute piece the crowd made not a sound, save for a bristle of excitement and incredulity when the first "nonvocal wind noises" were made. I'm not sure if the crowd was silent purely out of respect for the musicians or if part of the reason for their silence was because they had never seen or heard such a strange performance. The music was quite eerie, and somewhat reminiscent to Garry Schyman's orchestrations for the soundtrack to the video game "Bioshock". When the orchestra was finished playing, the crowd applauded, and then myself and two other people from the crowd discussed the piece with Freeman and the other orchestra members. It was a very enlightening experience. After that, the reception began to wind down, so I headed back to my dorm to do some research on George Crumb's music. I can't wait to see what other music Orchestra 2001 will be playing for Bluebird, and I am very excited to be joining the Drexel Players.