I've been home for almost two days now and it's taken me a little while to put my thoughts together enough to recap my Winnipeg Adventure. It seems like such a whirlwind went by and yet, at the same time, I almost felt like we'd been there forever. I miss it already and a part of me wishes I was in Saskatoon right now, but this is not "the" show. This was the learning experience. Producing my own fringe show was something else entirely. All in all, I probably spent as much money on this show as I would have on one year of university tuition. I can absolutely guarantee you that I worked harder and learned way more out in the field than I ever did striving for a piece of paper with a couple letters attached to it. I found strength I didn't realize I had, I made friendships that I know will last, and I gained incredible insight about myself as a person and as an artist. Plus, I noticed that I also have a pretty wicked sense of humour.
Recently, an absolutely beautiful lady said to me that I am the most optomistic person she knows. At first, I didn't exactly believe her. Afterall, anyone who knows me intimately knows that I am incredibly moody and swing from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other multiple times on a daily basis. However, after thinking about it, that doesn't mean I'm not optimistic.
I probably had the most poorly reviewed show at the Winnipeg Fringe (which I've masochistically now linked here in their entirety for your viewing pleasure):
2 Stars from the Winnipeg Free Press (with a nice comment about my performance, but she spoils the ending of the play...)
and
D+ from Uptown Magazine (scroll all the way to the bottom and wow D+ isn't even a passing grade!)
Personally, I don't think anyone would blame me if I came home licking my wounds, pulling my hair out at my bank balance, moping around for a bit, ect. But I really don't feel that way. In fact, if anything, these reviews now give me something to work on. When the Ottawa Fringe Festival ended, I knew that there were things about this show that I wanted to fix, but I couldn't figure out what. Though I believe a lot of what was said about my show was bullshit, there were some parts that rang true and now I know where I need to go. If anything (and this is going to sound a little sick), Ottawa was too nice to me.
As we packed up the set on our last day there, I took a look around the washroom in our venue. The walls are covered in various forms of graffiti which I typically barely acknowledged, but this one caught my eye:
So, I fell off the ladder in Winnipeg and hit every rung on the way down before smashing into the ground below. That's ok though, because I've got nowhere else to go now but up.
See you next year, Winnipeg.