I have converged.

The third annual Indy Convergence closed yesterday with our open lab performance, followed by dinner and striking the set. I was thrilled to be a part of this great group of collaborative artists for the second year.This year I brought my short play (sketch, really), The Singing Dog, which was performed by two actors with myself doing the sound effects. Yes, I barked like a dog. A dog who listens to opera and tries her own renditions of arias including Mozart's Queen of the Night vengeance aria. That's the one with all the high f's, though I believe I barked it a whole step down. Kudos to actors Julie Mauro and Chris Waldron who made the dialogue way funnier than I could have imagined! The audience was quite appreciative, judging from the amount of laughter.I also collaborated with actor Sara Bashor on a piece called Notes in Time. This was a mash-up of sorts using two songs written about 300 years apart and turning them into a conversation, conceived on the fly in our spare time. Sara sang phrases from Kander and Ebb's "The World Goes Round" and I responded with phrases from "Felice cor mio" (in English) from Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea. This was a little hard to make work at first, but we did some brainstorming about our motivations and were able to play off each other quite well. It was a really fun experiment and I'd like to do more in this vein. The audience seemed to get it and responded well.There were eight other dance or theatre pieces on the program, combined with video footage of the participants in workshops and rehearsals, and talking about our process. One thing we did a lot of last year was contact improvisation with the dancers. You can see a sped-up video excerpt of this here: Movement Improv Sped Up. I'm in the blue jacket. I love contact improv because it relies on creativity more than skill, so non-dancers and dancers can do it together. Of course, the dancers look better doing it. I really wanted to come up with something that accessible with music, so this year drummer Ryan Anderson and I collaborated on a workshop that included drumming and vocal improvisation. It's going to take me a while to find words to describe it! Participants threw off all inhibitions and produced a couple of great improv jam sessions, each singing their own phrases and then catching the contagious phrases of others around them, the speed controlled by the circle of drummers. In one case, they all settled into the same key. In another, cacophany reigned for a while, but everyone ended together with a final "moo" (inspired, no doubt, by the cowbell that Ryan used to control the tempo). Charles Ives with all his music boxes going at once had nothing on this! I'm excited to explore these ideas further and try this again.Collaboration is like food for me. I thrive when I get the chance to work with other creative people and come up with something completely new. Convergence founders Caitlin Swihart and Robert Negron have done an excellent job of creating a safe space for artists to experiment and collaborate. We worked hard and I'm a bit sleep deprived, but I feel energized and ready to dive back into my new novel, which is my next project.