Christmas markets

One more post before I leave London for the holidays. I've been immensely enjoying the market culture here. Every weekend, and sometimes during the week too, there are open-air markets. Food markets, flower markets, any-variety-of-goods markets. Streets are blocked off for them. Covered courtyards are home to them. At the Greenwich market, buskers play classical music. At Covent Garden opera singers appropriate a staircase and sing to one another. At a flower market in Hackney a young adolescent auditions "Two for a fiver" in his boyish tenor, anticipating the day he'll have his father's baritone. In the East Ham market I couldn't even understand what a Cockney barker was saying.

The Portobello Road market is intimate and eccentric, Camden Town is punk, Greenwich and Spitalfields are tony, while sprawling through the streets near Spitalfields is a very cheap and somewhat down-at-the-heels market that, except for the skin color of almost everyone there, could have been in Istanbul. And there are surely dozens of markets I haven't seen yet.

Last weekend I went to Camden Town, where four or five markets shoulder their way into one another. Camden High Street/Chalk Farm Road connects them all (street names here change every few blocks), and while it's not a pedestrian throughway, you wouldn't know it at first glance. Pity the driver who needs to pass through on a weekend day, or anytime right before Christmas. The storefronts could be on the Midway at the State Fair. Rough and sometimes gloriously grotesque sculpted pieces give it all a fantastical dreamlike aspect. Heavily pierced men and women in leather or Goth black, many with high pointed Mohawks--think the Statue of Liberty on a 3-day binge--stand on the sidewalk looking like street prophets warning that the end of the world is near. Their signs point you to tattoo and piercing parlors with names like Dark Angel, Metallic Militia, and Chrome.

This is not the part of town you go to if you're thinking Starbucks (though sadly you could probably find one there). Minneapolis by comparison, with its sterile glass skyways, feels like a laboratory in a research hospital.

I do look forward to going home to see friends and family, but the vibrancy of this city--exhausting though it can be--is magnetic.

Reflecting at year's end

With classes having ended for the term, I hope to be spending some time pulling thoughts together. That will probably come over a period of time. I'd appreciate the chance to discuss some of this over a pint with my classmates, but understandably, people are scattering to the four winds for the holidays--or if they're not, I'm not sure who's still in town because we don't have schedules in common right now. I too will be heading home soon (Thursday!) for two weeks with the family and seeing friends and neighbors, and I'm looking forward to that, but it'll seem a bit unreal. As will this whole experience here from the perspective of being back home.

Anyway, a few thoughts, impressions, and recollections at this point, with a bit of catch-up thrown in:

Rock paper scissors

Much of what we do in class is try to convey close observations of nature through bodily movement. This has the double function of, well, making us observe closely and learn to move in ways we haven't done before. (Duh.) For example, two days in the final week or so we observed paper and balloons. You may think you remember how a balloon behaves when it's blown up and released, but watching it closely, very closely, may bring some realizations and refinements you'd forgotten. At what pace(s) does a balloon inflate? What's the rhythm? Once you let it go and it exhausts itself, does it still move? (Often it does, subtly.) When you crumple paper and throw it on the floor, what does it do? (Try it sometime. Thin paper crumpled loosely work best. Watch closely.) And then try to recreate that with your body, with your voice. How does paper tear? What's it like to be paper being torn? Or how does olive oil move when poured onto the floor? And if you pair up with a partner and one is olive oil and the other is paper, what happens when they meet? Add a third person standing at a distance who is also a piece of paper. How does that person react--how do they crumple--on seeing the other piece of paper become not just paper and not quite oil? It goes on and on. Once we did bouncing balls interacting with a pane of glass, and soon the bouncing balls became kindergarten children coming in from recess and the pane of glass a teacher on her first day. Fascinating to watch. Or to try to be.

This may or may not give you some idea of the odd but imaginative work we do. And it's all expressed without dialogue. Or very rarely with dialogue, this year anyway.

Thursday evening we got to see some presentations by the Advanced Course. Some were in a commedia dell'arte style, with half masks (and dialogue). Some were big-screen films translated to 6 or 7 people recreating them on platforms about 6 feet by 3 feet, with no props, no entrances and exits, no costumes (but with dialogue). That's been my favorite thing to watch thus far. It's amazing what creativity is spurred by an impossible task like performing "Jaws" or "Jurassic Park" or an Indiana Jones movie on what is basically a table top set on the floor. You've really got to see it to fully grasp the wonder of it all--the mixture of close-ups and long-distance pans, the change in camera angles, the conveying of special effects through only the embodied imaginations of an ensemble of people crowded onto a very small rectangle.

Idumea

To my great surprise, we ended our final Voice class singing a shape-note hymn (called Idumea). The teacher had heard it in the film "Cold Mountain." I happened to know it from, well, being married to Robin. (Shape-note singing is basically an old form of hymn singing from the Appalachians. Very powerful, very primitive sounding.) Simon and I taught it to the rest of the class. I asked why he'd had us sing such a hymn, and he said it was because of the long sustained notes and how it draws on singing from the belly. He knows nothing of the tradition, but he did have us end singing while standing in a very close cluster, which actually isn't that different from how that kind of singing is usually done. I told him I'd bring back a shape-note songbook for him to look at.

You better watch out, better not cry ...

It's pretty well known that you can't go far in London without being watched by security cameras. Even downtown Minneapolis is going that route with cameras mounted on light poles and buildings. But today I saw something I'd never seen before. Parked on my street near the bus stop was a black SmartCar (one of those pint-sized autos that are starting to make their way onto the American market) with what looked like a black webcam mounted on the top, a sinister cyclops the size of a baby's head. On the hood of the car (would that be the "boot" or the "bonnet"? I can never remember) it said simply CCTV. I assume this was a mobile security camera, probably police operated. So even where cameras aren't stationed, they send out these little robotic-looking thingies to spy on what's going on. It's a bit weird. Is it supposed to make people feel safer or to intimidate? Maybe a bit of both. But it seemed to be more of the latter.

Christmas in London

I hear that Christmas is coming up soon, but it's hard to get into that awareness. Part of it is having been so busy, part of it is having nothing in my regular schedule that reminds me what season it is, and the weather is as you'd expect in London--gray, damp, occasionally rainy, basically the same as it's been for weeks and weeks. I do see some lights strung on trees in public places, but Christmas decorations on houses are rare. Actually I like it that the tendency to put colored lights on everything that doesn't move is more restrained here. And I rarely hear any Muzak carols, which is a boon to aesthetic sanity.

Hey, I know what it is! One reason it just doesn't feel like December is that there's not the surge of good movie releases like I'm used to! (How sad is that that that's a marker for me?) Really, unlike in the States, when all the Oscar contenders get released just in time for Christmas, almost nothing of any note is in the movie theaters here. (Or "in the cinemaaahhs," as they say.) I gather that this Clint Eastwood/Angelina Jolie film is getting some Oscar buzz, but that's one of the few such films on offer here. Now that really makes me feel like I'm living in a foreign land!

Time to come home and see some movies, eat buckets of buttered popcorn, and put back on some of that weight I've lost.

Or time to come home for a visit anyway.

The end is near

The term is almost over. Classes one more day, then we get to see the Advanced Course's final presentations tomorrow night, then we have one-on-one conferences with the school founder and present our final group Creations on Friday. Today, as you may recall, were our Acrobatics presentations...

Anticlimax ahead.

Yesterday morning I fell awkwardly on my neck yet again. How many times I've done this now I've lost count. Besides my deficit in physical skill, I must not be communicating very clearly. Either that or I'm not being picky enough in choosing my spotters. (Frankly, I think it's the latter.) As on Saturday when I fell hard on my shoulder, yesterday I'd explained to a classmate beforehand what I didn't want to happen--what I wanted his help in preventing--and the support I hoped I wouldn't need (but did) came too little and too late. When I fall, I fall fast. And hard. And, I'd guess, not too gracefully.

In a word: Ouch. Though that's not the word I said at the time.

I had called the London School of Osteopathy on Monday to try to get an appointment to have my shoulder looked at. I was to go in yesterday afternoon. That was fortunate. Now I had yet another sore spot to add to my litany of injuries--right shoulder, left knee, right hip, right elbow, and now the neck again. As I write this, I have a pack of frozen peas lashed to my neck with a tea towel. When the osteopath took notes on my history, he must have felt like he was writing a novel, probably a comic one. And after examining my shoulder and neck (there simply wasn't time in an hour-and-a-half appointment to get to all my sore spots--how telling is that) he told me in no uncertain terms that I really shouldn't try the Acrobatics routine this morning. So of our class of 21--and as far as I know, of our total first-year class of 45 or so--I was the only one who sat out. To prevent bodily damage I injured my pride. So it goes. Instead I became the designated videographer and occasional spotter for others.

To be sure, I wasn't looking forward to doing the Acrobatics routine today. Dreading it is probably a more accurate reflection. But still, I had the adrenaline build-up, and then came the let-down. Why do the body, mind, and emotions combine to play such games?

I do hope to be able to fully participate in Acro next term. I AM going to master this headstand. And the handstand is still in my sights. And so is a flexible and functional neck.

The bane of my Lispa existence

Because Acrobatics is so difficult for me, it's one of the areas that gives me fruitful ground for learning. Not just learning how to accomplish a headstand or a handstand, though I do want to do those things. It’s also what I learn through failing when trying to do them.

Today we had an extra time set aside to go back into the Hackney space to practice on the mats. (The space … I know how odd that sounds. We basically have one large room that's our classroom and lab for everything. People just refer to it as the space. As I may have mentioned, half of us have our classes in the borough and town of Hackney in the East End. The rest have their classes on Latimer Road on the West side in what is probably Kensington and/or Hammersmith. Occasionally we visit each other's spaces for presentations. In January we all move into a new space in East London. More on that next month.) Back to today’s events…

I was working on various things, especially the headstand and handstand. Without having to plan to, I was also working with my feelings of discouragement. I know that no one at the presentations on Wednesday will be overly critical of how well or poorly I do things—probably not even critical at all. We’re all agreed that the main thing is to do your best, in Acrobatics at least. (The Improv classes, on the other hand, have a higher standard.) But I get so discouraged when I can't do things. I'm sure I could just say no, I'm not going to do a presentation. But that's not what I want either.

Take the handstand. Basically you approach it like a cartwheel but head on. And you're supposed to put your hands to the floor, arms straight, and kick up into a vertical position, head down and toes pointed to the ceiling, balance for a moment, then tuck your head, bend your arms, and roll out of it down the curve of your spine and back up into a standing position. I just can't get the hang of it. A couple of times I've gotten into the vertical upside-down position, but only with two strong people assisting me. Part of the problem, I know, is that I hesitate. You just can't hesitate in this or you don't get the momentum. But I've done it in so many wrong ways--not keeping my arms straight, trying to kick up before having my hands on the ground (which is akin to trying to dive into a mat that is so very much not water), looking too far forward and so having my shoulders and spine in an impossible position to get my legs vertical ... see how much I'm learning? a thousand ways from Sunday how not to do it. Now if I could just get my body to do the right things! Anyway, I've attempted this so many wrong ways that it's very hard for me not to hesitate when I go to try it again, which often leads to discovering a new way not to do it, and a heightened likelihood of hurting myself, which leads to more of a feeling that I can't do it, which leads to discouragement, which leads to more hesitation... You see where this goes, and it's not pretty, and it's not fun.

How do you talk yourself into a feeling of "I can do this" when your experience is repeatedly one of not being able to? Where's the road from I can't to I can? Your mental state is so very important in these things, but there's only so much that talking yourself into it can do, especially when personal injury is a likely result of not getting your body to do the right things. But this is the challenge. Yes, I know, you can break it down into little steps, and I'm trying to do that, but ultimately it's also about flow. The steps aren't discrete and separate, like knots on a rope. Without momentum, it won't go. And hesitation and over-thinking it just get in the way. I don't mean to say this is all impossible--it reminds me of some classic philosophical conundrum from one of my college classes, Zeno's paradox it might have been called, where in order for an arrow to strike a target it has to go half way first, then it has to go half way of what's left, then half of that, then half of that, and you can halve the distance so many times that after a while you think it's impossible for the arrow to get there at all. But the arrow does get there. And somehow it's possible--even for me, I trust--to accomplish a handstand. And I want to do it. But I hurt myself yet again trying it today, landing hard on my right shoulder. I heard something crack when I landed. I iced it and am dosing it with ibuprofen, and nothing swelled up. So I'm hoping that what cracked was nothing more than a bit of my resistance. But it'll be a bit harder yet not to hesitate when next I try it again.

The other day someone posted this quote from Samuel Beckett on the bulletin board.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Maybe that's my task for now.

Voice lessons (or, Simon says)

Simon, our Voice teacher, said something today that I thought described the apparent goal of Lispa in general. (When I think about it, It seems a bit odd that I've never even heard the last names of almost allof our teachers (or of my fellow students, for that matter). And no one ever refers to "the teachers" as faculty, certainly not as professors.) The gist of what Simon said was that what he's trying to do is help us to recover good and healthy ways of using our voices that, through bad learning, misuse, or disuse, we've forgotten--ways that will help us to communicate more effectively and more naturally if only we can get our bodies to remember them and retrain ourselves into using those practices again.

The school, by focusing on what is called physical theatre, aims to help us use our bodies in such ways. My middle-aged body is a good example of the stiffness that comes from inattention, bad habits, and years of neglecting to keep myself limber. My distress has been that I won't be able to regain the flexibility that I lost as a child. I literally can't remember the last time I could sit cross-legged on the floor, for example, and I've always felt clunky and awkward in any kind of freestyle dancing. But Ilan, our main Movement teacher--a very childlike, limber, and young-acting man whom, rumor has it, is 76 years old--keeps assuring me that I can indeed regain lost flexibility. And, bless him, he also says he can already see a difference in the way I move.

The recovery of something childlike, young, creative, expressive, something that (we are repeatedly told) our bodies know even if our minds no longer remember or understand: this seems to be a lot of the aim here. That and encouraging us to find the bold and generous creator/artist/communicator within. And a more harmonious unity of body, will, and spirit.

Or so it seems after seven weeks.

I can see why Thomas keeps saying not to think of this as an acting school.

PS -- Speaking of stiffness, the hot Epsom salts bath seems to have headed off a lot of the pain I expected after Acrobatics class yesterday. I decided not to try a headstand again today. But I need to try to get back on that horse again tomorrow or Saturday. Our Acrobatics presentations are less than a week away. I need to set aside the hesitations and fears that hold me back and just go for it. I want to do that. After all, that's what I'm here for: to push through the things in my own head and habits that hold me back.

It all lands on the neck

Well, I guess I was due for a fall. (How Minnesotan is this?) Yesterday was such a good day, and today... well, let's just say things balanced out again.

One of the highlights yesterday was that I accomplished a headstand! With only the most minimal assistance from a classmate, there I was, crown of the head and both palms on the floor (head cushioned by two pillows), my body vertically up-side down, toes pointing to the ceiling. It was an amazing feeling. Finally! We're working up to a presentation next Wednesday that has a scripted acrobatics routine of 16 figures, with cartwheels, headstand, handstand, forward rolls, side rolls, even a figure approaching that thing you see men do in the gymnastics part of the Olympics--on the horse, I think--spinning one leg in circles horizontally beneath their crouched body, switching hands to let the leg swing by. We're to do three of those. I can't even do one, but so it goes. As a matter of fact, there are many of the moves I can't do very well or without assistance. Which made it all the more rewarding to do a headstand (which almost everybody else could do weeks ago).

Then today we had Acrobatics class. And I kept landing on my neck and hard the middle of my back when I was trying to do the forward roll again (which, yes, others were doing with ease weeks ago). And I strained my neck when my weight shifted to the side when practicing a headstand. Arrrrrggggghhhhh. And I was so close yesterday.

On top of the discouragement, I could feel my neck and back tightening up, so I skipped the afternoon classes and called in sick to work. Came home and soaked in a hot bath with Epsom salts and am hoping for the best. So far not too bad. These old bones need some TLC.

Yawning for credit

Tomorrow begins with Voice class. I may have mentioned that we got cheated out of Voice the first two weeks due to teacher illness and a scheduling snafu, but I've been enjoying it once we finally did get started. We do a lot of yawning in that class. Apparently it's very good for the voice to open up the throat like that. And we've even been taught some of the finer points of not popping the jaw too wide open in a full yawn. No need to go into it all here, but Voice is often quite a relaxing class, and sometimes the most common things can be both more beneficial and more complex than I'd ever realized.

As in all the classes, much of the focus in Voice is on the breathing. (Thus the title of this blog.) It's amazing how often we forget to breathe when concentrating on something difficult or new, and how remembering to breathe can help a lot--I'm sure I must be forgetting to breathe during my headstands! And since to date we've used our voices very little in our Movement and Improv classes, this one gets to a very important but unstressed aspect of communication here.

More on this at another time. Right now I'm just looking forward to a more relaxing start to the day. Today was pretty discouraging.

Promethean fire (or at least a glimmer of insight)

It helps to have struggled aloud (struggled ablog?) with this question of who the neutral mask is. Perhaps yesterday's questions put me in a position to have a bit of an epiphany today. It came in a class with Thomas, whom many people have rightly called a master teacher. He has a way of presenting things in such a way that doesn't quite take you all the way there, but leads you to the threshold of discovery and puts you in a position to step into a new awareness.

What I think I understand better today is this. For today anyway, I think the best way to describe the neutral mask is to say that he or she is Promethean. I don't remember that Greek myth in detail, but what I do recall is that Prometheus was the one who stole fire from the gods and brought it to humanity. Why? That may never be explained, but his urge, his act, his story reflects something in the human spirit that rebels (or rather that pays no attention to the things that would hold it back), something that reaches for transcendence, that embodies human striving. Something that does what it has to do, not out of duty but out of what it naturally desires and needs, and for the good of us all because it's what we all want and need.

Jotted below are my notes from a three-minute break between Movement and Improvisation classes today. I recognize that they might not make much sense to some readers--I never could quite understand what Isabel was talking about when she blogged about her first-year experience here two years ago--but it will to others. The break between classes came just after a short talk by Thomas following an exercise in which we were playing with the dynamics needed to lift a hugely heavy barbell from the floor and hoist it over our heads. (There was of course no barbell. It was all an imaginative exercise in which we had to explore and act out the most efficient way of doing it using just body dynamics):

I think the mask is Promethean.

[Quote from Thomas:] "If you want to create something original, you have to learn to swim against the current. If you're satisfied just to be a nice performer, that's something different."

This is why the mask knows no small movements. This is why its psychology never second-guesses and its thoughts never hold it back. The mask says yes to its creative impulses. It is alert. It generates and it reacts. It is fully alive. It is not 'sentimental.' (But if it is to have an exodus, it has to be more complex, less of a jumbo jet. So part of the problem yesterday was the mismatch of the assignment.)

The key is in the question Why? [and especially in its unanswerability.] "Why should you lift that great weight?" Thomas asked. "You could just let it lie there." Similarly: Why create? Why journey? Why even breathe? That question--why breathe?--may best reflect the motivation of the mask. So it's not just remember to breathe. It's remember that you do. And know in your body that if you don't, you can't even be. If you don't breathe, you are nothing. If you don't breathe, you die.

So much of this first year is designed to get people to find the Prometheus within. To discover what it is we deeply want to create. To push each of us to discover for ourselves What is my vision, my gift, the specific creation that only I can bring to the world? What is my Promethean fire? And if we really find that, and if it truly is Promethean, then we will have to find a way to bring it forth. Otherwise it's simply an idea, a whim, a hobby.

As always there's a lot more to say about this, and it touches on some of the most obvious questions--why did I choose to leave ministry after some 20 years? why did I leave home, partner, and country to pursue this holy(?) grail in a far country, even and especially when i don't consider myself an actor or a performing artist?

I'll surely return to this question from time to time, but a quote has been echoing through my mind of late when I've thought of these questions. It really doesn't address some of the weightier parts of my decision, but I'll mention it here because it's a familiar way into the question. From Thoreau's Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Stay tuned.

Neutral mask, revisited

Time for another update. For any who are checking this blog regularly, I apologize for the sporadic rhythm of my posts.

Only two weeks left in this term. Next week we each have a conference with Thomas to evaluate how it's going and whether we'll each be coming back for more in January. I assume everyone will have the option, and as far as I know everyone will choose to come back. I embarked on this journey assuming I'll be here for two years. It's too early to make a decision yet, but I've been thinking more and more that one year might be enough.

I think I'm rising to the occasion of the end of the term, but I've been in a bit of a doldrums for the past couple of weeks. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe fatigue. Maybe because some days this whole experience misses the mark for me. We've been in kind of a no-man's land for a while--or at least I have. All the improvisations for a few weeks now have been in the neutral mask, which I described earlier. The teaching style here is often, shall we say, indirect. And while they never out and out say "That's the wrong thing to do," it's clear that there is a kind of personality that they all agree that the neutral mask has, a certain kind of movement that the mask requires of its wearer. The neutral mask is unintimidated by anything (even earthquake, wind, and fire). The neutral mask is at home in all kinds of (imagined) natural environments. It is at home in the world of giants. It's a jumbo jet, one of the teachers likes to say, "and you don't drive a jumbo jet to the corner store for a gallon of milk." So while they never use this word, it seems to me that the neutral mask (that is, its character) could be described as heroic. It's mythical, maybe archetypal, but archetypal of what exactly, I'm not sure. And so the fact that we're always putting on the mask for our improvisations shapes the way we are to do things. "You can be much bigger," they're always telling us. "The mask is bigger than that." "Look at the mask. It knows no fear."

Is this an acting style they're encouraging us into? In a way, yes, but somehow it's more than acting. It's really a way of being in the world. But the settings in which we are to enact that way are always extraordinary. If you don't drive your 747 to the corner store, neither do you use it in your everyday life in any way. So there's something very artificial about all of this--even though in the vocabulary of the teaching here, the mask is by definition natural, but not normal. (Normal being our usual ways of living in the world--characteristically at a low energy level, in kind of a J. Alfred Prufrock state of being ("I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short I was afraid...") The mask is its antithesis.)

So what I think they're really about here is trying to pull the heroic, the brave, the extraordinary out of people as artists. And they're trying to nurture a feeling of connection with others, a generosity that wants to communicate and is always aware of others--your co-creators on stage at any given moment as well as your audience. I'm all for that. But there's no room for the small gesture in the world of the neutral mask, and sometimes I find that too limiting.

A small example from today. Our task was to present something on the theme of exodus: a group of people who have to leave home and go on a journey. They would prefer to stay, but some circumstance we've decided on as creative collaborators makes it necessary for us to leave home and go. Our group decided to portray a family having to leave a farm because of drought. (All of this is done nonverbally, and in mask.) Without saying so, my character was the old man (yeah, I know; go figure...), the one who had lived there for the longest, who probably built the house, perhaps had cleared the land. As we left, after finding the crops parched and no more water in the well, I bent down to scoop up a handful of soil and put it in my pocket. The teaching critique that came later was that's too small a gesture for the mask, and it just comes off as sentimental.

So is the mask human? subhuman? superhuman? Probably not exactly any of the three. And there's no point in asking for an answer to such a question in class, because none will be given, though the question itself will be celebrated.

It's not that this is frustrating to me--I've always been better at asking questions than at answering them anyway, and I know that a question stays alive, keeps working on you, pushes you to newer and deeper understandings when you can hold it in suspension and not demand an answer (which often reduces the question to a smaller level anyway). It's more that the questions I have are not primarily about who the neutral mask is. They have more to do with who I am and who I'm still becoming. Yes, it will be great if all this work will spur me to more boldness, to knowing what it is I want and to having the fire in the belly to pursue it. That's what I'm here for. But will learning to express a near-mythic drive through large bodily movement translate into that?

(I can hear it now: Greaaat! Yes! A very good question!)
But I'm not looking for praise for asking questions.

So I wonder how this will all progress in the months to come.

And by the way, I still think there's a place for the small meaningful action, even if there's no place for "sentimentality" in the world of the neutral mask.


Moving on to other topics...


Not acting. Reacting.


The focus in the improvisations isn't on acting. It's on creating a world--helping the audience to see a world--through our reacting to it, through having that imagined world work on us. We communicate through reacting to what only we can see (since we have no props, no costumes, and usually no dialogue). The mantra recently and again today, it seems, was "Give us the experience, not the idea." There's a lot of "Don't think. Do." "Turn your brain off and allow yourself to be surprised" by what comes to you in your improv. This is really hard--and means that it only gets in the way to start with much of a plan of what you want to do. And it's an open question to what extent it's a way of doing things that's transferable outside this program. Though I recognize that there are times I'd have been a lot happier, a lot freer, and might have created something better for myself and maybe also for others if I could just have quieted the eternal chatter in my brain.

Teaching gems, part 2

One day, as a way of spurring creativity for our Creation group times later, one of the teachers (Michael) led us in this exercise where we were to say yes to whatever anyone else proposed. The scenario was that we were put in groups of about 5 and given some silly product to create an advertising campaign for. Whatever proposal anyone came up with was supposed to strike us as the best idea ever. And we'd just build on it with whatever other suggestions arose. It was a lot of fun, and it also was remarkable to see how much energy was generated by the simple fact of not worrying over what others would think of your idea. Surely a broader lesson there somewhere.

And remember the blog entry about false starts and "It begins before it begins"? Teachers have continued the occasional practice of stopping people right as they start and having them start again. A scene has to begin with energy. You have to "take the space" to command people's attention from the very beginning. One of the teachers said "Josephine Baker used to get fucked right before she went onstage. Literally." But apparently (we heard later), not quite to the point of orgasm.

Talk about an entrance! Imagine how she must have commanded people's attention from the moment she stepped on stage!

(For any who are worrying, we don't have practicums in "How to take the space like Josephine Baker.")

When the cows interfere

My call center job--oops, I mean my call centre job--isn't as boring as you might think. All the calls are made at random, but it seems that every night there's one that makes the whole evening worthwhile. Once it was an interview with a 68-year-old woman who was celebrating her birthday. I offered to call her back another day so she wouldn't have to spend 20 minutes of her birthday answering questions about how well she likes her phone company, of all things, but she was in such a great mood that she insisted on continuing, even though her grandsons were sitting right there with her. And she was a delight.

Tonight it was a conversation with a 16-year-old farm boy from the north of England. He was really sweet and wanted so much to be helpful. I also think he doesn't get many calls. At one point we ask how many people live in the household of the person we're interviewing (15 people in the farm boy's, including "my closest cousin; his name is Jimmy"). At another we ask them the question, "How important it is to you that your phone company makes it easier to maintain relationships and build your network of friends?" And then we read out the choices: "Extremely important, Very important, Important, Not very important, or Not at all important." He simply replied, "I really don't have many." Which was innocent, sweet, and sad. A few other times were touching as well, like when he said he doesn't think he gets great service from his phone company "because I don't think they like me." We're not supposed to go too far off-script, but I tried to reassure him that I'm sure it wasn't personal. Generally he had a good sense of humor about everything. When he told me about not getting good customer service in a phone store he said, "I think they think I smell. But then again I do. I live on a farm, you know." (As if I could forget.)

Calls usually take about 15 minutes, 20 at the most. My conversation with him--broken in half when he had to go help his dad with the goats--took over 40. When I called him back on his mobile phone half an hour later to finish the interview, I asked if it was a good time and he said, "Sure, I'm just on the toilet, havin' a poo." This was the only interview I've done where a respondent's complaint about poor phone reception was due to "bein' out with the cows a lot, and I think they block the signal." There's also a time at the end of the interview when we're to ask if it would be OK for someone to re-contact them at some time in the future to ask more questions. Usually people say yes, occasionally no. His response was an enthusiastic "Fock, yeh!"

I wish I could call him again next week just to check in. I'm afraid he'll be disappointed if no one gets back in touch.

Mr. Nelson's neighborhood

The house I live in is two-and-a-half storeys, a rowhouse like so many in East London, sharing walls with its neighbors on either side. To the right as you face our house is a shut internet shop, then some florists. To the left, houses stretch endlessly, their chimneys and chimney pots punctuating the habitually low gray London sky. I have three housemates, actually four now that one’s girlfriend moved in a week ago.

The ground floor has a living room that’s used more as a bike garage and laundry-drying area, though if the house weren’t so damn cold we might use it as more of a lounge. There’s a nice little kitchen and a small eating area. Out through a sliding door is a small overgrown grassy yard or garden with a shed built into the back wall.

Up the stairs are three bedrooms and a bath. One room is quite large. The other two considerably smaller. Up another flight of stairs is the largest bedroom. My room has a good double bed in it and a wardrobe. And room for nothing else. If I lie crossways on my bed, I can touch opposite walls with tiptoes and head.

Have I mentioned how cold it is? (Robin: you are forewarned.) Many a night I’ve jumped under my duvet wearing a T-shirt, cotton pants, a sweatshirt, socks, and fingerless gloves like someone from a Dickens novel. The woolen prayer shawl that women in my church gave me when I left ministry doubles as a wrap under the duvet to keep my dreams toasty. I may add the practice of a hot bath before turning in. I’m certainly appreciating a good cup of hot tea when I have the leisure. (As I sit typing, cup of tea steaming within reach on the tabletop, in addition to what I put on this morning I wear a sweater, my shawl, and Bob Cratchit’s gloves. A hat may come next.)

Over the wall in the back garden is the East London Cemetery and Crematorium. (No, we don't see smoke rising ghoulishly from a smokestack. This isn’t Schindler’s List.) The cemetery entrance is a short walk from our front door. Just to your right when you enter the cemetery is the area where people’s ashes are apparently interred, very small stones in a close grid. Each has a well-pruned rosebush, a lovely touch. I’d never seen that before—and I’ve been in American cemeteries a fair amount. But that’s not the only difference here. Something about the rest of the cemetery has brought me to tears on two of my three visits. It’s somehow a very intimate place where the grief is made permanent, literally carved in stone.

The larger part of the East London Cemetery is jammed with monuments, many of them bearing a first name more prominently than the family name. Many bear doggerel verse of almost unbearable sentiment. A monument that caught my eye on my first stroll through the cemetery is dominated by a stone dartboard where you might expect to see a Celtic cross or an angel. Topping the stone, the name Billy in big letters. Carved into the polished stone below the dartboard:

BILLY GILL
TRAGICALLY TAKEN FROM US 5TH FEB 1990
AGED 24 YEARS

HAVE YOU EVER LOST A SON WHO WAS EVERYTHING TO YOU,
ONE YOU LOVED SO MUCH AND MISS HIM LIKE WE DO.
HAVE YOU EVER HAD THE HEARTACHE OR EVEN FELT THE PAIN.
WE PRAY YOU NEVER DO.
BECAUSE IF TEARS COULD BUILD A STAIRWAY
AND MEMORIES BUILD A LANE,
WE WOULD HAVE WALKED TO HEAVEN
TO BRING OUR SON BACK AGAIN.
LOVE YOU FOREVER, YOUR DEVOTED MUM & DAD
XXX XXX

And further toward the front of that same grave, upright on the horizontal marble slab, gilded letters carved into two panels forming a heart-shaped with a jagged break down the middle:

A THOUSAND WORDS
WON’T BRING YOU BACK.
WE KNOW BECAUSE WE HAVE TRIED.
NEITHER WILL A MILLION TEARS,
WE KNOW BECAUSE WE HAVE CRIED.
YOU LEFT BEHIND
MANY BROKEN HEARTS,
MANY MEMORIES TOO.
BUT WE NEVER
WANTED MEMORIES.
“BILLY, WE ONLY WANTED YOU.”
LOVE FROM YOUR
BROKEN HEARTED
MUM & DAD

I'm just here for a short time--maybe two years at most. I'll never be a true East Ender. But there's something sweet and sad here that touches me.

Lewis Carroll writes again

From a review in the Guardian of an Eddie Izzard stand-up comedy concert, 22 Nov 08 by Brian Logan:

"It's fabulously polymathic: not many comedy shows reference the battle of Thermopylae. Izzard credits Wikipedia, but the thanks should flow in the other direction. After all, Izzard was hotlinking between screeds of erudite waffle when Wikipedia was but a glint in the programmer’s eye.”

Setting aside that I don’t even know what polymathic means, “hotlinking between screed of erudite waffle”! Where else but in England do concert reviews read like “Jabberwocky”? If our columnists were so original, perhaps the American newspaper wouldn’t be following the dodo’s path. I do love the love of language here.

Catching up a bit

It's been over a week since I had time to blog. Days are long with school and work--and especially with travel within London, which eats up a sad amount of time and energy (1-1/2 hours on days when I just have classes, more than 4 hours on days that I also work. And all of this on top of 6 hours of class and 4 hours at my job, to say nothing of shopping, cooking, running errands, and standing in queues. So it's a task just managing the time. And then to find moments to reflect on what I'm experiencing here. And then to write about it... I wish for an extra day of doing nothing else each week.

But I don't wish I weren't doing what I'm doing.

I'll write in snapshots now, maybe to expand on them later.

The joy of Skype

Robin and I video-Skype almost every night. We each have a camera either built into or plugged into our computers, and we can talk (for free) and see each other at the same time. "Just like the Jetsons!" as Robin keeps saying. Actually, the most delightful part of the experience is seeing what a kick Robin gets out of it. Her smiling face each night, her sense of wonder at the whole thing. Isabel was back in town for the week (she flew to Minneapolis today), and each night before signing off, Robin would look at us through the computer screen say, "I'm cursoring you right now" (meaning she was drawing hearts around our faces on her computer screen). At times, without quite realizing what she was saying, she'd say, "I'm cursing you right now," but with the happiest and most loving expression on her face that the incongruity of it all was just hilarious.

The journey turns catastrophic

I wrote last week of "the fundamental journey," an exercise in Improvisation with the neutral mask in which we made our way through a variety of landscapes, riverscape, and seascape--either individually or in small groups. This week the journey was all what they call "off balance." Much of what we were tasked with doing early on, even before the fundamental journey, was to establish a world in balance. To convey through our bodies reacting to imagined things in the world on a blank stage, a world without conflict, in which things are as they should be. And to show through our actions and reactions that this is indeed how things are in this imagined world. Basically to show what normal is. (Or maybe what natural is--they keep drawing a distinction between the two.) In a sense, the fundamental journey takes place in a world in balance--not without striving or obstacles, but without the kind of situations we faced this week, when the sea as in a storm, the forest was on fire, the mountain was cracking in an earthquake, the river was a torrent, and the plains and desert were consumed in tornado and sandstorm. And to top it all off, at the end of the journey we were to look out not on a sunset, but on our hometown in flames. And to convey all of this without any props, without any language, without any facial expression because the mask shows nothing in the face--but everything in the way you move. And even though we all knew the task, a key part of the assignment was to reflect what you're seeing and the element you're moving through in the way your body moves--not so hard with the earthquake (in which I received as close to a compliment as I might expect from a teacher--"you're very close to something there'') and much harder when for example you're expressing a conflagration. Not only your reaction to it, bit also to show the movement of fire in the way you yourself move. If it sounds hokey, it isn't. If it sounds nigh onto impossible, well, that's the challenge.

Gems of wisdom

In the midst of all of this there are little gems that the teachers offer that resonate not only in the work we do here but in a larger sense. They probably won't translate well out of context here (c'mon folks, work with me on this), but here are a few, not from a conversation, by the way, but from different days and situations:

from Thomas: "Resistances: they can't be caressed away." Indicating the inadequacy both of denial and of a wan expression of effort when you're trying to communicate the enormity of an obstacle.

from Debra: "It begins before it begins." Which goes with what several teachers have reminded us, that you always enter from somewhere, from some previous event. You don't just stroll onto a stage, or into a situation in life without bringing your history and experience to it. I'm also noticing that I have a tendency to end a scene before it really ends, that sometime it really does take time simply to let your breath catch up to you and move through you before a scene or  situation is really over.

from Michael: (this is the one I most wanted to remember, bit of course it's the one for which I can't find my scribbled note): "Sometimes a detail is given to you and the rest just follows from that." He was talking about not overplanning our Improvs, about following an image that occurs to you on the spot and seeing to what unexpected place it takes you. That's really what inspiration is, in an artistic or a religious sense--a gift of insight or imagination, perhaps even a revelation that leads you to a moment you could not have contrived. Sometimes you see it in an enjoyable novel--the baseball or the armadillo in John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, for example. Or perhaps the famous madeleine in Proust (though I've never read him) or the food critic's taste of ratatouillie in the recent animated film of that name. What comes is a gift. What follows is a new creation, a surpassing of the predictable. I don't know enough to claim this with any authority, but my guess is that that's actually not far from the original meaning of genius, which must have something to do with generativity, and perhaps even with the word genie.

I wrote before about the lesson implied in some of our classes about the necessity of finding the desire beneath any action. This week, Thomas' teaching seemed to move beyond that again--no lesson is static here--to the necessity of finding within yourself the desire to connect with others, to communicate not just your own experience but shared experience. He was speaking (again) in terms of not even thinking about theatre yet, not even thinking about acting at this point (which chafes some of the goal-oriented actors in my class). What I think he was saying, though he's never this explicit, is if you don't have that sense of generosity and connection in you, why even bother. Find that first and, to paraphrase the gem recapped above, all the rest will follow--whether it's acting or writing or whatever. 

In my time in ministry, I often thought that that's really what preaching was at its best--an articulation of a shared experience, a shared search, a shared longing, joy, discovery, or lament. It wasn't telling people what they should believe or think. It was an honest expression of a shared experience, one person's way of articulating what others who were also on the journey might also be struggling to put into words.

Stiff man poster pop

I finally got internet access at home this week via this curious little memory-stick kind of a wireless thing that plugs into a USB port. So I should be able to post more conveniently now. My school and work schedules often combine to mean I'm away from home from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., though, so these posts may still be spotty from time to time.

Isabel passed through town this week from Portugal on her way to Berlin. She arrives again tomorrow for seven days before going home for several weeks. It's great to see her. She's beautiful and looks so happy. Tuesday she stopped by school at the end of my classes to see Thomas (the school founder) and several of the second-years. Some of my classmates also got to meet her, which some found confusing and others intriguing. After asking how old Isabel is, one of my classmates said I'm old enough to be her grandfather. (My classmate's, that is.) Not quite, I thought. I am by far the oldest in my class, though. The next-oldest student is 15-20 years younger. The youngest is 32 years younger than me. (The original title for my blog was "Old man plays the fool.") One of the early-20-somethings told me she wishes her dad would do something like this. I guess I can be the poster pop for the school's AARP recruiting, if they ever decide to do such a thing.

***

The tone of the teaching changed this week. Every day we have 75-90 minutes of Improv (I can never quite remember the schedule, but I don't really have to), and the teachers always give some feedback on what you might have done better. But starting this week they've been interrupting people from the very beginning. An example: Today when Amy (one of the five Movement and Improv teachers) asked for someone to "open the space" and go first, everybody hesitated, so I volunteered. We're working with the neutral mask--a plain brown stiff leather mask that covers your whole face, large holes for eyes, no particular expression in the eyes or mouth--and doing stages of what they call "the fundamental journey"--from the ocean, through a forest, up and down a mountain, across a river and a plain, and ending in the desert. Today we were working our way across or through the river. Generally we face away from the audience while we put on the mask, then turn around when we're ready and begin.

As soon as I turned around to start, Amy stopped me. "No," she said. "That's not it. Try again." Four times this happened. "Nope." "There's no energy there. Show us something." "Still not it." I never even got close to the water's edge, and it was time for someone else to try. (I did get a second chance later, which was much more satisfying.)

In the first two or three weeks we never got stopped like that. Now, in Week 4, it's happening to somebody every day.

Actually I don't mind it. It's all part of the teaching, and we all learn from it. Plus, I don't consider myself an actor, so it doesn't cut into me to be told I'm not doing well. Generally people take it fine, but I imagine it must be harder for some who do see themselves as actors and are a lot younger, more vulnerable in that way.

I also decided back on Tuesday in Thomas's class that I'm going to approach the improvs differently than I had been. It occurred to me that I wasn't drawing on my life experience, and that's what I have a wealth of, especially in comparison with many of my classmates. I'm 53, a father, have been married for longer than probably most of my classmates have been alive, have lived through the death of both my parents, was in ministry for almost 20 years. I have a lot to draw on. And so even if it's not exactly what the teachers are asking us to do, I decided to bring that experience into what I do, even if I'm the only one who knows I'm doing it. It's working pretty well--making the work more meaningful for me, anyway, and I do think I'm understanding what the teachers are getting at in a very different way than many of my classmates. Even if I'm a lot less talented--and a lot stiffer in the body--than so many others are.

The point the teachers are pushing, by the way, is that you have to have a reason for whatever you do. Or if reason is too intellectual, too heady, there has to be a why, an oomph, a desire beneath it. I can hear that many of my classmates aren't tuned into that yet. And I can see it, too. And yes, it was also what Amy was (not) seeing in my many non-starts today. This is hard, good, deep work. And a very bodily form of expression for it all. One of my subsequent posts should be called "It all comes from the hips." The pelvis, actually.

I feel like I've come a long way already. With an inexhaustible horizon of how far there is yet to go, of course, but still, this time has been productive already. The first week in our Acrobatics class--which is worth a blog entry in itself; maybe later ("It all lands on the neck (even though it's not supposed to)")--anyway, as I was saying, the first week in Acrobatics I was so distressed at how little I could do in comparison to others. There are some astounding athletes in my class. And while I'm fit for my age, so much of this whole experience is both physically and metaphorically about becoming more flexible and unlearning years of habits that have stiffened me. A classmate from India (who was also having difficulties in Acrobatics) helped me a lot that first Wednesday by saying, "It's not about getting it right. It's about seeing what your body can do." That perspective helped me get through the whole first week. Now, after some pretty severe plunges of the spirit during the first two weeks, I've been on a much more even keel for the past fortnight. (Gotta love some of these British words.)

So on I go. The stiff man is learning to bend. And to be resilient. And to ground himself. 

More later.

 

Brief Encounter

Went to a play yesterday at the urging of Ilan, one of our teachers. Not sure how often I can do this (even with the discount, it cost £20), but it was so highly recommended as a piece of physical theatre, which is what the school's about, that I splurged and went. i was glad I did.

The play was a staged version of “Brief Encounter,” played in a grand old movie theater on Haymarket Street near Trafalgar Square. Kneehigh Theatre was the company. A very talented ensemble. The production was very creative, incorporating projected scenes that looked like an old black-and-white film. Early on one character stepped through the screen from in front of it (the screen had vertical slits in it) and then appeared in the movie itself. The show included a lot of music, a bit of puppetry, a lot of movements by the actors to indicate things like a door opening and the cold wind blowing in, or how everything jumps and rattles in a café that sits right next to the tracks as a train rumbles by. Projected images of the ocean became a metaphor for passion and turmoil. And the pacing was so very tight. So well done.

When I met Thomas Prattki, the school founder at the Guthrie this summer, I remarked to him that i"d love to get some insight into how he watches a play. Maybe this is a first step toward that. There's so much to attend to in a production--so much more than I paid attention to before (like how the stage is or isn't balanced by the placement and movement of the actors, or the pacing and rhythm of the dialogue). The mind reels with all the elements that go together in those fleeting moments that build the whole experience.

I'm getting closer to being wiling to try to describe what we do at this school actually, but I don't want to get too bogged down in the details. Especially for someone like me, this isn't only a theatre school--though I am getting a better sense of how to watch a play. (Maybe it's a bit like how I thought, a while back, that the best way to learn how to be a lay member of a church is to serve one as clergy. But that's a longer story too.)

Sold my soul to the telemarketing devil

Well, it's not exactly telemarketing--marketing research, really. (Do you use a cell phone? Who is your carrier? How would you rate [insert name of carrier] in terms of not cutting you off in the middle of a call? Would you say they are Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, or Poor? ...) 

I've only worked a few 4-hour shifts, but the time goes fairly quickly, and thus far anyway, the British are generally more receptive to such calls than I would have expected. I for one hate getting such calls, especially at the dinner hour--guess when my shifts tend to be--but at least I'm not expected to hassle them or try to get them to buy anything. I really had to find a job, and this is the only one I could get so quickly. (An American accent seems to help here, too, kind of like how we like British accents in the States.) I figure I'll hold onto this job through December, at least. Unlike at some other jobs, they never even asked if I could work over Christmas. Maybe that's because their terminology for someone like me is "part-time casual  worker." Minimum wage here is something like £5.45 an hour (which is close to $9.50)--much closer to a living wage than at home. And this pays a bit more.

I've also finally gotten registered with the National Health Service and opened a bank account--on the fifth visit to the branch! You'd think banks would be leaping over each other to get people to deposit money in them these days. But they make it very hard to do business with them. At least twice I rushed to the bank right after class, waited in line for 45 minutes (the English stand in queues a lot), only to be told that there just wasn't time for me to open an account before they closed for the day. (Would it break the bank for them to staff both of their Meeting Point/information kiosks so the could handle twice as many people?) OK, maybe I'm being the impatient American, but really... 

Classmates, eggs, and eels

Three weeks into our classes thus far. I hope to get to the point of expressing some of my reflections, but I think it's too early yet. So for now, a setting of the scene and a little local color.

There are about 45 students in the first-year class at Lispa. Twenty-one of us have our classes in Hackney, in East London, and the rest have theirs on the West Side, on Latimer Road. All of us in the Initiation Course, plus the second-years (a.k.a. the Advanced Course), meet together on Monday afternoons to watch short pieces that we first-years have put together, fulfilling vague assignments like "A place, an event" or "The invisible man or woman." Come January, we'll all have classes in one location--Three Mills Studios in East London, which is closer to where I live, in Plaistow. At the initial getting-to-know-you meeting of first-years, we told where we're from. Our full class includes people from (as I recall) Portugal, India, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Israel, Puerto Rico, Japan, Zambia, Greece, Italy, Croatia, Ireland, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, France, Bermuda, Australia, England, and the US. Whew! The London International School of Performing Arts, indeed.

I share a house with three other students, one from England, one from India, one from the States. They're all second-years, so their classes start when mine end in mid-afternoon. I get a lot of time to myself at home, which is fine. I had my worries about where we live, though. The first night I was to sleep here, I walked the last half-mile from the nearest Tube stop. I could have waited for a bus, but it seemed just as quick to walk. On the final leg, I heard a car accelerate from behind me and felt something splat right between my shoulder blades. Something wet sprayed on the back of my neck and in my hair. When I got home I found that I'd been egged. Welcome to Plaistow. 

I don't walk from the Tube stop late at night anymore. 

On my second weekend here, Richard--a classmate who's a Cockney East Ender himself--took one of his housemates and me out for a traditional meal of "pie and mash with green liquor." (Steak-and-kidney pie, mashed potatoes, and a non-alcoholic green gravy that looked like a weak soup flavored with some pulverized herb.) It was really pretty good. And then he ordered three bowls of jellied eels. He must really like them, I thought. But no, he was ordering one bowl for each of us. And he told us he'd never had them himself. 

Mmmm, jellied eels... can you even imagine it? 

You may be afraid to, but I'll bet you can. 

But can you imagine eating them? Me neither. Still I figured, why not? I'd had haggis in Scotland. Why not jellied eels in the East End? (Though I'd never have ordered them myself!)

I'm not quite sure how you cook eel, but they came sliced into rounds about 3/4 of an inch thick. The meat is a bit flaky and not too bad. I expected it to be all slimy, but thank God it wasn't. The jelly is some kind of translucent light green Jell-O kind of substance. Best not to ask what it's made of, I figured. The whole thing was pretty mild in taste, only vaguely fishy. 

We were in a small white-tiled diner in East Ham. Narrow marble-topped tables and benches on the side. Robin's, it was called. Two women who'd probably presided for decades served from behind the counter. Three other women at the table behind me told us as they left that we should put a lot of vinegar and pepper on the eels (though that just made them taste pungent). And the women behind the counter scolded Richard for not ordering them hot, as that's apparently the proper way to eat eel. 

But hot jelly? Sorry. Not willing to go there. Though I did tell Richard I'll buy him a bowl of hot jellied eels sometime to pay him back.

Cricket and fireworks

My baseball buddies back home will be pleased to hear that I've already had my first cricket lesson. Last Saturday I was biking through Victoria Park trying to trace my way back home from school, and the path took me past what was a bit like batting cages. Men were taking turns bowling (what we'd call pitching) balls for another to hit. I stopped to watch for a while, and one of the guys asked if I wanted to "have a go at it." Sure, I thought. Why not? So he pulled out another ball for me to try bowling with. They're a bit smaller than a baseball, cork on the inside and covered with red leather with stitches around what would be the equator to hold it together. You take a running, hopping leap and then throw the ball with a straight-arm motion over the top. It's a lot harder than it looks. My first throw went straight into the ground. (OK, some of my teammates from back home will tell you that that happens with my  first throw of the day with a baseball, too, but this got only marginally easier with practice.) The guy who lent me the ball gave me a few more pointers, so I wasn't embarrassing myself too badly by the time it started raining some 25 minutes later. I biked home happy and with my pointer and middle fingers stained red from the dye on the leather.

Last night I went out in search of a Bonfire Night celebration and ended up in Southwark Park (pronounced suthuk). I asked the guy next to me in the food line for a bit of background. "Basically it's a celebration of the torture and assassination of a Catholic terrorist," he said (see PS below), and went on to tell me more of the story. He also lamented that Bonfire Night has turned into these huge gatherings of people to watch fireworks and eat food from trailers serving things like burgers and hot dogs. When he was a kid, people didn't really celebrate Hallowe'en but instead would make an effigy and go around asking for money ("a penny for the Guy") that they'd buy their fireworks with. Then they'd gather all the scrap wood they could find and build bonfires on the 5th of November in which to burn their effigies. Now nobody has bonfires, he said, because of the safety issues. So to my eyes it looked more like a small county fair (little rides for the kids, loud thumping music, fast food), and a fireworks show that lasted maybe 10 minutes. I hear they do it up bigger in other parks, but the only thing big was the crowd, which was massive. Even the fireworks didn't have the towering dandelion-flower-type explosions that so dominate the Fourth of July (which was kind of refreshing, actually).

Only in Istanbul have I been in crowds as thick and as often as I have here. For being a famously standoffish people (that's a bit overrated) Londoners don't seem to much mind being crammed cheek-by-jowl in parks and on the Tube. There is no such thing as personal space on public transit here in rush hour. London on the Tube at the beginning and end of the work day: a claustrophobe's hell.

PS added later. 

A Londoner emailed me two traditional Guy Fawkes poems:

Guy, guy, guy,
Poke him in the Eye
Put him on the bonfire
And there let him die.

and

A rope, a rope to hang the Pope
A piece of cheese to choke him
A barrel of beer to drink his health
And a right good fire to roast him!

Nice little rhymes for the kiddies to chant, eh wot?

Truly a new day

Since I arrived here I've gotten into all sorts of conversations simply by wearing my Obama T-shirt or hat. Everyone I've talked with was rooting for Obama. Classmates from Ireland, England, Mexico, Sweden, Norway, Portugal, and a handful of other countries. Somalis at an internet point. Black British and West Africans. Everyone--except for two Americans on the Tube the other night, one of whom wouldn't even look me in the eye as she told me she didn't vote "for him."

Last night a friend texted me of Obama's victory at 3 a.m. Robin called during his acceptance speech at 5. Later this morning when I started to read the newspaper account of his win, I broke down and cried on the street. That in itself would have made quite a picture, I suppose--an American, walking down the street holding a Guardian with the headline "It's President Obama," crying. The significance of this election continues to bring tears to my eyes. 

Yes, emotions are closer to the surface when you're living in another country, but it wasn't simply that my guy won. And it's a lot more than the awareness that the Bush era is finally coming to an end, as much as that in itself is worth celebrating. The other students in my class--from about a dozen countries--are happy for his victory, but they don't quite get what a huge thing this is. As an American, this goes so much deeper for me. What this feels like a step in the long road of national redemption, a step that may jump us a bit ahead on the path of transcending our racism, past and present. It's dangerous territory, and I pray that the Secret Service can keep him safe. (Even more, I hope that no one attempts a hateful and violent act. Assassination is such a part of our history.) But this day truly marks a momentous event. Deep down, I yearned for this, but I guess I wasn't sure we were up to it. 

I'm sorry to be missing the celebrations back home. But with all the fireworks in the air tonight (Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes Day), maybe I can just translate it in my mind to a celebration, not just in Obama's honor, but in hope of the nearer fulfillment of America's promise.

The Mike Mulligan dance, and a telltale street sign

Two and a half weeks ago I arrived in London. So much has happened already that I won’t even try to record it all. Bits will leak out from time to time, I’m sure. But for now, a glimpse into my journal from my second day, just as a tone setter:

I headed off to London Fields and the Broadway Market [in the East London borough of Hackney, where my classes are this fall]. The Broadway Market is a street market on Saturdays. At least I think that’s the only day. Anyway, it’s a delight—fresh vegetables, baked goods, a pig roasting on a spit that they carve right there and make sandwiches of, fresh fruit smoothies, racks of clothing, crowds of all ages. I’m limiting myself to two meals a day—this evening I noticed that Lispa recommends a food budget of £35 per week, ouch!—and had the first one there. (Each of my meals today cost about a daily budget’s worth.) And then I went back to London Fields, which may be my favorite place in all of London. And there I happened upon a wondrous thing.

I was sitting on a park bench jotting down to-do notes, when I heard an aria being amplified through the open air. I looked behind me toward the music, and there was a big Komatsu digging machine, a more modern Mike Mulligan the Steam Shovel kind of thing, if I remember the name of the children’s book correctly. It was sitting in the middle of a platform made of some kind of flat squares to protect the grass. The aria was blasting from speakers at the four corners of the platform. And a man about my age, probably a few years older, started to dance with the machine. The digger’s big claw swooped down to him, and he climbed on top of it. As the music soared, he stood and the Komatsu lifted him about 30 feet in the air. It brought him down safely. It spun in circles chasing him. He beckoned to it lovingly. It spurned him. He begged it to come back. At times what I was watching was very funny, at times very sweet. It turns out they were rehearsing for a couple of performances in the afternoon as part of London’s International Festival of Contemporary Dance.

I returned this afternoon to see it again. At one point, I started to cry, it was so moving. (The recording was Maria Callas. Go figure.) Mostly I laughed and was amazed. The Komatsu has tinted windows, so it looks even more nonhuman. I assumed it was computer programmed, though this afternoon after the dancer took his curtain call, he opened the door, and the machine operator stepped out and took his own bow. (Still, when they acknowledged the Komatsu, I expected it too to do some kind of bow in response.)

I’m sure Lispa folks will call this great theatre, and surely it is, but I’m going to resist using that term too much. So what was it? A moment of grace? surprise? delight? A thing of transcendent imagination and beauty? All of these things.

(As I left London Fields after the afternoon performance, I saw a traffic sign I hadn’t noticed before. It’s a red rectangle, with white letters and reads “Changed Priorities Ahead.” Maybe that describes the effect this Lispa experience will have on me. Not that everything will be artsy fartsy for me, or that I’ll become a theatre person. But I do hope to be more attuned to beauty and wonder, and more involved in it. These may be among the changed priorities that lie ahead.)

The afternoon crowd had lots of children in it, but I think the adults were probably even more amazed than the kids were. The dance of man and machine certainly came from a childlike place in someone’s mind and heart. Kids seemed to enjoy it, certainly, but not to be particularly amazed. That was more the privilege of us adults, who live with less wonder and more worries. (The performers/creators/artists, by the way, were Compagnie Beau Geste. Somehow it did seem very French, in an imaginative, innocent, Jeune Lune kind of way.)

After the rehearsal I wanted to call someone and tell them to come see it, to share it with somebody, but I didn’t have anyone I know that well in town to call. A moment of loneliness. Not the first. Certainly not the last.