Feeling the Love in February

The Pine State Pitches pose in their brand new matching sweatshirts!

Hello and happy never-ending winter! I hope everyone affected by the recent Nor’easter is safe and your shoveling arms are recovering. We did not get much snow in the Portland area, but the wind blew so much snow around that it was hard to tell exactly how much we got. I ended up carrying Fred out to the little cove of trees in my backyard during the storm so he could do his business – I couldn’t risk him blowing away!

We are just one month away from our annual concert at One Longfellow Square, which means rehearsals are ramping up! We’re all spending extra time at home making sure we have each word, note, and movement down. Amber has been organizing our formations, spending hours planning out where everyone will stand during each song so we can all be seen and heard, and hear the other parts of each song that we need to be able to hear. On paper is may sound like an easy task, but in reality it takes hours of careful preparation and countless rearrangements to get our formations just right - and that’s before we even start rehearsing them!

This week, Holly will be teaching us choreography to add to our songs. If you liked Bang Bang and Good Luck, Babe last year, you’re going to love what Holly has come up with this year! She has designed the choreo completely on her own, spent hours recording several drafts of videos for us to learn from, and made sure movements are accessible for everyone in the group, no matter their dance experience. Singing and dancing at the same time takes a little extra coordination (and rehearsal time), but we think the end result is worth the added effort.

We are also having a blast getting ready for our second performance in Pop-Up PortFringe on March 21. We are the first group in the line-up, so buy your tickets and make sure you arrive early for front row seats! As we did last year, we’ll be bringing a fun musical twist to our segment of the story - you wont want to miss it.

On top of our busy rehearsal schedule, our members are involved in many exciting projects outside of the Pitches. You can catch some of us in the cast and production teams of Anastasia: the Musical at Lyric Music Theater, Little Women the Musical at Portland Players, and The Minutes at Mad Horse Theatre Company. We’ll share more exciting projects you can catch us in next month!

This month, I’ve been thinking about how powerful it is to create art in any form. With the introduction of AI, it can feel like art is less impactful because anyone can ask a computer to create an impression of a drawing in seconds. In fact, it is more important than ever to create real art - not only because the world needs it, but because it fuels your soul. A computer can never fill your heart with wonder the way real, imperfectly perfect human art can. We will keep singing for you as long as we possibly can, and in return, we ask you to keep giving the world a little piece of your heart as well. A computer can never take away the beautiful connections that creates.