I woke on Friday at 6, feeling alert but with a small headache. The rest of the apartment was quiet, so I showered and went for a walk, eager to stretch my legs and watch how the city wakes up. The neighborhood we’re in is out of the tourist area, so the hotels and high-end shops are replaced with apartment rows and stores for Amsterdammers. Paint shops, halal markets, McDonald’s etc.
The city is slow to wake up. By 8am, there was only one coffee shop that was open for business in the neighborhood (Google Maps shows at least ten in a two-block radius that opened later in the day). I grabbed a cappuccino before heading back to the apartment to grab my stuff for work.
L and I got ourselves from the apartment to the theatre on a really beautiful ride. My favorite part of the ride is the section that has a city park on the right and a small grassy field with tram tracks on the left. There’s something cool about the grass growing all around the tram tracks, with hundreds of Amsterdammers biking on either side of them.
Work at the theatre was the last day of load-in and prepping for tech. I ran my SPAT test track and it worked like a charm, so I built out longer versions of the sound sequence. I set up microphones, started programming qlab, etc. I watched a run of Anatomy of a Home, and when I got back to the theatre from the rehearsal hall, I discovered that the theatre had booked two workshops into the venue for the rest of the afternoon and evening. I had planned to work all afternoon spatializing sound and building the show. Instead, I had to wrap things up to make space for the workshops. Oh well.
A quick lunch with L, B, and E before heading back to the theatre to work in their maker lab for a few hours. I kept building content while L and B went to pick up K from the train station. She had just flown in from CA and gamely jumped into rehearsal with R while L and I watched.
After rehearsal, L, B, and K headed back to the apartment to get K settled in while I rode my bike to the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. The four of us were going to meet R to watch a show with the Nederlands Theater Festival called ‘The Story of Travis’ and I wanted some time by myself to take photos and collect some thoughts. I didn’t find the area very photogenic, but I found a lovely bar called NJoy that had a great cocktail with scotch, cognac, citrus, and thyme. Then, I grabbed a quick bite and headed to the theatre.
The venue itself is old and grand. I was in a box seat all to the side on the second balcony. The air was warm and humid, and the spotlights glowed as they shone from the back balcony. The play ‘The Story of Travis,’ was performed in Dutch and focused on a Black man who grew up in Chicago before relocating to Amsterdam as an adult. I didn’t get any of the details b/c the language, but the text was clearly working through issues of Blackness, culture, and African heritage. There were elements of the design and staging that felt very simplistic, compared to some of the conversations we’re having in the US about these issues, but the (95% white) audience ate it up. Five standing ovations.
Afterwards, we biked back to the apartment. K and L went up to go to bed, while B and I went for a beer and some more conversation. He took me to a nice local beer bar, and we got back to the apartment at around 1.
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