Welcome to our Web site
By Chad Fasca
I will never forget the night I met my girlfriend's parents. I had been given two sentences to say to them: 'Hello, my name is Chad,' and 'It is a pleasure to meet you'. I said them over and over, so many times in my head that the words became a cadence, then a drumbeat, then a Paul Simon album on extended play that pulsed in my head throughout our 14-hour flight to Tokyo.
After flying the last seven hours of over a wide, deep ocean, we landed and I still remembered my lines. We then took the high speed rail from Narita Airport into the Tokyo proper, where we transferred to a local train, then switched to the monorail. Along the way, I would practice my phrasing and rehearse my lines every ten or fifteen minutes.
Of course, just when you think you have something nailed down, it vanishes. I've experienced this first hand in the rehearsals preceding performances. Your memory fails you, the music stops moving you or your muscles forget the choreography. In these rehearsals, you make your worst mistakes and labor through something meant to flow and look easy. Typically this happens the night before or the morning of a performance, not minutes before one. My collapse occurred two stations away from Oikeibajo Mae station, where my girlfriend's parents stood waiting for us.
I was supposed to say 'Hello, my name is Chad,' which sounds something like "hadji mei mashtae Chaddo dis." Instead, I kept thinking "haghee" instead of "hadji." The harder I tried over the next ten minutes, the worse it became. And I still had another complete sentence to go. The sentences seemed within reach as our monorail train pulled into the station, but when the train pulled out, my sentences left with it.
Muscle memory does not leave so coldly. It may skip a stop, but I it always returns on performance night; unfortunately, oral memory does not come back as easily. When I saw her father standing across from me on the platform, I had nothing to say, so I smiled and held it. As my girlfriend fed me the lines, he watched, amused by the whole affair. And when she explained how I had rehearsed the lines and still couldn't get it right, he laughed. And I relaxed.
Relaxation is key. If you are not your best one night, you must relax and concentrate on making the next night better. We took the stairs down to the ground level, where her mother waited. When I met her, both sentences returned saddled only with minor pauses and a few pronunciation flaws. I said hello; then, we all walked home.
We spent the next two weeks in Tokyo, primarily to teach Lindy Hop workshops for the Tokyo Swing Dance Society, but also to visit my girlfriend's family and friends. So, I received a lot of practice introducing myself to people in Japanese. Each time I approached a new person, my greeting improved until the words were no longer a cadence or a Paul Simon song, they were a natural part of me.
I can not help drawing a parallel between this fortnight in Tokyo and the launch of ActorsUpdate. As I sat down at my desk to write a welcome message for our site, this memory moved to the front of my mind. We are meeting for the first time. We are introducing ourselves in a new language, the language of the Web. We come from different places and paths, but with common interests. ActorsUpdate might not get things exactly right the first time, but we will keep trying and keep improving week to week. Our goal is to be your home on the Web. We may have a long way to go, but we will get there.
Our journey began Oct. 18. Leading up to this date, we spent a great deal of time cobbling together our resources database. If you click on the 'r,' you can access this part of the site. Each subject heading has a number of categories within it, not just those topics listed. The resources have been checked and we constantly update them with new resources and new information on existing resources. We have also begun reaching out to the community for news. In our news section, we will add new feature stories each week covering everything from theatre to dance to arts organizations, and especially individuals.
And we've made our site free to you out of a strong conviction that you should not have to pay for the tools to create art.
But, the 'u' in our logo means 'You.' We cannot succeed without your help. If you know of a resource we don't have, or find something out of date, by all means tell us about it. We also would love your tips on news stories or interesting feature stories. And we are always looking for correspondents to send in their notes on this Equity informational meeting or that upcoming workshop, etc.
"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone," Ralph Waldo Emerson once said.
The same words could be applied to our performing arts community. It's not about us and what we think; it is about you.
We are a community Web site that allows performing artists to share their news, views, shows and visions with each other. The format will become more user friendly with each passing week. Over the next two months, we will build additional components to the site that will allow you to post information to our site yourself. And we will make the site more interactive, meaning you will have more opportunities to respond to articles you agree or disagree with, as well as rave or rant about a resource or an agency in our directories.
Hello, our name is ActorsUpdate. It is a pleasure to meet you. Let's make New York's performing arts community the world's best together.
