Buon venerdì, ADA blog readers!

My name is Geneviève, the summer intern for the Accademia dell’Arte, and blogmaster for the interim of the Summer Arts Program. I just finished the spring semester program at ADA in Physical Theatre, and I’ve been in Italy ever since, both traveling and at the Villa. I can’t believe my time here in Italy is coming to a close; a short two and a half weeks from now I will be back in my hometown of Oakland, California.

That’s me with the wind-blown hair, doing intern-type student lift things.

This internship is interesting because until I expressed an interest in staying at the Villa, it sort of didn’t exist. As the spring semester began to approach its end (with the steady inevitability of a doomsday drum), thinking about leaving the Villa was causing me an inordinate amount of anxiety. I knew that my time here just couldn’t be over yet and I wrote an internship proposal, which was discussed and eventually accepted. One of my philosophies in life, art, and especially time abroad, to create your own opportunities. Needless to say, I am extremely thankful that ADA could facilitate my little dream coming true.

So here I am! After a month traveling around Europe, I am just ecstatic to have somewhere to put my head for the remainder of the month. I’ll be checking in a few times during the month to reflect upon how things are going and what it’s like to return after being a student in the capacity of intern.

Last week I started with some student-life related duties: helping with the arrival and orientation days and getting to know our fabulous new students. My first “real” intern project was organizing the Villa’s unofficial library, which was a fun if daunting endeavor; we disposed of no fewer than sixty travel guides that I deemed inexcusably old, the oldest of which was a guide to restaurants in Rome from 1987. I also worked on the first Summer Arts Program post for the ADA-life blog and did a little bit of voice-over work for one of the PR videos. This week I hand-cut four hundred 3×5 (that’s 9×13 centimeters) flashcards and began organizing the costume closet.

I know these sound like your typical “oh, we have an intern to do the grunt work” shenanigans. To some degree, they are. But here’s the thing about an organization like ADA.

At the end of the semester there are several feedback sessions with the students in areas of both academics and student life. After the students leave, the teachers come together and re-imagine the program based on the feedback the students give. This process is, in fact, still going on as I write. So I am in the library or costume closet, deciphering what is usable and what is not, clearing out the clutter and re-imagining the system to make things run more smoothly. The administration is doing the same thing on a grand scale, and with such a small staff, nobody except an intern has time to do the remarkably mundane organizational tasks well.

I’ll be checking in again sometime soon — right now I’m excited to write about the visit from the Scuola Teatro Dimitri. In the meantime, here are a few photos from my month of traveling to give you a bigger picture (ha ha ha) of where I’ve been!

-Geneviève