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.
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