Grad school projects based on “Harold and the Purple Crayon”?
A few days ago, my Facebook status read thus: “Alida’s creative idea is inspired by ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon.’ Yes, that’s right. That’s what grad school has done to my brain.”
A friend replied, “If you were in my grad program that would be perfectly acceptable. In fact a girl in my publishing class is doing her project on Harold. I am doing mine on The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”
I told her that maybe, once I’d finished the project, I’d post a synopsis of it, just for fun, since I’m fairly sure that a library school project based on “Harold and the Purple Crayon” is vastly different than mine, and it’s cool to see how we can take the same source material and have to do something completely different with it.
My assignment, for my Advanced Case Studies in Producing class, was to create a proposal for a project. This wasn’t a complete strategy (which would include a budget, marketing and PR plan, preliminary contracts, timeline, personnel needed, etc), but rather, a preliminary proposal for a commissioning project that was inspired by the research we’ve done into the worldwide producing environment. Preferably something exciting, challenging, complicated, compelling, and big. Basically, it was a chance to dream big without the limitations of trying to figure out the reality of it.
So here’s what I came up with:
“Messiah”
This weekend, one of the things I got to do in Calgary was see Ambrose University College’s Messiah, which Colin, Mom, and Dad were all singing in (with the AUC Community Singers). It was good, overall, but disappointing in places. The first, biggest, thing was that it was held in the gym of the college that was hosting it. That wasn’t the director’s choice, but the school just built a brand-new campus, so of course the administration wanted the Christmas concert to show it off. Unfortunately, there’s not a large enough concert hall for the event, so they set up the gym.
The sound was quite good, and it didn’t have the terrible acoustics that most gyms have, but the aesthetic was terrible. The mood and formality of the event was really compromised by having it in the venue that they did. I get why the administration wanted it there; I’m also completely on the director’s side, who has said that he’s going to fight to make sure it never happens in that location again. It’s why I will not have my wedding reception in a community hall or something similar. No matter how much you try to dress it up, it still looks like a high-school dance, and that’s an aesthetic that isn’t appropriate for a concert like that.
The Saturday night concert was a sing-along, which I was really excited about, but it was far from meeting my expectations.