We're back in the thick of it (and I'm not talking flies now; I'm happy to report that we're down to mere dozens--oh, the carnage of May!* Do come see me in the ring of hell reserved for mass insect murderers, won't you?)
I don't think I really expected that we'd be ramping up slowly this term. But I also didn't expect that we'd start each of our first two Acrobatics classes with 100 sit-ups, 50 push-ups, and a round of two other diabolical variations on a squat-thrust/jump combo.
The fun part of the week has been in developing a character. We were to come dressed as one of our choosing on Monday, and then we worked with ways of building that character physically throughout the week. Also in putting them in different situations. Next week we each create another one. In Week 3 we'll apparently switch quickly back and forth between the two.
I would be delighted to introduce you to Robert E. Lee Beechum sometime. Professor Beechum (Bobby Lee to those of a more familiar acquaintance) is a Southern gentleman who simply does not understand why an appropriate decorum is not observed in all situations. He is a scholar of the American South, specializing in its fine literary tradition. He has a fondness for bow ties, and it is as obvious to him as the green on God's green grass that he has earned the respect to which he is due. Mm-hmm. Yes.
[Who will come forth next week I don't know for sure yet.]
___
* An unintended allusion to Truman Capote, I just realized. (Meaning I stole it.) Extra credit to whoever can name the book. This Professor Beechum has more of a hold on me than I knew!
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Summer comes to London
I generally have compassion for other members of God's creation, but when they outnumber me hundreds to one in my own kitchen, they have to die.
I arrived back in my house yesterday to swarms of flies. "Oh, well," one housemate said. "Summer." Which seemed an, oh I don't know, inadequate response to me. Now that the weather is dry and fairly warm, we tend to keep the back door open. And some of the windows. None of which have screens here. And when nature-boy housemate installed a compost bin last fall, he put it right outside the kitchen window, which was fine and even handy in the winter months. But with the coming of spring--or maybe this is summer for London--it just made for a breeding place in very close proximity to a key part of the house. I just wasn't in the mood to deal with this in my jet-lagged state, so I left the house for a much more pleasant experience (see below), and in search of flystrips. Luckily what they sell in Tesco is a less ghoulish version, cute little window stickers that look like flowers. And that kill bugs dead. I've already replaced one that was covered with the little buggers this morning. And my ecologically minded housemate has moved the compost bin toward the back of our little garden, so things are more under control today. But I'm going back to Tesco to resupply my personal arsenal of mass destruction for my six-legged brothers and sisters in the family of God. Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.
And so it was that I set out on my bike, pedaling along the Greenway (a bike/pedestrian route that looks like it may have been an old railbed), only to find a section I usually ride on closed until sometime in 2011 because it passes by the Olympic stadium construction site. Finding my way onto the network of towpaths by the canals, I passed through parts of London I'd never seen before. You'd never have known it was London, actually, as much for the leisurely pace of life there as anything else. Not a lot of people, even though it was a gorgeous day. A few here and there fishing, some reclining on the bank as if they'd been transported from a Seurat painting. A few canal boats puttering along, working their way through the manually operated locks. Ducks, swans, and other waterbirds I didn't know the names of. Lily pads and flowers. A man throwing sticks for his dogs to retrieve from the water. Woods and fields alternating with low-rise industrial-looking apartment buildings.
Later I made my way back to London Fields, where I thought everyone was waiting for some kind of concert to begin. Hundreds of people sitting on blankets, several with their portable grills. Some sections of the park were just packed with people, while just across the walks that cut through the lawns there was nobody, as if some kind of zoning were in effect. I asked a guy in a fluorescent vest who was cleaning up around the overflowing garbage cans what was going on. "Maybe Jesus is coming," he said with a smile. (Earlier I'd passed by a teenage pentecostal street preacher. He was working the crowd on a street called the Narrow Way. But of course.) The guy at the trash cans later said something about, "When you only get three months of sun..." so I guess this is what the parks are like in London on weekends for a while now, everybody sitting in the sun just waiting for the party to begin.
And last night I went to a "scratch night," in which people presented 15-minute theatre pieces that are still works-in-progress, with audience feedback afterward. Some Lispians presented. A housemate and I biked over to see it at an arts space on the Isle of Dogs--a short but harrowing ride on six-lane roads, especially as my handlebars kept loosening up from all the road vibration and some screws that just won't stay tightened. (Gotta get that fixed one of these days.) Blessedly there was little traffic late last night when I biked back home by a more circuitous route.
Another lovely day today. And then classes start again tomorrow. Stay tuned.
I arrived back in my house yesterday to swarms of flies. "Oh, well," one housemate said. "Summer." Which seemed an, oh I don't know, inadequate response to me. Now that the weather is dry and fairly warm, we tend to keep the back door open. And some of the windows. None of which have screens here. And when nature-boy housemate installed a compost bin last fall, he put it right outside the kitchen window, which was fine and even handy in the winter months. But with the coming of spring--or maybe this is summer for London--it just made for a breeding place in very close proximity to a key part of the house. I just wasn't in the mood to deal with this in my jet-lagged state, so I left the house for a much more pleasant experience (see below), and in search of flystrips. Luckily what they sell in Tesco is a less ghoulish version, cute little window stickers that look like flowers. And that kill bugs dead. I've already replaced one that was covered with the little buggers this morning. And my ecologically minded housemate has moved the compost bin toward the back of our little garden, so things are more under control today. But I'm going back to Tesco to resupply my personal arsenal of mass destruction for my six-legged brothers and sisters in the family of God. Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.
And so it was that I set out on my bike, pedaling along the Greenway (a bike/pedestrian route that looks like it may have been an old railbed), only to find a section I usually ride on closed until sometime in 2011 because it passes by the Olympic stadium construction site. Finding my way onto the network of towpaths by the canals, I passed through parts of London I'd never seen before. You'd never have known it was London, actually, as much for the leisurely pace of life there as anything else. Not a lot of people, even though it was a gorgeous day. A few here and there fishing, some reclining on the bank as if they'd been transported from a Seurat painting. A few canal boats puttering along, working their way through the manually operated locks. Ducks, swans, and other waterbirds I didn't know the names of. Lily pads and flowers. A man throwing sticks for his dogs to retrieve from the water. Woods and fields alternating with low-rise industrial-looking apartment buildings.
Later I made my way back to London Fields, where I thought everyone was waiting for some kind of concert to begin. Hundreds of people sitting on blankets, several with their portable grills. Some sections of the park were just packed with people, while just across the walks that cut through the lawns there was nobody, as if some kind of zoning were in effect. I asked a guy in a fluorescent vest who was cleaning up around the overflowing garbage cans what was going on. "Maybe Jesus is coming," he said with a smile. (Earlier I'd passed by a teenage pentecostal street preacher. He was working the crowd on a street called the Narrow Way. But of course.) The guy at the trash cans later said something about, "When you only get three months of sun..." so I guess this is what the parks are like in London on weekends for a while now, everybody sitting in the sun just waiting for the party to begin.
And last night I went to a "scratch night," in which people presented 15-minute theatre pieces that are still works-in-progress, with audience feedback afterward. Some Lispians presented. A housemate and I biked over to see it at an arts space on the Isle of Dogs--a short but harrowing ride on six-lane roads, especially as my handlebars kept loosening up from all the road vibration and some screws that just won't stay tightened. (Gotta get that fixed one of these days.) Blessedly there was little traffic late last night when I biked back home by a more circuitous route.
Another lovely day today. And then classes start again tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Going back for more
On my way back to London again, Philly airport again, layover again. But this time no free wifi so it’ll be tomorrow before I can post. Before I left London, a classmate told me I had to buy a pretzel in the Philadelphia airport and have it for him, which I have. I may have a second. Yes, Frank, they’re that good.
But as this isn’t a culinary blog, I digress.
It’s hard to believe that we only have one more quarter left in this year. Then again, starting classes last October in the Hackney space does seem a long time ago. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, though what exactly is hard to encapsulate. A neighbor back home asked me what I’ve learned (Midwesterners being innately practical), and what I found myself saying was “Something about presence. And timing.” Not a very definite answer, I’ll admit, but it does touch on the essence of a lot of what we’ve done.
I should probably write just about that sometime, but as I go back, presence and timing are on my mind in a different way. A few months ago I was sure that I wouldn’t come back for the second year. I thought I might not even finish the first. It was in that period of time last winter when I just didn’t have a sense of where I was on the learning curve, or whether I was on it at all. And no sense of where I was in terms of why I'd thrown myself into this whole mess (for a mess it was, then). I’d also lost a sense of my own presence to myself, you might say, because I just didn’t feel at home anymore in whatever had brought me to leave everything I was doing “in my previous life” as well as where I was living, my home and my community. The vocabulary that I’m newly immersed speaks of being in your body and there was a sense of estrangement because I had little or no sense of what I looked or sounded like. I felt vacant, empty, alien even to myself physically and spiritually. I wouldn’t have thought to say it in these terms, but I just wasn’t very present to myself or to others at that time. So in moving through that, I feel like I've regained a sense of presence in my own life. That’s not what I had in mind when I answered my neighbor’s question in the driveway the other day—I was speaking more of stage presence and awareness of others in an ensemble, which also has to do with timing (knowing when a scene or a story needs you to say or do something, or needs it from someone else so it’s your job just to hold on and allow for it to happen*)—but there’s something of presence and timing in this larger life sense that I’m also learning in new ways through this Lispa experience.
Part of that knowledge comes in a confidence that it’s not time for me to leave Lispa yet, that I'm making some headway now and that I'll continue to do so. I do go back, however, with the awareness that time is going really fast, and I want to be more aware of each thing that I do. To continue to exploit this metaphor—I’ll let loose my grip and release this poor thing soon. I promise.—I want to be more present to this sense of passing time and to make better use of the time I have left in London. Just a small example: We concluded last term with The Brawl, as mentioned before. My part in our presentation was as a quiet, fussy laundromat owner, every thing having a place and everything in its place, cleanliness being next to godliness, and all that. My character kept to himself as tensions rose around him, straightening up, taking an almost fetishistic pride in keeping the floor mopped. This was, as they say, my mask. Not a physical mask, but it was what you would have seen of my character if you’d watched the presentation. It was my character’s persona. (Somebody pointed out to me a couple of years ago, talking about “the three persons of the Trinity,” actually, that our word persona comes from a (Latin? Greek?) word for mask.) And when everything was falling apart at the laundromat and everyone was making such a mess of things, flinging clothes around, using a bra as a choking rope, you name it, my “countermask” emerged as my character went berserk, screaming, throwing things around, dumping bags of clean and folded laundry on the floor, until another character floored me with a strong right hook. I think I realized at the time, though not at the level of full consciousness, that I was talking way too fast in my berserk state. I was paying more attention to the rest of what I was doing. But I want to have a fuller awareness of the moment to be able to attend to more than just the most obvious elements. A fuller sense of presence in the moment, both to be more intentional or practiced in what I’m doing, and also what others are doing around me. (On the flip side of all this, as my laundromat guy was mopping earlier in the scene, so into that activity that it was almost as if waltzing with my mop, I missed the moment in which I was to do a key physical element of the story: I was to pick up one woman's panties that had dropped out of her laundry bag and mistakenly put it in someone else’s bag. The whole brawl eventually would spring from that. Luckily I found the bright red panties on the floor just in time, and actually had to cross the stage with them to catch up to laundry bag #2, which ended up working out better anyway since it drew people’s eye to them in a way that picking them up at the moment we'd practiced wouldn't have. But one of my scenemates told me afterward that I'd almost given him a heart attack when I’d missed my cue. As you might expect, I still have a lot of awareness to cultivate going in both directions.
That last was an awkward sentence, I realize, written as they were calling my flight in Philadelphia. And I was going to go back and rewrite it, but now that I look at it again, having just arrived back in London a few hours ago, it gives me a chance to segue into an item I just read in the Guardian:
Once again, I digress, but wasn't it worth it?
More later. I have to get out and enjoy this lovely day.
* footnote to the asterisk above: looking back on this sentence later, it kind of describes parenthood too, doesn't it?
But as this isn’t a culinary blog, I digress.
It’s hard to believe that we only have one more quarter left in this year. Then again, starting classes last October in the Hackney space does seem a long time ago. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, though what exactly is hard to encapsulate. A neighbor back home asked me what I’ve learned (Midwesterners being innately practical), and what I found myself saying was “Something about presence. And timing.” Not a very definite answer, I’ll admit, but it does touch on the essence of a lot of what we’ve done.
I should probably write just about that sometime, but as I go back, presence and timing are on my mind in a different way. A few months ago I was sure that I wouldn’t come back for the second year. I thought I might not even finish the first. It was in that period of time last winter when I just didn’t have a sense of where I was on the learning curve, or whether I was on it at all. And no sense of where I was in terms of why I'd thrown myself into this whole mess (for a mess it was, then). I’d also lost a sense of my own presence to myself, you might say, because I just didn’t feel at home anymore in whatever had brought me to leave everything I was doing “in my previous life” as well as where I was living, my home and my community. The vocabulary that I’m newly immersed speaks of being in your body and there was a sense of estrangement because I had little or no sense of what I looked or sounded like. I felt vacant, empty, alien even to myself physically and spiritually. I wouldn’t have thought to say it in these terms, but I just wasn’t very present to myself or to others at that time. So in moving through that, I feel like I've regained a sense of presence in my own life. That’s not what I had in mind when I answered my neighbor’s question in the driveway the other day—I was speaking more of stage presence and awareness of others in an ensemble, which also has to do with timing (knowing when a scene or a story needs you to say or do something, or needs it from someone else so it’s your job just to hold on and allow for it to happen*)—but there’s something of presence and timing in this larger life sense that I’m also learning in new ways through this Lispa experience.
Part of that knowledge comes in a confidence that it’s not time for me to leave Lispa yet, that I'm making some headway now and that I'll continue to do so. I do go back, however, with the awareness that time is going really fast, and I want to be more aware of each thing that I do. To continue to exploit this metaphor—I’ll let loose my grip and release this poor thing soon. I promise.—I want to be more present to this sense of passing time and to make better use of the time I have left in London. Just a small example: We concluded last term with The Brawl, as mentioned before. My part in our presentation was as a quiet, fussy laundromat owner, every thing having a place and everything in its place, cleanliness being next to godliness, and all that. My character kept to himself as tensions rose around him, straightening up, taking an almost fetishistic pride in keeping the floor mopped. This was, as they say, my mask. Not a physical mask, but it was what you would have seen of my character if you’d watched the presentation. It was my character’s persona. (Somebody pointed out to me a couple of years ago, talking about “the three persons of the Trinity,” actually, that our word persona comes from a (Latin? Greek?) word for mask.) And when everything was falling apart at the laundromat and everyone was making such a mess of things, flinging clothes around, using a bra as a choking rope, you name it, my “countermask” emerged as my character went berserk, screaming, throwing things around, dumping bags of clean and folded laundry on the floor, until another character floored me with a strong right hook. I think I realized at the time, though not at the level of full consciousness, that I was talking way too fast in my berserk state. I was paying more attention to the rest of what I was doing. But I want to have a fuller awareness of the moment to be able to attend to more than just the most obvious elements. A fuller sense of presence in the moment, both to be more intentional or practiced in what I’m doing, and also what others are doing around me. (On the flip side of all this, as my laundromat guy was mopping earlier in the scene, so into that activity that it was almost as if waltzing with my mop, I missed the moment in which I was to do a key physical element of the story: I was to pick up one woman's panties that had dropped out of her laundry bag and mistakenly put it in someone else’s bag. The whole brawl eventually would spring from that. Luckily I found the bright red panties on the floor just in time, and actually had to cross the stage with them to catch up to laundry bag #2, which ended up working out better anyway since it drew people’s eye to them in a way that picking them up at the moment we'd practiced wouldn't have. But one of my scenemates told me afterward that I'd almost given him a heart attack when I’d missed my cue. As you might expect, I still have a lot of awareness to cultivate going in both directions.
That last was an awkward sentence, I realize, written as they were calling my flight in Philadelphia. And I was going to go back and rewrite it, but now that I look at it again, having just arrived back in London a few hours ago, it gives me a chance to segue into an item I just read in the Guardian:
One evening about 150 years ago, a busy House of Commons was listening patiently to Sir Robert Inglis, a High Tory and bitter foe of Roman Catholic and Jewish emancipation, or anything with a taint of liberalism, although he happened on this occasion to be complaining about an injustice. A prisoner had been denied visits, known in the legal phrase as “right of egress and ingress”. Or, as Inglis unhappily put it, “Things have come to pretty pass when an Englishman may not have his wife backwards and forwards.”¶ We know this scene from a famous pen. “The shout of laughter in the house was electrical,” Benjamin Disraeli recorded. “Sir Robert Peel, who was naturally a hearty laugher, lost his habitual self-control and leant down his head in convulsions.”
Once again, I digress, but wasn't it worth it?
More later. I have to get out and enjoy this lovely day.
* footnote to the asterisk above: looking back on this sentence later, it kind of describes parenthood too, doesn't it?
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Three terms behind me
Heading home for the break, battered and bruised but happy. The past couple of weeks have been focused in large part on stage combat, which is one of those paradoxical things in which the person who is apparently getting beaten up on stage is (supposedly) the one who is safest, and the one who’s doing the beating or making the sounds that make the whole thing convincing is the one who gets bruised up. Of course, tumbling around after having just apparently gotten the punch to the face or the knee to the groin leads to some bruises and scrapes, too. So I’m heading home with sore knuckles and bruises on my legs, hands, and arms, but little worse for wear.
We prepared fight scenes for two classes—Creation and Acrobatics. And each group of 3 or 6 or 7 set, developed, and choreographed their own scene, so fights were set in dining rooms, offices, emergency rooms, rec halls, laundromats, tea shops, county fair pie judgings, bakeries, even ballet studios and Lamaze classes. Some were comical, some terribly unsettling.
We also did final presentations of closely observed animals in Movement class, with even more variety, each person choosing whatever animal interested them. Noah might not have had such a variety. Elephant and giraffe, yes, and snow leopard, goat, and horse. But also starfish, komodo dragon, osprey, sloth, and amoeba. And on and on. A classmate and I were iguanas, and thank God for YouTube. (OK, maybe not God directly, but…) It’s amazing how much stuff you can find videos of online—I’m talking educational stuff here, by the way—and it’s fascinating to pay really close attention to how an animal moves. And often frustrating to try to make a human body move the same way. So the goal becomes (and here comes a favorite Lispa verb) to transpose it, to give the essence of your animal through a human body. So much of it, and so much of this term, has been about specific details. With all the mask work we did, again and again the goal was to boil down the movement, to find that essential detail and surround it with enough focused stillness that it has the impact that a lot of movement never could. At one point I was reminded of a phrase from E.B. White’s classic little book on writing The Elements of Style: the point is to make “every word [or here, every movement] tell.”
This week also included continuing work on passages that we’ve memorized from whatever source. Some were dramatic monologues, some were poems, some passages from novels. First the process of working with the text to memorize it was fascinating. I think I wrote something about that previously. And it got even more interesting when we moved into the speaking phase. One week we split into groups of three, and first we reacted silently to where each other was in the space. No script, no agenda, no words. Just three people starting out about a meter apart from each other, and our entire vocabulary for responding to one another was to stand, sit, lie down, walk, run, or stop. After a few minutes of moving around the space in reaction to the other two people, we started speaking our lines to one another. Contexts emerged as if out of nowhere. The second time we did it (in our final class this week), we stared in our groups of three and eventually were interacting as a whole group of 20 or so, each bearing our our own text in mind. Then each would choose the moment to speak their lines. Usually it came in response to what someone else had spoken, often a text we’d never heard before, and so it became this ever growing dramatic piece that had its own logic and probably could never be the same again. I’d memorized a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that I ended up speaking after a classmate did a monologue about a madwoman from Cork. Others who are more theatre-literate than I am can probably identify the madwoman piece, but I didn't know it. A short speech by one of Lear’s daughter’s (from near the end of the play) came in response to my little part of the drama.
I guess I’m ever the old guy in this group, but there are worse things to be, and much worse characters to be compared to!
In the first term we focused on closely observing nature. In this term we were closely observing animals. Next term we delve more (among other things) into building characters through close observation of people. At times the progression of themes at Lispa isn’t apparent, but at times I can glimpse the grand arc.
As I write this I’m in the Philadelphia airport, waiting for my connecting flight. It’ll be good to be home for a couple of weeks, to reconnect and heal up a bit. I’m sure the next term will fly by.
We prepared fight scenes for two classes—Creation and Acrobatics. And each group of 3 or 6 or 7 set, developed, and choreographed their own scene, so fights were set in dining rooms, offices, emergency rooms, rec halls, laundromats, tea shops, county fair pie judgings, bakeries, even ballet studios and Lamaze classes. Some were comical, some terribly unsettling.
We also did final presentations of closely observed animals in Movement class, with even more variety, each person choosing whatever animal interested them. Noah might not have had such a variety. Elephant and giraffe, yes, and snow leopard, goat, and horse. But also starfish, komodo dragon, osprey, sloth, and amoeba. And on and on. A classmate and I were iguanas, and thank God for YouTube. (OK, maybe not God directly, but…) It’s amazing how much stuff you can find videos of online—I’m talking educational stuff here, by the way—and it’s fascinating to pay really close attention to how an animal moves. And often frustrating to try to make a human body move the same way. So the goal becomes (and here comes a favorite Lispa verb) to transpose it, to give the essence of your animal through a human body. So much of it, and so much of this term, has been about specific details. With all the mask work we did, again and again the goal was to boil down the movement, to find that essential detail and surround it with enough focused stillness that it has the impact that a lot of movement never could. At one point I was reminded of a phrase from E.B. White’s classic little book on writing The Elements of Style: the point is to make “every word [or here, every movement] tell.”
This week also included continuing work on passages that we’ve memorized from whatever source. Some were dramatic monologues, some were poems, some passages from novels. First the process of working with the text to memorize it was fascinating. I think I wrote something about that previously. And it got even more interesting when we moved into the speaking phase. One week we split into groups of three, and first we reacted silently to where each other was in the space. No script, no agenda, no words. Just three people starting out about a meter apart from each other, and our entire vocabulary for responding to one another was to stand, sit, lie down, walk, run, or stop. After a few minutes of moving around the space in reaction to the other two people, we started speaking our lines to one another. Contexts emerged as if out of nowhere. The second time we did it (in our final class this week), we stared in our groups of three and eventually were interacting as a whole group of 20 or so, each bearing our our own text in mind. Then each would choose the moment to speak their lines. Usually it came in response to what someone else had spoken, often a text we’d never heard before, and so it became this ever growing dramatic piece that had its own logic and probably could never be the same again. I’d memorized a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that I ended up speaking after a classmate did a monologue about a madwoman from Cork. Others who are more theatre-literate than I am can probably identify the madwoman piece, but I didn't know it. A short speech by one of Lear’s daughter’s (from near the end of the play) came in response to my little part of the drama.
I guess I’m ever the old guy in this group, but there are worse things to be, and much worse characters to be compared to!
In the first term we focused on closely observing nature. In this term we were closely observing animals. Next term we delve more (among other things) into building characters through close observation of people. At times the progression of themes at Lispa isn’t apparent, but at times I can glimpse the grand arc.
As I write this I’m in the Philadelphia airport, waiting for my connecting flight. It’ll be good to be home for a couple of weeks, to reconnect and heal up a bit. I’m sure the next term will fly by.
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