Scotland, Theatre, and Other News!

So, my lovelies, I have been absent for a while.  But a lot has been happening.

First of all, The Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland: the biggest fine arts festival in the world.  Hardin-Simmons University Theatre Department (my school) is taking a play to perform in August, entitled "The Shadow Box".  Beautiful, beautiful show.  And I am honored to say I have been cast.

So, Scotland.  This is a chance in a lifetime to go to one of the places I have longed to visit, and perform theatre, nonetheless!

However.  Funds are pretty low, and cost is pretty high.  There is a neat little gadget on the sidebar that will allow people to donate to my GoFundMe.  If you don't want to donate [that's totally fine] consider telling other people, or people who have a love of theatre and/or travel.  Every dollar helps.  Sharing helps get the word out.


Here is the link straight to the webpage for my GoFundMe:
https://www.gofundme.com/ReaganDyer


Also, I'm on the HSU Webpage [shown below] where you can also donate if you would rather: http://fund.hsutx.edu/site/TR/Events/General/705957980?pg=team&fr_id=1231&team_id=1354

Reagan Dyer is a junior BFA Acting candidate, Honors minor from Evant, Texas and works in the HSU Theatre Scene Shop. She recently was seen in Check Please and was the assistant stage manager and lighting designer of the HSU production of Trevor. She has been seen in the HSU production of Hay Fever, The Prophet Darla, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, DirectFest 2014, DirectFest 2015, Sweeney Todd and Sense and Sensibility. She was the  light board operator and assistant stage manager for Abilene Live Theatre’s first summer season in 2015. She is the Chaplain of Alpha Psi Omega Honorary Dramatic Fraternity.

The Night Circus

The Circus left that night.

In the darkness—out of all the countless tents that morning—only the Big Top remained, its red and white stripes showing gray in the dim moonlight.  It was drained of color.  Clouds scudded across the sky, casting strangely shaped shadows along the ground—curving and rippling, seeming to rise up from the grass to grope the surroundings. 

Everything had been packed up—vendor’s booths, animal tents, performer’s tents, wagons, trollies—disappearing under the fabric of the big tent.  It was almost like magic.

Nothing breathed that night.  It was quiet; the type of quiet that makes shivers crawl along your skin, or perhaps the kind of quiet that suffocates you.  That is to say, it was not a good quiet.

In the thickness of the dark, unseen by any, a huge cloud left its track in the sky and descended toward the open field where the tent stood, alone.  It came closer and closer, billowing and getting bigger and thicker before finally settling right above the Big Top.  It hung there from an invisible string, the unseen puppeteer using a master’s touch.  Then it enveloped the tent, coming down to the ground and wrapping around it until the tent could no longer be distinguished in the thick whiteness.

Slowly, carefully, the cloud rose back up, higher and higher, carrying the tent within it.  Farther into the sky it flew, until one couldn’t separate it from the other clouds.

The night sky hadn’t changed.  It was the same as ever.  Clouds puffed and evolved into odd configurations; a dragon, an ice cream cone, a trolley flitting across the pockmarked face of the moon.

And one looked rather like a very large Circus tent.

The Circus had gone.

The 777 Challenge: An excerpt from The Nameless Novel

So, I was tagged by the phenomenal Samantha Chaffin for the 777 challenge [check out her writing, now.]  The 777 challenge works like this: you post 7 lines that are found on page 7 of your current novel-in-progress, and then you tag 7 bloggers.

Well.  I break rules.  So I'm posting seven lines found on page seven of chapter TWO in my novel, instead of chapter one.  Because I do things like that.

So this is an excerpt from The Nameless Novel [as I like to call it] because it has no name.  Yet.

Usually, I start out with a name for a novel before I even start writing.  I work from the name up [i.e., The Lightcatcher].  A name ferments in my head, going round and round, before finally demanding that I tell its story.

So this novel has really been frustrating for me because I cannot think of a name.  I just know that a story started forming under my fingertips, nameless, and I had to capture it.


It has the same feel as The Lightcatcher, which is to say it has ocean and wind and sky [because deep in my heart, I long to live in a place like that].  But there are no sentinel balloons or islands or redheaded boys who are strangely enticing.

Instead, there are horses.  And a boy.  And a beach girl with long tangled hair.

Passion, Life, Loud Music

What drives you?  What pursues you?  What thoughts invade your sleep, your dreams, make you wake up in the morning, make you sleepless at night?  What is the reason you cry, you laugh, you love, you breathe.

What is the reason you live?

Today in dance, we were talking about music and how it hits you, and the beat hits you, and you can feel it in your veins.  Music, for me, is more than just pleasant listening material.  I want to feel it.  I want to become the song.  I want to soak my body in its rhythm.

When I'm upset or angry or frustrated or so full of passion I think I'm going to scream if I don't let it out, I turn up my radio in the car and blare it so that I can barely focus on driving.  All I feel is that moment, that anger, that pain.  And at that moment, honestly, I'm not sure that I would care if a semi hit me head-on.

There Was a Princess

"She lived in a castle with birds flying about, day and night, carrying their music in from the surrounding mountains.  She was not a frail, milk-skinned princess as most were won't to think princesses should be.  The mountain air had seeped into her bones from the time she was a little child, feeding her with a love for wild things: a wolf’s howl on the full moon, a Lark’s song on a summer morning, the screech of an eagle as it dives for its prey.  She was lithe, with ruddy cheeks and tangled hair, and her legs were browned from the sun.

"A proper princess indeed.

"Nobody really knew her real name, except for her parents, because everybody called her Rose.  She spent so much time running about in the woods, among the trees and wild things, and plaiting flowers into her hair that she didn’t look a bit like she belonged with a Proper Name.  Rose fit her much better. 

"All day long she dreamed of faraway places, exotic princes and kings, the feeling of a strange mountain’s mist upon her face, a foreign land’s dirt beneath her feet.  With her head full of cobwebs and stars it was a wonder that she ever learned anything.  Every day, when she was convinced to come inside, her tutors had to brush the tangles from her mind with a special little brush.  But every day they gathered again: pictures of tropical birds, colorful plants, lavish spices, faraway ships going to faraway places…  And each time she dreamed, the urge in her little chest to see the world grew stronger and stronger until she thought she might burst from the pure wanting of it.

"I should know.  For that little girl was me."

Pain

I want to write a post on pain.  Why?  Because I've experienced it.  Details are too many and too personal to write down in one blog post.  I haven't had an awful life.  I had a wonderful childhood [despite being brought up with serious body-image issues] and I'm happy.  I'm in college, in love with my major, surrounded by supporting friends.

That being said, however, I have gone through pain.  At this point in my life, the taste of pain is very familiar on my tongue.  And I say that because it's true, not because I'm screaming for attention.  Recently, an event in my life took my heart, chewed it up, and spit it back into the school semester.  It was hard to deal with.  It was painful to deal with.  And I'm still trying to come to terms with it.

But I've learned a lot through it:

Camino de Santiago

Recently, I embarked on an adventure.  I hiked 200 miles of the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage that has been journeyed since ancient times.  If you want to research it a bit, American Pilgrims on the Camino is a good place to start.  It starts in France and continues throughout Spain, and ends at Santiago de Compostela, where the Cathedral de Compostela is [the supposed resting place of St. James].

It was incredible.

The Dance

I wrote this last semester during one of my classes.

THE DANCE

Copyright Reagan Dyer 2014

A mash of mixed up words

all the music coming strong and fast,

the pain thick on my tongue.

But on and on we dance.

The world is all become red

with white-hot flashing lights.

The voices have become a blur

that spill out in the night.

I want to say something,

but the words die on my lips.

Do I deserve this thing?

The world begins to tip.

A nightly tradition we carry out,

spinning round and round again.

The tune beats inside my head,

each note a throb of pain.

But while the music carries on,

I know I have no chance

to duck his flying, bloody fist
before we break this deadly dance.

Bulletin Stories: War is Hell

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I have various pictures tacked up on my bulletin board and I have written something about each one.

-R.D.

"I want to kiss him.  I want to kiss his mouth and make him forget––forget everything he has seen; every horror he has witnessed; every injury he has sustained.  Every person he has killed.  For a couple seconds, I want to kiss him, hard, and then I want to lose myself in those eyes."

Update

I am not a very good blogger.  At all.

I justify myself by saying that I am a better college student, but I'm not sure if that's true.  Anyway I have been trying to write [mostly in The Lightcatcher, but I have new idea as well], which hasn't been all that successful.  So I have started tacking up random pictures on my bulletin board in my dorm room.  Underneath each of these, I have written a sentence or several just about the picture in general.

It is a way for me to be creative without committing to a lot of work, and it has been wonderful.  So I think I'm going to start putting them up here for y'all to see as well.

-R.D.