Off we go?

They say the postal strike is over, or at least on hiatus until after Christmas. But my visa application is still in transit to the processing center, 12 days after I mailed it. It took a month for my Oyster card (tube & bus pass) application to get across town, but only two days to get it back after they processed it, so who knows what my chances are of getting my passport back in time to travel home for Christmas. (The Home Office is not known for processing things quickly. It was their slowness that started this whole dragged out thing in the first place.) So the saga continues, silently and at a distance.

Meanwhile, classes have started. It's all structured very differently this year, with mostly shorter classes and often longer waits in between. Tuesdays are the worst for the group I happen to be in so far. First class: 12:30-1:30, second class doesn't begin till 4:15. Some of this is due to occasionally splitting us into 3 groups of about a dozen. Some of it in having one fewer classroom/rehearsal space. My class is also a lot smaller. We started with about 45 a year ago. Now, with the addition of 2 people we didn't have last year, we have 35. The smaller classes are good, but we're also getting only an hour to an our and a half each day with the main teachers, whereas we got 2-1/2 hours last year. And there are no voice classes this year since neither of the voice teachers came back. In its place we have a group-singing session.

One thing I knew would be different: Our improv/creation work is more specific this year, focusing on particular styles of theatre. We're doing platform dramas now--stories compressed into small spaces and time frames, with no costumes, no props, just 5-7 people on basically a table top and a lot of imagination. It's fun, and quite a challenge. Next we move onto commedia. We're making our masks now. Later some Greek chorus work and epic stories (melodrama). Then clown. Along the way there's some bouffon and grotesque. I'm not sure what all of this is yet.

We continue to have acrobatics, Alexander and Feldenkreis movement classes, and space lab, plus a course in "company development," which gets to a lot of the practicalities of starting and working in a small theatrical company. And a new course called Applied Techniques, in which we specifically build on skills we learned last year in a supplemental way to what we do in the other improv classes. We're also learning a traditional mime routine in one of the improv classes.

So in some ways it's tremendously busy, while in others we seem to have more time in our hands in between things. Our classes are also afternoons and evenings (which means that this time of year we don't even start till it's almost dark), plus Saturday creation times. Later in the year, classes end altogether and it's all individually designed projects for the final 10 weeks or so.

And so in we plunge.