We received our negative tests late on Friday evening, and so I went into the school for rehearsal on Saturday. It was really great to be back in person, and we got quite a lot done. It was the first time that the full team of Marie-Pierre, Thom, Aine (our producer) and I were all together with the cast since MP's diagnosis a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately as the day went on Thom started to feel a bit shivery and by the time he got home he was starting a fever, and feeling under the weather. One of the participants in a workshop that he led earlier in the week had just tested positive, and so he needed to isolate and get a test. While so far there have been no confirmed transmissions between anyone on the cast or creative team since rehearsals began in late August, the administration was concerned, and so the COVID prevention committee pulled the plug on in-person rehearsals for the rest of the week. It's been very frustrating for all of us.
In fact, there were only scheduled rehearsals on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday this week, because the Toussaint holiday, or "half-term" as it is called in the UK, is scheduled to begin this coming Saturday. As is usual the school scheduled professional development days for Thursday and Friday, so the kids had two extra days off.
I decided to do one-on-one singing rehearsals using Microsoft Teams on Monday instead of group rehearsals, which was only partly successful. As I have written before, and as some of you may know, standard teleconference audio is optimised for speech, and not singing, so there are some workarounds required to allow singing to be properly heard over teleconference. But it was certainly better than nothing.
While face-to-face production rehearsals were stopped, private teaching was still allowed, so on Tuesday I went in and taught two lunchtime lessons and three after-school ones, and also took the time in between to practice my own two Bach Cantatas for this coming Sunday. These went fine and we made some good progress. Last night Thom was recovered somewhat from his symptoms (a promising sign) and so he and Marie-Pierre and Aine also joined the rehearsal, and we each ran scenes with different groups of kids on Zoom or Teams. Today I will have another private in-person lesson, before the Toussaint break begins in earnest.
These interruptions in the normal rehearsal plan have meant that while the individual soloists are in ok shape musically (many of them are private students of mine as well) we have missed opportunities to physically run the scenes and sing the ensembles with stage movement. Grease is a pretty energetic show, with some complicated choreography, and so we may need to delay the performances to allow more time for staging and rehearsal, and move the shows from late November to late January... that hasn't been confirmed yet but it seems highly likely. As well we are hopeful that by then the epidemic curve will be less steep, and we will be able to accommodate a larger audience in later January than the current guidelines allow.
It seems that Duncan has completely recovered from his COVID infection and hasn't had a fever for probably ten days, with no further symptoms (sniffles, cough, or headache) since the middle of last week. But as luck would have it his school has decided to suspend in-person classes, so I've set him up with my personal computer at the dining room table, and he's been doing some school work this week, and I assume next; the Belgian school doesn't begin its Toussaint holiday October 31st, so the next ten days or so will be interesting, with all three of us at home. Yoshi will be happy to have humans around all day!
Some other important news has just arrived for me... The school has been relatively lucky with enrollment, which has held steady since the epidemic began. However the administration did some restructuring this week, and reassigned some classes with the arts department to teachers who had space in their teaching schedules, but now they find themselves with some music classes and no one on staff with free periods to teach them. Yesterday morning I had a meeting with the middle school principal, and while I haven't signed a contract yet, he did offer me the job of handling the music classes that remain, from now until the end of the school year.
It's only about a 30% load of classes, or about seven periods per week, which is fine with me, given that I have twelve private voice students already, plus the musical (or possibly musicals if the middle school show goes ahead) so I hope that I can manage it. As well, I have made it clear that the few singing contracts that I have already on the books will mean that I will need coverage of those absences, and the administration has agreed. That is of course assuming that those concerts (Leuven in December, Japan in January, Binkom in February, Toronto in May, etc.) will even happen... in the meantime it will be good to have a little more financial security, and looking toward the future and maybe teaching in a conservatory someday, any additional classroom teaching experience is good for my resume.
About the COVID situation, while the numbers may seem dire, and the news reports are frightening, the situation here in Belgium isn't as gloomy as one might think from the news. People are much better prepared now that they were in the early spring, and the infrastructure for testing is established. We have a better idea of how serious the infections are, and while the rate of infections is higher than it was in the spring, the death rate is not rising to the same extent. In Wavre at least people are very compliant about mask-wearing, so that's a good thing.
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