Amherst Early Music Festival (July 2017)
I think everyone may remember their first period production. I have no evidence for this, but given that all men are in tights, acting as if they "have pillows under their armpits," and are often singing as multiple characters without a care for how that looks to their audience, I think first performances in this genre are fairly memorable. Mine was just like many before me.
Drew Minter more-or-less popularized and pulled into the mainstream period gesture in early music performances. Back when he first was directing, he would star in his own productions. For a while, he has been sharing his craft with young people, and it has changed how I sing and act for the better. Every gesture has actual symbolic meaning. Love is traditionally one hand over the heart and the other palm shining where their affection lies. Every other oft-used emotion has its specified gestural picture. We have borrowed all of this from sculpture and art, but it has not gained a permanent foothold until recently when enacting period performances. I feel lucky I had an opportunity to explore in this direction, and learn a completely foreign way to move on stage.
Adam Pearl, conductor, with 30-piece period orchestra
The orchestra had wooden "things" I had never seen: Baroque oboes and bassoons, viols, violones, tailles, baroque cellos, a conductor who created a contraption so that the harpsichord rested as a second manual of sorts on top of a portative organ. I sang in the faculty concert with Xavier Diaz-Latorre who is a renowned theorbist. Even though I was at this place a single week, I left feeling as though I had the world's most intense education in Baroque and Early Music. I rehearsed day and night, and I was probably the most ignorant person there by large bounds. That was the best part!