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.