soulscape

I’m writing, conceiving, directing a 1/2 hour drama and dance production this Sunday during some of the Mosaic gatherings: Pasadena at 9:30am and the Mayan at 6:00 and 8:00pm. If nothing else, it’s going to be a visual feast, but hopefully it’ll be a nice emotional experience also — I’m describing it as a mindtrip.

So yes my last couple of weeks has been dominated by this. And many, many hours of work remain the rest of this week leading up to Sunday. Check it out if you can. For more info on locations, etc, for Mosaic, go to mosaic.org

For those of you who may wonder what that “dance stuff” is I’m always involved with, always rehearsing for, then I invite you to come this Friday night to see firsthand. We’re performing our “Scribble” show this Friday only at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater in Hollywood. This is the show we’ve taken in one form or another around the country and to South Africa. My parents, three of my brothers, and my brother’s fiancee are all coming to watch me. That’s going to be interesting in itself.

The show includes a lot of dance, some spoken word, and also a good wallop of comedy. It’s only $10 if you get the tickets now online! See more info below.

This Friday!

Edit: I later was forwarded a link to a blog Willow Creek created that had videos and discussion of the conference. It included one cool post about Erwin and Scribble with a nearly three-minute video clip and lots of cool comments. Check it out here:

http://2007artsconferenceblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/your-r.html

This past Tuesday, Lisa Olson and I (Alan Luu) were the first to arrive in Barrington, IL, where Willow Creek Church makes a home. It was in Willow’s 7,100-seat sanctuary that the Arts Conference was to occur from Wednesday to Friday (June 13-15th). Approximately 5,000 attendees were expected, perhaps the highest total ever for the conference.

We were there to meet with the conferences’ tech team, to help walk through our Scribble Show, since the entire Scribble team could not get out there that early. The tech team was a pleasure to work with - from Jill the Production Manager, to Matt the Technical Director, Mark the Stage Manager, Scott the Sound Engineer, and on and on. Sherri the Program Manager and many more would make the next couple of days a very pleasant experience.

My immediate impression of Willow Creek and the sounding area: Very Green, Very Beautiful. Growing up in Los Angeles, you are not used to seeing so much green, and so much open land. In Los Angeles, if there is open land, the immediate thought is “what are they going to build here?” So Angelenos may wonder why the people of Barrington have left so much land unused.

We were joined later Tuesday by Chris Duran and Nathan Neighbour, both of Mosaic Los Angeles. Chris arranged for us to have dinner that night with Jim and Lianne (apologies for any mis-spellings). Jim is the Director of the Willow Creek Association of churches. We were treated to some great discussion with a fabulous couple.

The four of us also were able to enjoy the first day of the conference, featuring Dewitt Jones, Nancy Beach, and Dan Kimball. The David Crowder Band also started the conference off ably.

The rest of the team arrived later that day: David Arcos (Urban Poets’ Director), John Torres (actor/musician), Dan Perkins (Saxophonist), Phillip Attmore (Dancer/Actor), Mike Tyus (Dancer), Arlene Yuan (Dancer), Stacey Carr (Dancer), and Abby Mason (Dancer). It was good to be together as a group again. We only had time Wednesday evening to have a much-needed rehearsal for the show. While using the dance studio space in the Willow building, we were fortunate enough to meet Willow’s dance team. They showed us one of their new dance pieces while we previewed one of our pieces from Scribble.

On Thursday, David and the team put together a session called “A Weekend at Mosaic”, with David speaking, while the rest of us provided some elements, such as John performing his beautiful song, “Hallelujah,” and the dancers performing a piece from Phillip called “Only Hope.” The session went very well.

Friday was the day we had all been waiting for though. The entire team was excited to be able to perform for the 5,000 in attendance, and it was an honor to be able to close out the conference. Nancy Beach showed a lot of trust in us to even invite us, and we did not want to disappoint. In addition, the facilities and technical support were perhaps the best we had ever received for our modest show, so it was exciting to see how that would enhance Scribble.

After an early call-time of 6am to do one last run-through, a good portion of us took a nap in the spacious and beautiful green room. By about 10:30am, most of us were back up, stretching, doing some last-minute rehearsals, warming up. Our show would start at 11:15am, with Erwin McManus coming out first to speak on themes such as uniqueness, every human’s potential for greatness, creativity — themes that run through the Scribble show. Erwin would speak again in the middle of the show, and also at the end.

The show began rather quietly. After Erwin spoke, Dan came out to perform his sax intro. Right after that, we performed our first dance piece, a short minute-long hip hop number that’s meant to “hype up” the crowd. It didn’t really work. OK, so this crowd would be a little harder on the dance pieces, but I still had faith. Sure enough, after David’s “I Say Scribble” monologue, they were beginning to warm up. As the show went on, the audiences’ energy got better and better. It also became obvious that John’s character in the show was a big hit. In fact, he was a show-stopper. As always, Phillip’s “Move” monologue and the subsequent dance piece that features him tap-dancing was also popular. But John, who plays the show’s eager “stage manager” who gets over-excited and desperately tries to perform, was the clear favorite.

After the show, it was great to interact with people from all over the country, some of whom gave some encouraging commentary. As always, it was fulfilling to play a small part in the ongoing arts movement that is happening in certain places in this country.

I am writing this at 7:30am, East Standard Time, from Orlando, Florida. We are dancing at a conference called Humana 2.0, and I have been here since Tuesday, returning to LA tomorrow. I haven’t seen much of Orlando, but my impressions are that it’s generally flat, people run red lights, and some people have “southern” accents.

It’s what we Cali folks would call “chill.” The team was excited about going to Disney World, that was pretty much nixed because it’s $67 for a day pass to any of the parks. I guess Disney World consists of 4-5 different parks, all of which would require an entry fee.

Anyway, trips like this are always fun, if for nothing else because we get to hang out and bond, but as always I’m looking forward to returning to LA. See you all soon.

I am back in Los Angeles. What a two weeks in Joburg. There’s lots to share, and I will do that in the form of photos and videos, but there’s also a lot of work to catch up on for Awaken. Hopefully I’ll have time to put together a short video trailer of our trip in the next week. Otherwise, there’s a few thousand photos I can share that the different team members took. I also have 14 hours of video that I took.

More later, but hello again, Los Angeles.

I’m on my way to Johannesburg, South Africa today! Unfortunately, we are flying to London first, so that means no carry-on bags due to the new security precautions. Around 20 hours in the air and no carry-on items at all!

Will put updates for the trip, but maybe not until I get back on the 28th or after. Don’t know how much, if any, internet access I’ll have in Joburg.

In August, I might/will be going to Johannesburg, South Africa with a group of performing artists from Mosaic. Like the trip last year to Istanbul, Turkey, we will be performing at different locations. This year, we are also looking to create workshops for schools and also orphanages.

Of course a trip like this can be expensive, $3,000 to $3,500 each person. As a team we will be looking and trying to perform at different venues to raise money. We are also getting some help from friends at Mosaic who are throwing a couple of events to raise money for us.

Please check out the links below to the flyer for these upcoming events. The basic facts: $10 admission, which includes a salsa class from 7:30-8:30pm, then the night continues (I assume it sort of becomes a salsa party) until 2am. At 10pm, the night is interrupted by a show, which includes dance performances from the dance team I help lead at Mosaic. Again, check the flyer out if you’re interested.

BRIDGE THE GAP Fliers [click to view]:

I think I’ve forgotten to mention that the name our team to Istanbul went under was Urban Poets, and our show was called, of course, Urban Poetry. We have a website:

http://www.urbanpoets.org

It doesn’t have much now, but hopefully will be updated in the future.

As promised, I am posting pictures from my trip to Istanbul. I have pictures from our shows, as well as from the rest of the trip. In the future, I might put a video of the show up, but we’ll see. For now:

Click here for pictures from one of our shows.

Or, click here for other pictures from my trip.

K, its 7:45pm in Istanbul, and 9:45am in Los Angeles. I am once again at an internet cafe checking email and surfing the web. (It costs 1 YTL for half an hour, which translate to something like 60-75 cents.) Though I like to spend time here catching up, putting up with the smoke is horrible. (Many people smoke here, and smoking is still allowed indoors.)

Meanwhile, my hip hop team, DVS, is on stage at the Escondido Performing Arts Center north of San Diego, going thru their “tech time”. In about 10-11 hours they will be taking the stage in the Bustagroove competition. I will be asleep of course because it’ll be about six in the morning in İstanbul.

I will have to see if I can get to a payphone after I wake up to find out how they did. Regardless, I will be getting on a plane around Noon tomorrow İstanbul time to fly home. Although I think it takes a total of 14 hours in the air to get back to Los Angeles, it will only be the early evening when I get back because of the time difference.

Most likely I will be very tired. It’s been great but tiring. In between eating “durum” (kind of like a burrito) and rice pudding, we were constantly lugging around a lot of heavy equipment to our performances. Our performance is 25 minutes long, but getting the equipment there, setting up, breaking down, and getting the equipment back after is probably a three-four hour process, depending on if anything goes wrong.

Anyway, as I said in my last post, I will have a lot of pictures to potentially put on here at a later time. Next time I post I will be back in Los Angeles.

Alright so i am at an internet cafe in istanbul. i am supposed to be writing a paper that is due tomorrow (Wednesday), but thought i would make a quick post. Quickly:

- The part of istanbul i am in seems more like Europe (Greece, Italy) than anything else.

- Turkish people love to dance.

- Keyboards are different because they have more letters, like ığüöçş

- They eat a lot of bread here, along with lamb, chicken or beef.

- They call the War in iraq (ie War on Terror) America’s War

- it isn’t so different here

i will have plenty of pictures on here soon (i be back June 6th)