Back to Business

NYU is back in session for the second half of spring semester-- wow! Where did the time go?

Some exciting highlights of the last few weeks:

• Mixtapes competed in the ICCA Northeast Semifinals on March 22! We unfortunately didn't place and won't continue on in the competition but we had the amazing opportunity to perform in the beautiful space that is Boston Symphony Hall, which is an experience I'll never forget.
• Auditioned at the New England Theatre Conference beginning of spring break. I auditioned for over thirty different theater companies from the northeast and was called back for two. Still waiting to hear back from these companies.
• Was asked to perform in First Stages again this year and started rehearsing the piece yesterday. It's a student-written choral piece and I'm singing alto 2, which is an interesting challenge for me. I'm nowhere near an alto 2, and it's a lower range of my voice, but luckily it's not too low for me to manage. We perform the piece on Friday at 8 pm.
• Mixtapes are holding elections next week for Executive Board and various chair positions for next year. I plan on running for chair of Social Media.
• Saw my friends and fellow vocal performance students perform in the new work Beatsville this past weekend--so good! 
• Continuing to apply for endless amounts of internships in the hope of staying in New York over the summer. Waiting to hear back from the 6+ internships I've applied to. Have meeting with career counselor at NYU on Friday afternoon. 

Concert Weekend!

Sorry about the lateness of this post, school's been crazy with midterms coming up. But this past weekend was our first concert of the spring! We performed two new songs, two old songs, and we performed our ICCA set. We also officially announced that the Mixtapes will be competing in the ICCA Northeast Semifinals in Boston on March 22! A lot of people knew already, if they were friends with any of the Mixtapes, but we made an official public announcement at the concert. But other than that, the concert was a lot of fun! We had a smaller crowd than usual but it was nice, it was a more intimate concert. Lexi came, as well as Gabrielle, which was sweet of them. We had the Bryn Mawr Night Owls open for us, they're an all-female group from just outside of Philly. They were nice girls, but at our party afterwards they weren't very social with us, it was very much segregated between the Tapes and the Night Owls, but it was fine.



Here's a link to two of our songs that we did, "Blank Space" and "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?":

"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNKHIrnRj0

"Blank Space"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASYM0LrnY4s

Concert prep!

The Mixtapes are gearing up for their first spring concert on March 7th! Our theme is MARCH of the Penguins (we're a very punny group). We're singing two new arrangements, two songs from past semesters, and our ICCA set (complete with choreography!). We're still learning some of our set but I know we'll be ready come concert time. Sadly three of our members won't be at the concert due to other conflicts, so we're going to have to re-choreograph the ICCA set a bit to account for the missing bodies.

I'm on decorating committee again (this time my friend Jerry and I are co-chairing, I think). The theme is March of the Penguins but I don't know if we're going to take the theme literally and put penguins and that sort of stuff around as our decorations, or if we're going to take it in a different direction. Our dress code for the event is essentially a tuxedo look: black on bottom, white shirt, and black blazer. I'm hoping we go with the tuxedo idea for the decorations because I personally wasn't a fan of the March of the Penguins theme, I definitely didn't vote for that. BUT our next concert is going to be Murder Mystery/Dinner Theatre themed which I'm very excited for.


ALSO! There's a video up of our ICCA performance, here's the link!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW7QXwkUUJ0

Sick Week and Theater Auditions

Well, at this point I've been sick for almost a week, and it's not getting much better. I don't have a lot of time to relax and to allow myself to rest enough to get better, but that's college for you!

In the wake of ICCAs last weekend, the Mixtapes have started working hard toward our next concert on March 7. We're learning two "old" songs (pulled from previous semesters) in addition to two brand new songs, plus polishing our ICCA set which we're hoping to perform with choreography at our concert. It seems as though everyone's getting sick again, as if everyone's immune systems made the collective decision that now that ICCAs are over, it's okay to get sick because the obligation is past.

Well that's not quite true for me--I'm currently in the process of auditioning for Sharon Playhouse's Collegiate Company in Sharon, Connecticut. It's a summer stock theater company where I'd be performing in three full productions in addition to taking master classes and having a Collegiate Company cabaret event. I have a callback tomorrow and hopefully we'll hear back soon after that as to whether or not we get cast. I've also applied to the New England Theater Conference (NETC) which is similar to Unified auditions for performing arts programs. It's a weekend where I go and audition for about 30 summer stock theater companies at once and anyone there can hire me to work at their theater company over the summer. I'm also looking into theater internships in New York. So many possibilities!

ICCA Weekend

This past weekend was the International Championship of Collegiate A Capella (ICCA). The Mixtapes went out to Hofstra University in Long Island to compete in the Northeast Quarterfinals. We placed third, which means that we don't get to advance, but at the very least we placed third out of eight groups. Last year when we competed for the first time we didn't place at all. Experiences like this weekend is why I joined the Mixtapes in the first place. I'm very proud of the work we did, I think we looked great and sounded even better. We got lots of positive comments from audience members after the show and our friends who came to see us said we never looked or sounded better. We have an audio recording of the event and a video is coming out soon, I'll come back and post the link to that once I get it.

ICCA Prep!

The Mixtapes are hard at work preparing for the ICCAs coming up this weekend. T-6 days! Today we had a clinician come in to help us clean and work on our routine. Her name is Mel Daneke and she's part of an a capella group called Musae, and she also works at The Vocal Company, which produces solely a capella music. PLUS she's a judge for the ICCAs on the 21st so she knows what judges are looking for.

It was so much fun working with her, she was really nice and not intimidating at all. We did our set for her (as far as we had choreographed), and then we sat and talked and broke down the set song by song. She's really into talking about the emotion behind songs and what they mean to us, which was a great way of looking at it. I feel like we spend a lot of time perfecting our sound but we don't spend as much time thinking about the performance side of things, or the "acting" side, so Mel taking the time to sit with us and discuss the emotion and drive behind our songs and kind of the general story arch of the set was really cool. Then we started from the beginning of the set and started and stopped so she could give us notes and fix formation issues and whatnot.

One cool part of the clinic was when we were singing through "Pusher Love Girl" at the end of our set. There's a moment when the girls have a crazy four part harmony that's super cool and very much our style, and Mel asked who was on the highest soprano line. Everyone pointed at me (awkward) and she was like "Okay cool! Don't be afraid to have more fun with it, you can totally belt it more than mix it" and I was like "Yeah okay I'll try that" and then we sang it through with that in mind and it was sooooo thrilling! We sang the harmony part and then stopped and everyone was hooting and hollering because it sounded amazing. It was a really cool breakthrough moment. I also felt really happy and excited personally because I got to let go a bit more and have fun with the line and belt my face off a bit, and everyone seemed really impressed. Erica, one of the sopranos who just came back from being abroad in Prague, came up to me after rehearsal and said that she was standing next to me during that bit and she was blown away by my voice. Yay!

BIRTHDAY WEEK

This Tuesday I turned 20!! That's right, no more teenagerdom for me! I'm now officially a 20-something. And of course, New York (and NYU) recognized the significance of the day by declaring a half day Monday and a full snow day on Tuesday--the first time I've ever had a snow day on my birthday! I also realized that it was the first time since probably preschool that I didn't have school on my birthday, so that was exciting. My roommate Lexi and I slept in and then went and got our nails done, I got a free birthday drink from Starbucks, and then we went to dinner at this darling Victorian themed restaurant near my dorm. It was so delicious and so cute! Lexi and Elle and I walked past it once last semester and when I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go for dinner I saw Lillie's Victorian Bar and Restaurant and decided to give it a try. We ended up really liking that place. Then we went back to our dorm and Lexi made me a cake (funfetti, duh), and we watched The Other Woman--very funny movie!

In other exciting news, my a capella group has started rehearsing and preparing for the International Championship of Collegiate A Capella (ICCA), we compete in just about two weeks. We finished learning our ICCA set today and started choreographing and it already looks and sounds amazing. We only have I think three (official) rehearsals until the competition, although we might add another one if we feel its necessary. But if the choreography is as simple and easy to pick up as the stuff we did today, I think we'll be fine.