May was a difficult month. Many of the things I had planned to be doing were cancelled or postponed. And some things ended up taking up far more time and effort that they should have because they had to be moved online.

Since the production of Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella I was directing was postponed until next year we got permission to make an at-home style video of a few of the songs. I am aware that the internet is now full of these tiled videos of singers performing at home, but they are very time consuming to make. They also involve video editing skills that I had to learn, but in the end I was happy with what we were able to do. (The video will only be up for a couple of months, and then our license will expire.)

I work with a youth theatre and we had our final classes online for the season at the weekend. We were not able to put on a live performance, but we did try an online one. I wrote a little about my experiences doing that, but I can’t wait until we can make theatre in person again.

Not everything about the lock-down is negative. I have been watching the recordings made at the Spheres of Singing conference that has been taking place virtually. They made asynchronous tickets available allowing me to watch these recordings without having to time shift to UK time. They are available for a limited amount of time, but I set the time aside to watch them and so far I’m enjoying the conference.