Our First Week in the Lovely Champignelles.

Alright so to start, "lovely" is definitely a word I use to describe things that you can't really describe in any other way.. But it actually isn't too rough out here. It’s been a week and I’ve realized that I knew absolutely nothing about the festival and what my job would entail. It ended up being better.

So we took the train to the middle of nowhere, to a town known as Champignelles. The town has one café with wifi and one supermarket. It’s one of those towns where all the youths ride their bikes around all day long and the shutters are always closed and it’s perpetually quiet. I really like large and bustling cities so I couldn't see myself living here at all. But for the month I’ll be here, it’s perfect. Lucky for me we’re constantly busy and have no time to realize that we’re in the milieu des nulles parts (middle of nowhere.)

About the festival itself: so it’s actually called “Estivales en Puisaye” and to this day I have no idea why it’s estival rather than festival but I’m too ashamed to ask. It's a ten-day festival with concerts around the region. And by concert I mean Beethoven’s symphonies performed in churches, not today’s pop stars in Coachella. The festival kicks off with three performances of this year’s Opera performed by the students of an esteemed school in Paris. The first week in our little Podunk town is spent in the theater rehearsing the music, learning the choreography and making the show ready for the stage. In fact, the first time the chorus sings together is during this week (the week before the performance) and it’s really just shows how amazing these kids are that they can learn the music themselves and then learn the choreography in a week. But that’s what the kids do. I’m hired help to create the scenery, set up the lights, spread the word about the festival and really anything else that needs to be done. We are basically miscellaneous workers because some days we’re handing out fliers for the show, some days we are painting sets and other days we’re barbecuing for 130 people. It’s really not a set job. There are also two English girls who are here to help and we’re quite the team. The three of us obviously speak English, but we have a good level of French ability so the others have taken to speaking with us in French, which is quite an honor, I must say.

A normal day for us is starting the day at 9, doing whatever is needed for building the stage (such as physically building the stage), making posters and fliers for the region, setting up the lights, having lunch in the cafeteria (it's the café of a school so it’s low level stuff here, but it’s surprisingly good! After lunch we head to the café and have a beer or a coffee and hang out for 10-40 minutes and then head back to do some heavy lifting and watch the rehearsals. Since we can’t work while the kids are rehearsing (it’s pretty loud, what we do), we have to wait until rehearsal ends at 10 (sometimes later) before we do certain things. So far, we haven’t gotten home before 1 in the morning, and then we get to do it all over again! And by this time, we’re all so tired that the weirdest things happen. One night we were setting up the floor of the stage (which looks amazing) and then somehow the director started playing the piano and we did some “choreographed” dancing with some of the props, another night we brought coffee pots full of beer to the studio because the set making was taking forever and was ridiculously stressful, and another day (night) we spent trying to make dark brown and all we could come up with was a light beige. We poured a whole can of black paint into our light brown color and it still wasn’t any darker… By all accounts, it should be miserable but it’s such a fun time. The people are amazing and the music is so phenomenal I can’t wait to see the finished product!