Well what do you know – it’s December already! A year of returning to a normal of sorts, at least as far as COVID is concerned, coming to an end. For me, “normal” now means working on campus a couple of days a week on average, generally on days when I don’t have any online meetings, since I find it the most convenient to do those at home. We also coordinate within the research group so that there will usually be a few of us there at the same time so we can have lunch and coffee together. The most “old normal” thing I’ve done this year was giving a gool old-fashioned lecture in a lecture hall, the first one since 2019 – and that was in Dublin, so the last pre-pandemic one I gave in Oulu must have been in 2017. I went to the auditorium half an hour in advance just to be sure to avoid any delays due to me being out of touch with the latest presentation technology, but the hardest part turned out to be finding the light switch!

The end of the year has been heavily dominated by teaching-related tasks. There’s the usual avalanche of exams to be marked – a routine that never seems to get any less tedious, but at least it’s something useful to do when I’m not feeling creative enough for anything else. On top of that I’m currently involved in not one but two adult education projects where the university is offering companies training on AI-related topics. One of the topics covered is AI ethics, and recently I’ve been working on creating a new fully automated online course based on the syllabus of the lecture course, which is an interesting challenge, since it’s not exactly trivial to come up with genuinely meaningful ethics assignments where the answer can be checked by an algorithm. Making the course content relevant to the target audience is another challenge, and I’m hoping that people from a variety of companies will not only complete the course but leave some feedback as well.

Meanwhile in the world of music, rehearsals for The Magic Flute kicked off for real last week, and this week we already did a run-through of the first act in its entirety. I have no idea how these things usually work, but I feel like it went quite well, given how quickly we got to that point. From my point of view, the bit that needs the most work is what happens during the overture and the first scene; without giving away too much of what’s to come, I can say that there’s a dragon terrorising the hero, which involves most of the male chorus (myself included) executing a choreographed routine that, for a bunch of untrained amateurs, is certainly enough of a challenge to learn alongside the parts we actually signed up for. One of us hadn’t even had a chance to see the choreography in action before the run-through, so it was inevitably a mess, but we have time booked later for sorting it out.

So far the experience has been slightly bewildering, but above all interesting and rewarding. I guess I was expecting – rather naively, in retrospect – that the details of the production would be all figured out before the start of rehearsals and we’d be told exactly what to do on stage, but that’s not how it works at all. The director gives us the broad strokes, but the finer points are largely made up as we go along, and it often involves a fair bit of improv, also from us extras. It feels great to be included in the creative process like that, and somehow quite natural too, there’s hardly any of the self-consciousness that I’d normally expect to feel when thrown into a situation like that. Although the “characters” that I get to play are essentially just part of the background, I’m doing my best to come up with little things of my own that I can do to breathe life into them. Singing, dancing and acting – I’m a regular triple threat, me!

Another curious thing is that rather than tired, I’ve been feeling strangely invigorated after the rehearsals, presumably because of the mental stimulation. The downside is that it takes a while afterward to wind down properly, and since the rehearsals are in the evening, I’ve found it completely impossible to fall asleep until well after midnight. With daytime length down to four and a half hours and still diminishing, this time of year is exhausting enough without sleep deprivation, so I hope the novelty will wear off soon and I’ll start feeling ready to hit the sack as soon as I get home from the theatre. If not, at least we’ll break for Christmas and New Year before things get seriously hectic in preparation for the opening night.