The coursework is getting more demanding, as are the critiques. Several times this term when we’ve presented our Creation pieces on Mondays, Thomas has broken in before a group was finished and closed them down because the piece was taking too long and had become uninteresting. And after months of really having no homework to speak of, now we have it in several classes. The final three weeks of this term are stacking up to be quite full—final presentations ahead in Creation and Acrobatics and a Movement analysis class and perhaps in Voice, too.
In that last class we’re finally working with text. More on that below. There’s been some disgruntlement with the pace of that class, which led to a group discussion with the teacher in which anger and frustration (on both sides) was openly expressed. (I’d volunteered to moderate the discussion.) And today after presentations there were a few direct questions about why not everyone has been taking part in the past few weeks. We’re at a point where the stress lines are showing. I don't think it has to do with the increased work load. More that we’re way past the polite stage by this point, and long-simmering frictions are being expressed. Such is a life in community. Maybe especially so among creative types.
We continue to work with masks. First it was larval masks, then more human ones. Then our own expressive masks, which we made last week. (I enjoyed it so much, I made a second one over the weekend.) And tomorrow we start working with expressive masks that are more expertly, professionally made. I’m learning a lot. The pace of our movement on stage has become slower, more patient, more carefully articulated. I was going to say more deliberate, which may be true, but maybe more aware is a better way to put it. I do think the quality of the work is a lot better than it was a month or two ago, but it also seems that we’ve hit a bit of a plateau, thus the more pointed critiques of our work. In a way that’s a compliment. We’re being held to a higher standard now. And the critiques are less gently delivered. I remember hearing from Isabel and her friends that the critiques were pretty brutal (my word, not theirs), focusing on what didn’t work and why, with no mincing of words. For the first several months, I saw pieces of that, but the critiques were gentler than I expected. They’re becoming less gentle now.
Our Acrobatics class this term is half Acrobatics, half martial arts. Friday is hapkido day. I’ve never studied martial arts before. It’s a whole new world of discipline and tradition for me, often pretty interesting and as often confusing. The coordination is of a whole different sort. Wednesdays—our other Acrobatics day—is dedicated to those damn headstands, neck springs, different kinds of forward and backward rolls, and a myriad conditioning exercises, some of which verge on the diabolical. But I do admit to enjoying the conditioning. I’m in better shape (and thinner) than I’ve been in years.
Moving from the physical to the poetic, we’ve each chosen a passage or monologue to work with in Voice class. I’ve chosen a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. This being a school of physical theatre, though, the approach is very physical. We’re just getting started on it, but the technique of learning your chosen text is a way of getting it into the body, building up a wealth of associations and neural pathways for remembering the text. We’ve spent some time finding a place in the classroom (like speaking into a particular corner, with your head at this particular place and your right hand on that cinder black on the wall and you left one just there, your head at that particular angle) where a key word sounds exactly right. And we ended class the other day pacing the room, breaking the text into groupings of two to five related words and changing direction in our walk every time we move from one group of words to another. It’s a new way of learning a passage for me. I’m intrigued. We’ll see how it goes as we move on. In the meantime, I have to find time to work on breaking down my text outside of class.
Today we got our final assignment for Creation for the term. We’ll work on it for three weeks. The topic: The Brawl. For next week we create a situation and a build to the point where violence breaks out. The following week we present the build up and the fight (maybe incorporating some hapkido), and then we refine it again after the teachers’ critiques and present it to the second-years at the end of the term. Oh, and we continue our ongoing work of using animal behaviors as an underlayer beneath the human characters. Say what, you ask? It’s a bit hard to explain. Maybe you should just come visit some Monday and see it in action. That’s an open invitation.
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