No mistake. I skipped days 7 and 8. We rehearsed and advanced a lot. If and when you see our final product, you will see it. Nine days of rehearsals, and we will “run” our show tomorrow. Our digital audience will get a final product that will be registered more like a movie, less like an opera. Understanding the final arch will require a whole new process and tools, most of them on a flat surface. So, in our run-through, we will be able to imagine the real arch, and hopefully, no emergency touch-up will be required: misjudging the video element would derail the product. But as this is a first for me, misjudging could happen. Opera in covid time: we are all constantly doing so many things for the first time. No way around it, and so little time to learn about it. So, on day 10, we’ll go through our program and will feel its shape: we need to judge it.

It’s been unusually exhausting. Not because the work is harder than usual: it is not. Maybe because we keep exploring the unknown, with half the usual support. There is a constant feeling of wide exposure, and we are very aware of our fragility. A year indoors has changed our stamina. Administrating our energy is needed in rehearsals. We flush ideas and make final choices. In a little over an hour, we are hoping to seduce our audience,  sharing with them this passionate and magical world and all the identities that unite the Iberic Peninsula creating a place we know as Spain. Each tiny world in a different place, and a small window into so many unknowns. It will be an invitation to explore, and I’m searching for questions, as I do not know the answers.

I apologize for skipping two days – but this blog is just not needed. Saving the best creative energy for rehearsals is. And so, we choose… take 2 steps and jump…