remember to breathe

Round two--or is it three?

2010-10-11T00:47:00.001+01:00

Well, I'm back in London again.

And tomorrow Year 3 at Lispa begins. I'll be doing the pedagogical year, observing the Initiation Course classes and reflecting on them with the teachers and my colleagues in the third year.

I've decided to try to develop some of this Lispa-type experience for non-actors, especially people in midlife and older. I think there's a lot here for anyone trying to creatively reimagine themselves. And what else, after all, is midlife all about? I also think that in midlife and, I imagine, in the years following--this period of life that we live both backwards (in reflection on past experience) and forward (with knowledge that time is more limited now)--a Lispa kind of approach can be very helpful in integrating in a new way the people we are and have been.

I know that sounds a bit vague yet. It probably always needs to so as not to be too narrowly defined. But I'm here to get a better understanding of it myself.

Thus, I'm back in London again.

Moment of suspension

2010-08-19T18:46:00.000+01:00

Ah, the moment of suspension. In Lispa training it's that moment when things could go in any direction, like when you're on tiptoe and can't hold your balance. Or it's the gathering moment when the ocean wave... is... almost... ready... to come crashing down. That's where I'm living now.

I just don't know what lies ahead. Two years ago I left ministry at age 53 and plunged into a two-year program in physical theatre, not as a performer but as someone needing to do creative work and feeling a pull into creative work of a different kind, not knowing where it would lead. Some people called it a foolish thing to do. (I wouldn't argue the point.) Some called it brave. (I'm not one to say.) Some called it a great leap of faith. I'm feeling that more than ever these days.

It's often been very hard for me to trust that things will work out well. (What is well, after all?) Especially for me to trust that things will work out for the good, that famous biblical statement from Paul notwithstanding. And now here I am, two years and a world of experiences on, on tiptoe, leaning, wavering, riding the cresting wave and not seeing what lies ahead. And somehow, for now at least, thank God, I'm OK with that.

That's not to say that I don't wish for clarity. I do. And I've had some plans in mind, but the route to at least one of the main ones has become blocked. But one of the teachings of Lispa is that the moment of suspension is the alive moment, the creative moment, and without it nothing truly new can happen.

It's not too much of a stretch to call it a statement of faith.

Starting over

2010-08-08T21:24:00.000+01:00

At this point the question is probably, "Why bother?" Why start blogging again after so much time of silence and so much water under the bridge? I guess I'm entering into a reflective stage again. What's ahead? No answers right now, but you're welcome to accompany me as I reflect on the past two years and where I go next.

I've graduated from Lispa. The school year ended a week ago, and this week has been one of saying au revoir to folks. Some I'll never see again, some I'll see sooner than I think. But who can tell which is which? It's also been a week of trying to do things in London I haven't had time for, so I saw two movies and three plays, visited several museums, went to Evensong at Westminster Abbey, and had many a coffee appointment. Also a long visit with Thomas, the head of the school. Some of that conversation will lead to things I'll write about later.

But tonight, as I've just about finished packing up all my stuff--most of it to take home, some of it to store here for later shipping or carrying back (it's become incredibly expensive to check more than 2 bags)--it just seemed the time to blow the dust off the blog.

Further construction ahead. Drive slowly.

Tamil chorus, not Greek

2010-02-14T13:37:00.002Z

As I did several times last winter, I've fled my cold house on a Sunday to blog from the warmth and calm of the British Library. I'm still living in the Clapton house. The person who was going to move into my room decided she was going to leave school, and by the time she changed her mind again I'd told my housemates that I'd stay, at least for the time being. Chances are probably better than 50-50 that I won't move at all. It can be hard to find a place for less than 6 months, and I'm going to try to shift my work schedule so I only have two weekday mornings after late nights when I need to get going so early.

Three weeks left in the term. We set the epic dramas aside for a bit and will return to them week after next when we have no classes. As usual, they haven't told us much in the way of scheduling, but the assumption is that we'll present a program of some of the better pieces from the term on the final Thursday night (March 4). I think the coal mining piece has a shot at being included, as does the piece I'm part of now.

After we learned and presented parts of speeches, we formed groups of about 18 to do choral work in support of one person giving their speech. Again, these were to be speeches that espouse ideas we don't identify with. (Apparently mine was so problematic in its ideas that people wouldn't even let me finish! In part I took that as a compliment. In part I'm still pissed off about it.) Our group has chosen a speech given by an Indian classmate, taken from one delivered by a leader of the Tamil Tigers, the recently defeated terrorist/independence group in Sri Lanka. It's in Tamil and she's done the translation for us, but part of the power of the experience is in its being in such a different language. The communicative elements become the sounds of the language and the commitment of the speaker and the chorus.

I assumed all along that we'd be doing some Greek chorus this term because I know that's been a key element in the Advanced Course the past two years--and the years before that, I'm sure. But this assignment is a new wrinkle, and with only one more week of classes, I'm wondering if we're not going to do Greek chorus at all. Frankly, I wasn't looking forward to the chorus work, because I've never been much moved by it when I've seen it, here or last summer in Greece--it just seemed like a lot of overly dramatic shouting in unison--but this has been pretty intriguing.

Then again, maybe it's always more intriguing for those in the chorus than for the audience! Which would be a failing trait.

One thing that's become more and more apparent this term: While it's important for the performer to draw on authentic emotions, what's most important is that the performance evoke authentic emotions/memories/associations in the audience or spectators. (It seems like "witnessing community" would be closer to an appropriate term than audience, but it sounds so highfalutin'.) We've probably all experienced seeing someone so turned-in on their own emotion (in a play, in a sermon) that it becomes off-putting. Or maybe we become distracted, worrying that maybe they're not OK. But performance isn't therapy--not for the performer anyway. Though it can have a cathartic effect for those who participate by watching/witnessing.

Snow and shape note

2010-01-30T11:30:00.001Z

I don't know if this is normal for London or not, but another dusting of snow this morning. But it's clear and bright. I'll take this over rain any day. It seems like this week was the first time since I got back three weeks ago that the sun was out.

My epic drama group is devising a coal mining story based on the many stories of mining disasters in the coalfields of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. My preference, of course, is one of the more southerly locations. Last night we learned a shape-note hymn that will work well in setting the tone aurally and in terms of bleakness. Idumea. You get a good sense of it from this link.

Next week we start working on speeches (not part of the epic dramas). We were encouraged to find an important speech that we might not agree with, or by someone who's not a hero of ours. I'm working on parts of Ronald Reagan's "rendezvous with destiny" speech from the 1964 Republican National Convention. I've never assumed that he wrote his own stuff, but there are some good turns of phrase in it.

Now I'll just have to resist the urge to wobble my head when I do it.

The first week back took an eternity. These past two have gone much more quickly. And in five weeks I'll be home again for a visit. Whew.

And six months from today is the end of school. The big question, of course: Then What?

Soon as from [London] I go,
What will become of me?
Eternal happiness or woe
Must then my portion be?

Nope. Doesn't quite fit, does it? Life's a little pale sometimes.

Still here

2010-01-27T12:20:00.000Z

No, I haven't forgotten about the blog. I'm just under the gun to find a new place to live (again) and with work and school and that search, I'm not finding time to write.

We're working on epic dramas at school and "accessing deep emotions." It all comes down to the question, "Is it still possible to make people cry?" Learning lots. Being reminded of lots that I know from other contexts.

But right now I need to find a place to move to by Feb 8.

More later.

Panto

2009-12-24T23:05:00.001Z

What could be more Christmas-in-London than going to a panto? As it looked increasingly certain that I'd be here for the holiday, I made a list of things I wanted to do. One was to get out of town on Boxing Day to go to a mummer's play or some other quintessentially British thing. That one I'll forgo for the trip home! But the thing I wanted to make sure I did was go to a pantomime. And so, last night, still assuming I'd be here, I went to what I thought would be the first of a few pantos. At least I got to one. And what an experience it was.

The show was "Aladdin" at the Hackney Empire theater. The posters show Clive Rowe, a huge black man and one of the grandest of the panto "dames," dressed as a woman with very pink cheeks, very red lipstick, and a wig that looks like a cross between Pippi Longstocking and Diana Ross. I'd never been to a panto before, but that gave me some idea of what the tone of things would be. But by the time a few minutes had passed, I could see it was going to be so much more raucous than I had expected.

The show started with a singing camel and the audience of kids and adults calling back to her. Then the villain came on to a great chorus of boos, which he only egged on. What fun it must be to grow up as a kid in London and go to these shows at Christmas! It was all very bright colors, broad humor, bad puns, great singing and dancing, cross-dressing, quick pacing (I'm learning so much about how comedy is all about rhythm), and great good fun. The show went on for three hours. Part old-style Broadway musical, part vaudeville, part fairy tale, part mellerdrammer, and quite a spectacle.

I wish we had this tradition in the US. For a taste of panto and the panto dame see this BBC piece. Unfortunately it doesn't capture at all how great an entertainer Clive Rowe is. See him sometime if you can.

Minneapolis or bust

2009-12-24T13:42:00.000Z

The mail came today. No passport. I sent Robin the sad news by email.

30 minutes later, the doorbell rings. Special delivery for Eric Nelson. My passport!

I won't be able to get back into the UK without a new ID card, but it's supposed to come in the post in the next 7 days. So I've arranged with a housemate to FedEx it to me at home. And I've booked a flight!

Robin tells me they're predicting 20 inches of snowfall in Minneapolis between now and tomorrow. Will this saga never end????

Couldn't get a direct flight, so I'm coming via Chicago. Here's hoping I make it all the way home.

... if only in my dreams ...

2009-12-21T07:20:00.001Z

As in "I'll be home for Christmas..."

Passport didn't come on Saturday so I had to cancel my ticket to fly home today. There's still an outside chance that I'll make it, if my documents come in the next couple of days and if I can get a flight, but it's looking less and less likely.

Close encounters of the painful kind

2009-12-18T10:30:00.000Z

In the past week or two I've had an increasing number of close calls while biking in London. For a while I've thought that an antipathy toward cyclists must be part of the cabbies' union code of conduct--they seem to love squeezing the curb so you can't get by--and you also find car and bus drivers who do the same thing. Twice within 10 minutes a week or so ago I almost got run off the road by van drivers, and once again earlier this week by an ambulance that wasn't in any apparent hurry to get anywhere. It can't be that I'm invisible. I wear one of those day-glo green cycling jackets or, in cold weather, an even brighter green vest with big reflective stripes on it, plus head and tail lights on the bike.

Then on Wednesday I got caught between another bike that wouldn't move over as I passed him and a tourbus that veered in my direction as it passed me. The bus and I bumped twice before I went ass over teakettle onto the asphalt. My bike fared better than I did, but we both got banged up. My elbow was the size of a baseball, but x-rays showed no broken bones. Now I'm just sore in the ribs and have a puffy, colorful forearm as the fluid from the elbow disperses. I was very lucky.

Still hoping for that luck to manifest itself in a passport in the post so I can come home for Christmas. Has to happen today or tomorrow.

Last night was our final presentations for the term. The Back to the Future platform piece went well. People tell me I was born to play Doc Brown. That part was a lot of fun. Lord of the Rings has come a long way and became quite complex, dark as well as comic. Dracula and Moses also were presented well--no, not in the same piece--as well as four commedia pieces, including "Mamasita Chocolate," a randy Latina piece featuring two hot-to-trot parents and their bratty little boy who keeps interrupting them, with a mixup of medicine bottles (dad's Viagra and the sleeping pills intended for the baby) as a complicating factor. Words cannot describe...

A friend commented that people from Latin cultures seem to have a special feel for commedia. Thinking back on it, of the pieces last night, the women in Mamasita (from Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Brazil) and a Portuguese lothario in another piece were among the stars of the genre in our class. Many English-speaking actors seemed to carry their characters in the head and shoulders and with a high voice, while those who found it better like the four above brought an earthier, more pelvic grounding. Surely it had something to do with who played more with themes of sexuality and libido and who played more with hatred and greed. Which may also be cultural markers.

Today we see the Initiation Course final projects and have our Christmas party, before adjourning to a pub, I'm sure.

Fingers crossed for good news in the post.

Waiting

2009-12-13T23:22:00.000Z

No answer yet to the question whether I'll be home for Christmas. My visa application is still in the works and though I've asked for it to be expedited, I've received no answer from the UK Border Agency. I've tried all the angles here that Robin and I can think of, and she's tried working channels through Sen. Klobuchar's office back home, but to no avail. I have talked CheapTickets.com into giving me a partial refund on my ticket if needed, but that's small consolation. So now I have six days to receive two key pieces of mail from the UKBA (my passport and a newly issued ID Card for Foreign Nationals) or I have to cancel my ticket and stay here for the holidays.

On to more definite things... Tomorrow the last week of Term 1 begins. Thursday night we'll present the best-of pieces: some commedia, some platform. The platform piece I'm in is still in the running. The commedia piece I was in didn't make the first cut. Tomorrow we present the remaining pieces (4 platform, about 8 commedia) to the teachers one last time and then I assume we have yet another class meeting to decide what will be on the program. There are a few excellent pieces and several very good ones, judging from what we saw last Monday. But pieces can change quite a bit in a short period of time--and sometimes for the worse--so I look forward to seeing them one more time tomorrow.

I'll be more reflective at another time when I have more leisure--especially if I'm here for the holidays--but for now just one fun link that an American classmate sent around as we worked on our commedia pieces. Read it and weep, or laugh, or scratch your head. His comment: "If you love commedia and want to make a living sharing it with paying audiences, the public may not be ready for you..."

Isabel brings the sunshine

2009-11-25T14:44:00.000Z

Isabel arrived this morning on her way to Portugal for about 5 days. And while the weather has been gray and or rainy for days and days (of the 8 times a year that TfL sys a cyclist will get caught in the rain, I've had 7 this month), today it's clear and sunny.

We're working in commedia del'arte style now. Generally I really like the earthiness of it--the characters are motivated by the most basic of desires--but I'm getting a bit tired of the self-centeredness that's coming to the fore at times in school. Maybe it's that people are taking commedia to heart. More likely perhaps is that it comes from an awareness that we only have so much time left here and people feel some urgency to get what they can out of the program. Admittedly some of my aggravation probably comes from my wishing it were easier for me to claim that for myself. They're not all the same thing, but there is some overlap between assertiveness, self-centeredness, and pettiness.

Another week gone already?

2009-11-20T14:38:00.001Z

Closing in on the end of Week 3. Only four more in this term. This year is gonna fly.

Back to the Future is coming along, as are the other platform pieces. The teachers gave us one more week to work on them before setting them aside for a while. Meanwhile we've been playing with masks in class this week. We got some feedback on the ones we made, which we'll start to use next week, and have used some of the school's masks twice so far. One day it was leather commedia masks, another, wooden Korean masks.

It's remarkable how you have to tell a story differently when you wear a mask. Movement and language have to be used much more economically; messiness and rambling are laid bare. In a way, we're being asked to do two almost opposite things at the same time: keeping an openness to improvisation and creating on-the-spot while also moving and speaking only when and as it serves what we're making up in the moment. There's also a necessary moment-to-moment awareness of how to hold your head so the mask plays its best. And since these are half-masks, ending just below the nose, how you hold your mouth becomes part of the mask itself, so that too becomes essential and magnified. So much to be aware of without being so focused on it that it blocks your spontaneity. It's a tremendous discipline to develop, and just watching others struggle with it has been an education in itself.

One story we were to prepare for last week was that of the crucifixion of Christ. (A rather ballsy choice to assign in an intercultural school, I thought. Then again, it's probably as well known a story as any.) The storyteller was to tell it from the perspective of 3 to 5 characters (which could be completely made up), switching back and forth between them, speaking directly to the audience or the other characters they were also creating. This we did without masks. Then yesterday those who hadn't had a chance to go the week before were given the same task, but with the addition of using the Korean masks. Instead of quick-changing between characters as those of us who went the week before did, these storytellers were to pause between characters, turn around, take off one mask, put on another, change character, and then turn around again to continue the story in that character's body and voice. They weren't to hurry, but had to make sure the energy/tension/atmosphere/magic of the moment didn't drop. Whew!

When you can't use your facial expression, everything else becomes magnified. And the abstraction of the mask moves the whole thing into a fantastical (transposed) world, where the artifice of the whole thing is apparent but also has to enhance the experience. It's almost like alchemy. I'm learning a lot. Again.

I'm also having to set up appointments with the osteopath. Again. This 54-year-old back of mine has bedeviled me of late. Acrobatics, as you might guess, is going very slowly. Some days I just do the conditioning exercises and spend the rest of the hour and 45 minutes stretching while everyone else works on handstands, straddle ups, and all sorts of other moves I don't even know the names for. My accomplishment of a 2-second handstand this past summer will probably turn out to have been the high point of my acrobatics career. But I can live with that.

Isabel passes through town twice in the next two weeks. It'll be a joy to see her. And I hear that it's about time for Thanksgiving again, since one American friend is hosting a turkey dinner this Sunday and my house is having our own gathering the following weekend. Christmas decorations are up in London stores (though much less so than back home). But the weather here doesn't give much clue as to the season. Weak sunlight, trees slowly going bare without much color, rain as often as always, I suppose. Not every day, but the air's always damp.

Here's hoping Isabel gets through immigration without a hitch this time.

Back to the future

2009-11-16T10:09:00.005Z

Two weeks in now. A lot of our work has been in trying to get a good start on the platform piece. The group I'm in is working with Back to the Future 1. Others are doing Nosferatu, The Princess Bride, Moses (part of the Book of Exodus), Star Wars (the original one); so you can see the variety. I hear that one group is doing the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy--with five people on a door-sized platform in about 10 minutes. This I gotta see. And this afternoon I get to. The pieces aren't expected to be in finished form yet. We'll come back to them as we learn other styles and skills.

You could say that what we're doing is learning different languages, different styles of storytelling that require different kinds of structure and movement. Each is probably best suited to particular kinds of stories. If we keep on schedule we begin with commedia dell'arte tomorrow. I've just made my first papier-mache mask. The masks don't have to be traditional commedia characters (which I know little about). Mine has a big nose, the suggestion of a curly mustache, and an arched eyebrow. He looks kind of like a Cyrano de Bergerac or a musketeer. We'll see how it plays.

Today we also get to see the Initiation Course (first year students) present for the first time. I'm really looking forward to this. Last year I enjoyed those times when the whole school gathered--there's no more appreciative an audience than people who know what it's like to struggle with what you're trying to do--and the second-years said how much they learned by watching us do the same thing they had a whirlwind trip through the year before. A bit like traveling back in time.

(Cue movie soundtrack: Huey Lewis and the News...)

They lied

2009-11-14T00:32:00.003Z

Yet another wet one.

Guess I'll have to start wearing summat like wellies on me feet, now won't I?

Soaked to the bone again

2009-11-12T22:22:00.000Z

And in one place the standing water was so deep my feet were pedaling underwater.

Two down, six to go--for the whole year? Or did they lie?

Soaked

2009-11-11T23:58:00.000Z

They say ("they" being Transport for London) that if you bike year-round here, you'll only get caught in the rain eight times. I hope they're right, hard as it is to believe.

One down. Seven to go.

Off we go?

2009-11-11T15:42:00.001Z

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.

Bottom of the ninth, man on third...

2009-10-30T19:17:00.000Z

The score is tied...

Squeeze play...

And he gets the bunt down! Run scores!

Eric can stay in the UK legally past tomorrow. His application for a visa renewal is in the mail, just a day before his visa expires.

The crowd goes wild, as the runner collapses after crossing home plate.

This is going down to the wire

2009-10-29T09:32:00.000Z

So I received the statements from my bank in Minneapolis via FedEx yesterday. And they were just photocopies. Which are explicitly disqualified from consideration by the UK Border Agency. So now I wait for yet another FedEx from the States which is supposed to get here by 12:30 tomorrow.

One thing about the postal strike here: The Royal Mail website tells you which parts of town will be affected on any given day. How very British. So there's no point in trying to mail off my application tomorrow afternoon from a collection point anywhere in my part of town, but Central London post offices are supposed to be functioning, though with longer lines, I'm sure.

I did get my bank here to provide me a letter stating my balance, so hopefully that will suffice to take the place of the statement that's stuck in transit by the strike.

Oh, and that possibility of hand delivering my application? The office isn't in London, as I'd assumed all along. It's in Durham, which is just a caber's toss from the Scottish border. So that's a no-go, too.

Hoping for smooth operations tomorrow. Else I have to leave the country on Saturday.

The visa blues

2009-10-28T09:34:00.000Z

My visa expires in three days, and I still can't file for a new one. Hopefully tomorrow.

I've been surfing the anxiety wave for what seems like weeks now. I've read and reread pages and pages of regulations, filled out government forms (two kinds, since the UK re-did their forms in the midst of all of this), contracted with an agency in Chicago to help me negotiate an expedited passage through this (to no avail), burned through an international calling card, arranged for a trip to and stay in Chicago that won't come to pass and (the good side of this) been in touch with friends back home who were willing to help, gotten all geared up for a quick visit to home that's not gonna happen, and seen deadlines come and go while I waited for other information--deadlines that have required yet further waits for new documents because all my bank statements have to be no more than 30 days old. So now I sit at home in London waiting for a FedEx package which will bring me fresh bank statements from the US in the next few hours. And I hope for mail delivery today (there's an on-again, off-again postal strike here) and the arrival of the most recent statement from my bank here. After a long flirtation with plans to go to Chicago to get this all handled in a 48-hour period, I just found out night before last that that's a no-go. And last week I found out that there aren't any walk-in appointments to be had before my visa expires in all of England, Scotland, and Wales.

Once I finally receive these financial statements that are en route, I have until the end of the day Friday to post it or hand it in. And then I wait again, hoping that I get my passport and visa back in time to use that nonchangeable, nonrefundable ticket to come home for Christmas.

Oh, and school starts on Monday.

So that's my life for today. (Except that some mail just now arrived, but without a local bank statement. And so this stretches out for at least one more day. Out of a possible two.)

Distress, fresh air, inspiration

2009-10-18T21:52:00.001+01:00

All along through this drawn-out school accreditation/certification process that had to be completed before I can even apply for a student-visa renewal, I've been comforted by the knowledge that I'm fine staying in the UK and starting classes so long as I can get my application in before the end of the month. That much is still true. Even when I found out that for some unexplained reason there'd been a week's delay in even telling me that the letter I needed from the school was available for me to pick up (the fact that I was apparently the only one whose letter wasn't mailed out notwithstanding), that was no more than an aggravation. What I hadn't figured on, however, was what I found out when I picked my letter up: there's a good chance I might not get my passport back from the Home Office until after Christmas, meaning I wouldn't be able to go home for the holidays. This is distressing.

So now I'm trying to figure out if I can avoid paying the nearly $1000 expediting fee to get the thing processed in person. Ouch.

More than ouch. Way more than ouch.

And to add to the whole thing I have to go back to school tomorrow to get the letter reissued because it says the school year I'm applying for an extension for ... ended in July 2009. There are other frustrations that this extra delay has set in motion, but I'm sure you get the point.

Anyway, since there was nothing more I could do about the application on Saturday, I took my bike on the train again and went to Essex for the day. Cold, windy, and hilly, but a tonic for my spirits. I stopped in a few towns with great names, like Saffron Walden (a few others I've been close to on my rides these last two Saturdays: Tiptoe, Sway, and Ugley), visited some very old churches and a windmill, walked a "turf maze" (what we'd call a labyrinth), got lost a few times, and finished the afternoon in a small town pub that seemed so far away from London as to have absolutely no need for the big city at all. I came back exhausted, with deadened legs, and in a much better mood.

Tonight a housemate and I went to the Barbican and saw a show called Raoul, by James Thiérrée. Amazing, inspiring, fascinating, magical, delightful--if you ever get the chance, catch his show. Londoners aren't prone to giving standing ovations, but he got a long and enthusiastic one. It seems unfair to identify somebody by their relation to somebody else (you know, like Jesus, son of God), but Thiérrée is Charlie Chaplin's grandson, and the show had that kind of lyrical, graceful, acrobatic quality to it. If Chaplin were creating theatre now, this might be the kind of thing he'd do. Thiérrée is an amazing physical performer, so fluid in his movements and endlessly inventive. He has a background in circus and acrobatics, which you can tell, but it's not a three-ring circus kind of thing at all. It's really hard to describe. You might call it Lispa to a sublime degree. Highly visual, imagistic, not dependent on language at all. He shook like a leaf, he flew, he became a horse, then an ape. He danced, he used music magically, he played with the audience. There were larger-than-life puppets--a fish, a crustacean, a fossilized bird, a jellyfish, an elephant. OK, that last one was only life-sized.

It was basically a one-man show, but he had an alter-ego (another actor) who briefly came and went and then became Thiérrée or back again. Usually you could see how they did it. Once, in apparently full view, he/they did it in a way that neither my housemate nor I could figure out. And then as a great comical counterpoint, there were times when a prop guy would come out (carrying a huge ladder for example) and Thiérrée would try futilely to hide him.

It really was a tour-de-force. And an inspiration for the coming year.

Gathering solitude like a squirrel gathers nuts

2009-10-15T14:50:00.001+01:00

A beautiful season to be in London, made all the more precious by remembrance of how awful the winter is. As I bike around I keep thinking of how a former parishioner used to take walks in the rose garden at Lake Harriet this time of year, aware of the autumnal passing of time.

Just a few months ago it didn't get dark till after 10. A couple of weeks ago as I washed coffee cups at the end of my work day a little after 7 (a sign of the awesome responsibility I bear in my day job), I was looking out the window at a gorgeous sunset of deepening salmon, orange, blue, and purple behind the London Eye, which is kind of the luxury skybox of Ferris wheels. This past Monday around 6:30, I stood on the Millennium Bridge over the Thames (aka the Wobbly Bridge from the way it shook as people walked across it when it first opened) watching the last colors deepen.

I continue to spend a lot of time by myself, maybe storing up the solitude while I can before things finally launch in a few weeks: the solo bike ride in the New Forest last weekend, a mostly solitary birthday (haircut, reading the paper in Trafalgar Square, a stroll through the National Gallery, Evensong at St Pauls, dinner and the Millennium Bridge before meeting friends for a pub quiz in the evening). It's not that I'm antisocial (I enjoyed buying coffee for a stranger that morning), nor is it that I necessarily want to be alone, but there's something in me that's gravitating in that direction. It may be bad timing--more and more people are getting back into town now and it seems that there are more occasions for potlucks and parties--but the upside is that my solitary ways are giving me more room for reflection.

When I had coffee with Thomas a few weeks ago, the conversation turned at one point to what I might do after I finish here. I don't have anything specific in my sights yet, but I've been thinking I want to be involved in storytelling in some way. I've always been drawn to stories, certainly more than to doctrine, and he asked a great followup question: What kind of effect do you want to have on people? (And then yet another: And who are those people you want to have that effect on?) Those are questions I'll keep coming back to during the year. It's helpful to have longer-range questions like those in mind during the close and intense focus of Creation times in the Lispa school calendar. I think I'll be fighting an uphill battle by trying to keep inserting those questions into group work, but I think it'd be helpful if we remembered to keep those kinds of things in mind. Why just aim for cleverness if you're going to be trying to create something that goes deeper? I want to help create something that will evoke wonder, discovery, and an awareness of possibility. It may be it's not so much through story as through fertile and evocative images. (To do both, of course, would be of great reward! Personal, if not financial.)

The year ahead seems like a laboratory in which to try out ideas and approaches for whatever will follow. My questions aren't necessarily others', I know, and trying to get agreement or a shared direction among strong-minded creatives is indeed a bit like herding cats (while being one of the cats yourself). Still, I don't want to get completely subsumed in immediate goals and concerns this year.

The year is going to rush by--if it ever gets started! Here's to finding moments of reflection and insight in the midst of the coming long days of activity (and short days of sunlight).

Refreshed

2009-10-11T10:52:00.000+01:00

Ah, yesterday I got the kind of restorative trip out of town that I've been wanting. Took my bike on a train about an hour and a half southwest of the city and spent the day in the New Forest. Though much of it is forested, it's anything but new: a tract of land set aside a thousand years ago by William the Conqueror. Now a national park, there are small towns scattered throughout it, as well as crushed gravel bike trails and footpaths. Covered with forests of pine, oak, and fern as well as open moors, it's the kind of place that welcomes a switch from the fluorescent green biking jacket to a brown wool sweater, when you're off the paved roads anyway. Wild ponies are a regular sight, as well as free-ranging pigs and horses of the domesticated kind. I spied a couple of deer, too.

I biked from Brockenhurst to Lyndhurst in a meandering loop of 20 miles or so before whiling away the last hour at a pub as I waited for the train back to London. A lovely day that did my soul good.

Lyndhurst seems to be the main hub of the area. It's a lovely if highly commercialized little town with a charming hilltop church. It has its quirks, too. Here you can arrange for a remarkable variety of coveyances to transport your loved one to their final resting place. There are the traditional horse-drawn carriages in black, of course. Or perhaps you'd prefer the all-Volkswagen cortege, consisting of the VW van hearse and stretch Beetles for the family. There are Land Rover hearses for the dearly departed who loved that rugged off-road experience. And, my favorite, how about a stylish motorcycle sendoff? Your choice of a Triumph, Suzuki, or Harley with a sleek hearse sidecar. I was finishing reading that book on eccentric Britain yesterday between legs of the trip, so somehow this just seemed a normal part of things.

Homeland security, UK style

2009-10-09T17:19:00.000+01:00

A bit of excitement on Cleveleys Road this week. Late one night my housemates with rooms at the front of the house heard some shouting and commotion in the street. Apparently a couple of guys got arrested in relation to a murder at or outside a "social club" a couple of blocks away. The next day our street was blocked off and police were taking the names of everybody who came and went. The day after, half the street was still blocked off and a cop told me they were still looking for "a few things"--the murder weapon, maybe? (Or have I watched too many police shows on TV.)

Apparently there's a Turkish gang war going on in this part of town (again, according to what the cops are saying). It's probably stupid of me, but I find myself taking some comfort in that. It seems less random, more targeted. Yes, I know, people get caught in the crossfire, and every thug is some mother's son, but I feel less threatened than if there were some solitary madman out there. It also seems that police must be hovering out there all the time, ready to come out of the woodwork and swarm a neighborhood when something like this happens. It's kind of impressive, really, but seeing how at least a rowdy few of the Metropolitan police force got out of hand at last spring's G20 meeting here (one man was dealt a fatal blow by a policeman, unprovoked), "impressive" also can have an ominous aspect to it. London's a curious city. It seems pretty safe overall, even when there's been a murder around the corner, but you're also repeatedly aware of how many CCTV cameras there are. Word is that you're almost always on a TV screen somewhere when you're out and about.

I mentioned the other day that the beginning of school has been delayed into November. The reason is that the Home Office--kind of like the State Department, if I understand correctly--determined that all schools that admit international students had to be reaccredited this year. Some apparently were schools in name only and thus served as an easy way for us foreigners to get into the country. In the US, you'd expect such an action would be out of fear of some perceived terrorist threat. Here I think it was more because of the bad economy. "British jobs for British workers" has been an occasional rallying cry on the right, and among unions. Anyway, several thousand schools had to be reaccredited, including Lispa (the i and s stand for International School; most of the students come from outside the UK). Accreditation involved lots of paperwork and a site visit, then the Home Office decided it too had to do a site visit for each of the 4000-some-odd international schools, and then the slow-grinding mills of bureaucratic paperwork have to churn out a certificate. Cud moves faster through a cow.

The upshot of all this is that people like me can't even start the process of applying for a student visa or the extension of one till the Home Office issues a certificate to the school. We're still waiting. I'm here legally until my current visa expires, three weeks from tomorrow. So long as I can file the forms to apply for a renewal before 31 October I'm OK to stay. But pity the incoming students from outside the EU. They can't even start the process to get their visas till we all get the letter that opens the door to the process. And if they don't already have a visa, they can't enter the UK till they get the whole thing processed and returned to them. How one buys an airline ticket in advance in that kind of situation I don't know.

The other part of this is that, according to new and related legislation, by applying for a visa or visa renewal, all of us are applying for a national ID card that will have certain biometric measurements encoded in it. Whether I'll need to carry that with me at all times is unclear. Then again, I was surprised that the cops who were blocking off my street the other day didn't ask for any ID at all, just my name and address. After a year here I had just that morning stopped carrying my passport around with me. But I suppose once I get this ID card I'd better have it with me.

All England, all the time

2009-10-03T08:36:00.000+01:00

Off to Brighton today, just £11 for a round-trip ticket. With school beginning soon--it's been delayed till 2 November, but still...--and the days getting shorter alarmingly quickly, I'm determined to use this month to get out of London at least once a week and also to do some special things in town. Come November, I'll be in class every weeknight and -afternoon, and apparently some Saturdays as well. So now's the time.

I checked out a book from the library yesterday about those only-in-Britain eccentric events, like contests in chasing a wheel of cheese down an incredibly steep slope, shin kicking, bog-snorkeling, and this thing called "mob football," in which about a hundred drunken men form a scrum around a leather tube on a muddy field and push each other back and forth in a knot of bodies for hours until the tube (with mob attending) is finally pushed through the doors of any nearby pub, where they all apparently keep sharing pints till they fall down drunk. OK, I added that last part, but the preceding weirdness is all true. I don't expect to find any of that in the coming month, but what a country to explore, eh wot?

Mostly I just want to get out of the city from time to time.

Off to the train station. Maybe this little post will break my recent writer's block.

Last night I had the strangest dream...

2009-09-20T10:55:00.000+01:00

I'd taken friends to church with me to hear a friend of mine preach--Newell Bishop, who was as close to a mentor as I've ever had. Newell died earlier this month, though in the dream I had no awareness of this. The thing I did notice, though, was that Newell's hair and beard were pure white. The church looked more like a high school auditorium, rectangular, with a screen and stage at one end, padded metal seats bolted to the floor. Newell was giving some kind of a farewell sermon, and he talked about the search committee that was doing the work of finding his successor. As he spoke, people were setting up projection equipment for some kind of presentation. One man brought in canisters of what looked like movie film. I assumed the committee would be watching videos of their finalists preaching while the rest of us went to coffee hour following the service. Newell finished by directing everyone's attention to the screen, and all of a sudden we were watching a film that introduced the finalists. This is really odd, I thought. The whole congregation doesn't get to see this.

Then everything shifted and rather than being on film, the people were there in person. I must have changed seats, because I was right next to the communion table as the first finalist led worship. She was giving a sermon, sort of, but was overwhelmed by having to marshal her three young children into something like a cooperative state. All the while she was talking with the congregation (they seemed more like an audience), and I remember thinking this isn't a sermon at all. It was more of a monologue on how hard it is to be a single parent. She had my sympathy, but I was thinking this isn't a very good way to present yourself to a search committee. There was something about the interplay between her and her kids, though, especially her adolescent daughter, that was intriguing and beautiful. When she finished, I realized I was wowed by how musical their interactions had been. They hadn't been singing, but the pitch and rhythm, the counterpoint of their voices, even their subtle movements and shifts in position, could only be described as inspired. How did she get them to do that? I wondered. It looked completely unrehearsed, but was so amazingly well coordinated that it had to have been. That was what I wanted to tell her, rather than how it was lacking as a candidating sermon, when afterward she asked me what I thought. But things were changing quickly on what had become a stage that I didn't get a chance to say anything meaningful.

Then the next candidate came out, and the whole scene bore no resemblance to a church. It was clearly a theater, and four people came onstage in costume, onto a set that was a living room. They were ready to begin, but I was in their way, lying down on the front of the stage and blocking others' view. For some reason, that seemed to be my assigned "seat." I shifted to the side of the stage, near the curtain. All was very friendly, though, and the actors, the people behind me, and I all joked about how I was kind of like their footlights.

And then my alarm went off and I woke up.

Several years ago I was talking with Mary Ann Mattoon about dreams and what they might mean. Mary Ann (some of you will remember her) was a Jungian and a distinctively practical one. A dream probably means whatever you think it means, she said. I'm not sure about all of the details in this one, though I do think some of the particulars are simply trace elements of things I've been thinking about in my waking hours--Newell's death, the search committee looking for whoever will be the next principal minister at the church I left when I moved to London--but on balance the dream seems to reflect the transitional process going on in me, away from the pastorate and toward something that at least uses the tools of theatre, or is in that aesthetic world. I see my dreams not so much as predicting things to come as reflecting what's going on inside, the mind continuing to deal symbolically with things I think about, usually more analytically, in the daylight.

I still don't know where this exploration at Lispa is leading me. I don't even know what language to use to describe it. Is it leading me at all, for example, or is it completely up to me to chart the course? Where between the two does the balance lie? I have this image of balancing a long stick on its end in the palm of my hand. There's a back and forth between being able to stand still and being able to control which way I can walk while balancing the stick, and corrections in course that I have to take because the stick isn't completely in my control.

And so on it goes. Hoping (and praying) for a fertile year as I move from what I did before to what possibilities I may yet step into--and help to create.

Back in London

2009-09-13T11:01:00.001+01:00

I'd signed up for a weekend course in street photography for yesterday and today, but with my foot all banged up, I thought it best to cancel. (Sigh.) With the help of a friend I was able to see an osteopath within hours of arriving back here on Friday, though, and found that I hadn't broken a bone after all--I love that they test for fractures, not with an X-ray machine, but with a tuning fork. I did, however, do a number on some muscles and tendons in my right foot. Reassuringly, I also found that I'd been doing the right things by icing and elevating the foot as much as possible the past week, and using crutches to keep off it when it got sore. At least I'm learning something from all the injuries of the past year! Now I'm doing painful massages to help with the healing, and the improvement has sped up. At this rate, my hobbling days will soon be in the dust receding behind me.

Another insight into the health care absurdity back home: I went in search of one of those padded plastic boots people wear instead of a cast these days, as well as those shorter crutches that have a cuff that goes around your forearm instead of the pad that's designed for your armpit. I thought it might be easier to travel with those than the pair of vintage wooden crutches we had in the basement. At Fairview Medical Supply, the crutches cost $58. Each. And the boot was over 150. Surely it can't cost anything like that to manufacture them. I assume they get away with this because insurance companies will pay the bulk of the cost. Sounds an awful lot like the $300 toilet seats the military used to buy from defense contractors.

I did get a couple of unanticipated benefits from using those ancient crutches on my flight--I was invited to jump to the head of the line at immigration at Heathrow. And I found that a Boeing 777 has an amazing amount of legroom for the bulkhead seats. If you ever start to feel invisible, just get around on crutches for a day or two. People offer you their seats, call you sir or ma'am. It's still a kind world after all. (Yes, I know, with notable exceptions.)

"Large live rats"

You know how, when you sit on a plane waiting for takeoff and they run through the safety instructions (this is how you buckle a seat belt, etc.--I mean, really, come on), those times when you tune out and you're not really listening? I had a bit of a startle the other day as we were waiting to take off from Minneapolis. I heard the flight attendant say--or thought I heard--"Large live rats are located in the overhead storage compartments." Large live rats, you say? So I perked up my ears (wouldn't you?) and was relieved to hear the next part was about how to inflate your life vest. Never has the reminder of the possibility of a crash into Lake Michigan been so reassuring.

The Great Thanksgiving

Must be the Rick Steves in me, but whenever I go to a country where I don't know the language, the first things I try to learn to say are Hello, Goodbye, Please, and Thank you. And sometimes the word for Cheers or whatever it is people say when they toast one another. This, my children will tell you, is a big improvement over when they were young and I insisted that they learn the phrase for "Where is the bathroom?" (When in Rome, I may know little else, but I can say "Dov'e la tolletta?" with the best of them.) In Crete a couple of weeks ago for a friend's wedding, I was delighted to learn that the Greek word for "Thank you" is Eucharisto.

Had I taken even the most rudimentary Greek class in div school, this would surely have been no surprise to me. One of the humbling results of blogging is that you reveal your own ignorance. Perhaps a happier ripple effect is evoking an affirming "Well, even I knew that" response in many a reader. (If many readers there be.)

Another liturgical echo: From an essay in yesterday's Guardian looking back on the anniversary of the stock market collapse:

In the dock together, both in hock together, what answers have the English-speaking peoples come up with? They have duly shown remorse. They have drawn on the resources of a common cultural heritage in acknowledging the sinfulness of their ways. Like the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the mode has often been that of general confession: to acknowledge and confess manifold sins and wickedness, without specifying personal lapses. Have we followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts? Guess so. Have we left undone those things which we ought to have done? You betcha--we should have shackled Wall Street and the City. And have we done those things which we ought not to have done? Yes, we too got a bit greedy, we too were had, we too have been burned and we won't forget it (unlike some folks who still expect their bonuses).

Many's the time I would have loved to insert a "Guess so" or a "You betcha" into a Sunday morning prayer.

Labor Day, without the labor

2009-09-07T16:01:00.002+01:00

Enjoying some time at home in the beautiful late Minnesota summer. A cookout with friends this afternoon. Lots of time reading these days. Mostly with my right foot propped up because last Thursday, just before heading off for a long day at the State Fair, I was working on my handstands at home and cracked a toe hard against a piece of furniture. I assumed I'd just bruised it and then spent all day walking around on pavement at the fairgrounds, only to have my foot swell and turn all sorts of lovely colors. I think I may have broken a bone. But since I have no health insurance in the good ol' U S of A, I can't afford to go to a doctor who will probably just tell me not to walk on it (too late). So I'll get it looked at, some 2 weeks later, by my GP in London, with whom I've set up an appointment by email. And meanwhile I read all these articles in the paper about people demonizing "socialized health care" in Britain, where it costs me nothing to see my doctor and next to nothing to get prescriptions filled. The tone of the public... debate? discussion? those words seem too elevated a description ... here is so disheartening. I'm afraid the best we can hope for is so complicated a package that almost no one will understand it. An interesting article the other day in the paper quoted Bob Dole, first as saying that health care reform is the most important thing most senators and reps will ever vote on and that just saying no to everything is simply not an option (hooray there) and that having a complicated bill is actually an advantage because people can fiddle with the minor points and still feel like they have something to show to their just-say-no constituents. (I guess I'd give that a qualified hooray.)

This is why I shouldn't wait weeks between posts. There's always something present to write about and I never get caught up.

Back to Greece: While in Rethymno (on Crete) we saw two classic Greek plays, one by Aristophanes (Thesmophoriazusae) and one by Aeschylus (The Persians), both in Greek of course. I couldn't follow the dialog at all, but it was fun seeing Greek plays in a (modern) amphitheater in the old fortress at Rethymno, under starry skies. The comedy was broad enough that, with some previous description of the plot, we could basically follow it. With Persians, again we were given a preliminary description of the plot by a friend who's well read in such things, but I gotta say, I find tragic chorus things pretty impenetrable (in my limited experience). That'll be one of the challenges of the upcoming year at Lispa, when we run through a rotation of dramatic styles. Tragic chorus is one of them. I have a lot to learn there. (So what's new?) Other dramatic styles ahead of us include platform, melodrama, commedia, grotesque (and/or bouffant? not sure if there's a difference), and clown. Again, stay tuned. This is a collection of areas I can promise I'll write about.

More later, little by little.

A post before traveling

2009-08-08T12:52:00.001+01:00

Oops. I meant to set aside time to write before today, but no. It hasn't been hectic here. Maybe if it was I'd have been better organized. Not that I'm complaining.

In a few minutes I head out to Stansted airport to go to Greece for a friend's wedding, on Crete. Nikos (a classmate here) asked about 7 of us to come from Lispa to do a short play at the party after his wedding next Saturday. So this week we devise and rehearse, and enjoy being in Greece. Then a few days in Athens before going home for two weeks. And the Great Minnesota Get-Together (a.k.a., the state fair). I think we get the chance to see some Aeschylus this week, then deep-fried everything-under-the-sun on a stick a week later in St. Paul. Experiencing the breadth of human culture I am.

Speaking of cultcha, I've been able to see some quality theatre lately: Helen Mirren in "Phedre" at the National, and Mark Rylance in "Jerusalem" at the Royal Court, which was one of the best performances I think I've ever seen. And a second helping of Godot squeezed in between, which was even better than the first time.

I'll have to write more about those later. But for now, off to the airport...

This and that, part 2

2009-08-02T13:39:00.000+01:00

The chaos of free speech

Last Sunday a friend and I wandered through Hyde Park and came upon Speakers Corner. I'd been there before on a weekday, but no one was holding forth then. I imagined that if I ever did find someone there, there'd be one man or woman speaking from a stump or soapbox while a few people stood around and listened. I still have this image of the English that's more Jane Austen and less House of Commons. As we got within a hundred yards of the corner, I could see this would be more Parliament than Pride and Prejudice. Someone was waving a Union Jack, and there were lots of people, standing in clumps of various sizes. Each clump was centered around a man or two on chairs or stepladders, shouting out their opinions, often engaging in argument with angry other men in the audience. Very few women there.

The first guy we came across was standing in front of a red flag and excoriating the bankers and capitalists. The second was wearing a helmet with horns of different sizes on it, proclaiming himself to be Lucifer and laughing off the protestations of a Somali man. The third was a hoarse man proclaiming the virtues of Islam from a lamppost. About 20 yards away, a Nigerian evangelist in a purple suit was trying to convert the masses to Jesus and clearly enjoying the spotlight. A bit farther along, two men stood holding a sign saying Free Hugs. (No one was gathered around them.) And then there was what looked like it had started out as a debate between two speakers--an American Christian and a North African Muslim standing on chairs--on the respective merits of Christianity and Islam. But now the self-appointed spokesman for Christianity and the West was engaged in a shouting match with an angry Muslim who started shoving the people around him so he could get closer to the guy standing on the chair. "Isn't this the way it always is with the Muslims?" the American said, playing to the crowd. If this guy doesn't have a background in talk radio, he's certainly learned a lesson or two from it, for better or for worse.

Oy!

Since moving to Clapton I've let my Tube pass expire, so I'm getting around on bike and bus. I have a little ting-ting bell on my handlebars, but have been advised that a good shouted "Oy!" is a more effective warning. Still haven't got that syllable hard-wired into my brain yet though.

What is it with these signs?

Maybe it's the move to new surroundings, making me more alert to things around me. Or maybe it's something more transcendent. You tell me. Last fall when I first moved here and was preparing to begin this grand adventure or folly, I came across a traffic sign that said Changed Priorities Ahead. I haven't noticed another one like it since. Yesterday, having recently completed Year 1 and hoping to use the summer to reflect more on it as I prepare for Year 2, I saw one for the first time that says Priorities Changed.

Excuse my asking,O Holy One, but Your point is...?

And finally...

Words to live by

"The greatest potential for growth and self-realization exists in the second half of life." — CG Jung

This and that, part 1

2009-08-02T09:54:00.000+01:00

Some random notes to start catching up again:

The pub at the end of the world

There's a canal at the other end of the park near my house. Last week, several housemates and I walked up the canal path to a pub called the Anchor and Hope. The barman looked like he'd been there for years--literally, standing behind the bar for years with no break and perhaps no nourishment except what he pulled from the tap. Pretty much the worse for wear. One in our party wanted a shandy, but he refused to make one. Only beer, he said. After getting our pints and half pints we took a table outside with the rough-looking but genial clientele and the bar dog, who was looking for any new friend to scratch him on the butt. The sun had just set. All was calmer than I'd have expected. Across the canal stretched the Walthamstow Marshes--acres of grasses with feathery heads. Off in the twilight, some buildings poked up like grain elevators. The only activity across the way was the occasional passing of a train. I felt miles away from London, very much like being in the Midwest.

Variations on a theme

Went to the National Portrait Gallery again the other day. In addition to a showing of the annual portrait painting contest, there's an exhibit of one artist's collection of other people's paintings--about 300 of them, all of the same image. He went to flea markets and antique shops, originally thinking he'd collect every copy he could find of da Vinci's Last Supper or some other well-loved image. What he found over time, however, was painting after painting of a 4th century saint named Fabiola. The curator's notes describe her as the patron saint of nurses and protector of abused women. The walls are a hodgepodge of copies. Almost all show a woman in profile, facing left, red cloak on her head. A few turn her around to face right, and some change the color of her cloak. Her face, of course, is at least slightly different in each one. Most are probably in oil, some in acrylic, at least one is seed art. Some are on canvas, some on wood, one on black velvet like those homages to Elvis you find at state fairs and cheap bars back home. Some Fabiolas are huge, most modest in scale, a few are tiny, pieces of jewelry.

It's a fascinating experience to walk into the rooms and see the subtle and at times dramatic variety. Reminded me of a comment earlier about how some painters or sculptors (or actors) seem to recreate the same thing over and over again. Are they trying to get it right, or working out something inward, or is this just what we do? It occurs to me that maybe this exhibit imitated something like an archetype--an image that keeps coming up over and over again, in different parts of the world, in different times. It was also interesting to note in the curator's display that the original painting has been lost, so all we have now are probably copies of copies of a 19th century image of a woman who lived a millennium and a half before that. So it's not at all about what she really looked like, really about how she's been imagined and envisioned by individual artists of varying skill, over and over again. I guess you could say the same of any actor's portrayal of any given character. Or any preacher's take on Jesus or the gospels, for that matter.

Swine flu liturgies
Speaking of church--and no, I didn't even plan that segue--there was a notice in the paper the other day that the Church of England has, because of the swine flu outbreak and for the first time ever, directed its priests to stop using the common cup when celebrating the Eucharist. They didn't even do that during the plague--though Parliament did pass a law back then saying that in cases of necessity, Communion would be considered valid if only the bread or the cup were used (and not both). Interesting that it took an act of Parliament to settle such an issue. But this is the Sovereign Queen (or King) of England's church, after all.

Eric, Clapton

2009-07-25T15:44:00.000+01:00

Ahhh. I've moved. And I think I'm really going to like living here.

I'm in an airy, light, old house in Clapton, in a room that's more than twice the size of the one I had in Vermin House. A nice high ceiling--and room for a chair! There wasn't even enough space in my old room to lie down on the floor to do my back stretches. It'll be a pleasure to stretch out in a room like this.

I bIked over past school today (maybe 30 minutes, which is also about how long it'd take by bus) and then came back and wandered around my new neighborhood, found the local pub (with a quirky name, something like The Crooked Billet) and a couple of little restaurants and cafes (in addition to the ever-present kebab shops), checked out the bus routes, etc. My housemates told me of a couple other pubs a few minutes away that overlook the canal. And I found Hackney Downs, a pleasant park just a few minutes away. I think I mentioned the large park at the end of the block, too. I've rearranged my new room and spent most of the morning unpacking. It's nice to have leisure time to do all this. Unlike last October, when I moved in and started classes all within about 48 hours. And also unlike last October, I didn't get egged on my way home the first night in my new place. Ah, Plaistow, I will not shed tears for you.

Another good sign: Last night not one but two housemates brought home some Haagen Dazs. Some housemates will come and go over the next few months, but nations represented include Australia, Guatemala by way of Mexico, Italy, Switzerland, and the US. At any given time there will be 4 to 7 people living here. We'll eventually settle down to 5. Six when Robin comes next May-July or -August.

My new address, in case anybody needs it:
22 Cleveleys Road
London E5 9JN

The 20 movements

2009-07-22T18:28:00.001+01:00

One of the main events at the end of the first year is each student's presentation of 20 specific movements that we learned over the course of the year. We all have the same repertoire to draw from, but it's quite revealing how everyone does them differently and how each person strings them together in their own unique way. I'd heard that the 20 movements show who you are. That's quite a claim. But I'll grant that there's something to it. I wouldn't say the 20 movements are likely to reveal something that's never come to light before, more that they often crystallize some key parts of what has shown through from time to time.

We 40 or so did our presentations over three days, and we all watched each of them. The 2nd years were invited to come, too, and several did. As did most of the teachers. I'd worked on my presentation quite a bit. I enjoyed the challenge of finding a flow from one movement to another, also including some surprising juxtapositions and varying the rhythms. A few movements take just a few seconds. Others are quite involved--a dozen steps or more. And you can cycle through a movement several times before moving on if you want; so each presentation took a while. Mine was about 8 minutes. You're out there, all by yourself in front of potentially the whole school. The stage is yours. The time is yours. The goal is more to show yourself than it is to hide your mistakes, because often the things that are most difficult for you show you more in your fullness. (The things that are most playful often do, too.)

As I watched others go before me, I often thought of which movement I would go into from the one they were doing, just as a review to myself. The morning I was to go, I was a bit chagrined to see that a classmate had almost the same routine as I'd be doing a few people later. Of the 20 transitions, about a dozen of hers were the same as mine. Oh no, I thought at first, mine's going to look so familiar after this. But each of us does them differently--different bodies, different ways of moving, different things that we bring to it--and so after she'd finished, I realized mine would be different in its own way. I'm not sure anyone but me (and maybe she) noticed the similarities of pattern when all was said and done.

Doing the 20 movements was one of the highlights of the year for me. The feedback afterward was very encouraging, and I got a lot of strokes from my classmates. I don't know exactly what it looked like, but several people commented on the "maturity" I brought to it, which I really do think was not just a way of saying I'm obviously older. (One of the teachers even said I look much younger now than when I started last fall. I am a lot more limber. And lighter.) I won't go into the specifics of the comments here, but apparently something did show through that drew on a different level of life experience. I felt really good about it. It was one of those times (that we all need so much) when I could tell that I really have learned something in my time here.

It was also a time when I could get out of my head and trust that my body knew what to do. I remember thinking at one point in the middle of it all, "Did I just forget something there? Did I skip a movement?" But there wasn't time to stop and fret over it. Actually I could have stopped and done that, but I didn't want to. So I just went on, trusting that my body remembered the patterns I'd rehearsed. I wish I could do that more often.

End of Year 1

2009-07-19T15:47:00.000+01:00

Wow. What a ride, especially over the past few weeks. I won't try to put it all in one post.

At the beginning of the 7th week when we presented our final works-in-progress, they were so rough that the teachers decided on the spot that we wouldn't be ready to show them at the scheduled time. So final presentations were postponed by 6 days. A wise decision, though it threw scheduling into chaos (something that happens here fairly regularly). The pieces continued to grow and change in the extra time given. Our piece in particular was disjointed and benefited from the extra days. Even a week later--on the Monday of Week 8--it was pretty awful, but the final 72 hours proved to be fruitful (as well as temperamentally volatile). Two-thirds of what we ended up with was created in the final three days.

The six final group presentations varied greatly in subject and treatment. As did the 50 final projects the Advanced Course students presented in the last two weeks. And the 40 or so individual 20-movement presentations that we in the Initiation Course did on the last Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. (It's been a busy end of term.) Oh yes, and the nearly 40 double Acrobatics presentations in Week 7--one a set routine, the other created by each of the first years. Except me, who just did a set routine since I had to protect my neck and was pretty low in energy following a weekend of being sick.

I didn't have swine flu, but at least one classmate has had. I'm not sure what the impact has been in the US except to know that Robin had it and got through it OK, but it's starting to hit pretty hard here. They're predicting up to 65,000 deaths in the UK, and I've read of plans to give everyone shots. Concern jumped to a new level last week when a GP and an apparently previously healthy 6-year-old girl both died on the same day. They're expecting up to 100,000 new cases each week. Most of them mild, of course, but the numbers are remarkable. So this is a pandemic...

Moving house

Now that classes are over, it's time for me to get back to work and also to move out of my old digs. I won't be sad to shut the door on that place. Again, fine housemates (what else can one say?), but a bad house to live in. Poorly heated, often infested (flies, mice, throw in a little mold), dark, a crowded little room, not much to offer in terms of location. Frankly, Plaistow--the town I've lived in since October--doesn't have a lot to recommend it. I'll be moving to Clapton (or Hackney--not quite sure what forms the boundary), to a house with more room, more heat, more light, another set of good housemates, in a much more pleasant part of town. A bit farther from school, and not at all convenient to the Tube, but I can live with that. More bike riding lies ahead, as well as increased familiarity with the bus system and parts of the Overground and National Rail.

More anon, depending on internet access. Our connection at home went kaput. (I do not recommend Vodafone Mobile Broadband. I'm locked in one of those absurd situations where to get out of an internet contract I have to negotiate with the company via internet, even though my internet connection with them doesn't work. Grrr. Honestly, why do they even have stores if the staff there just tell you you have to do your business through your computer?)

Another plus of the new house -- wired for internet. And it works.

Moving the finish line

2009-06-29T23:20:00.000+01:00

The homestretch just got shorter. Today we found out that, contrary to previous terms in which we made our final presentations on the last day, this term we'll do them a week earlier. Ouch. And last Friday we found out that our Acro presentations will also be in Week 7 rather than Week 8. And on Wednesday to boot. That's a mere 9 days away. Double ouch. As if that weren't enough to mark the nearness of the end of term, a classmate bid us all adieu today. He's leaving Thursday and won't be back. Several classmates are thinking they won't return next year. I don't think it's a disenchantment with the school on any of their parts--more financial concerns, or life intervening--but we've already lost 3 or 4 people since the beginning of the year. We're all supposed to let the school know by the end of the week if we're planning on doing the second year. I don't think anyone will be told not to come back, but as it is we'll be significantly smaller, which is a loss.

¶ Last weekend I saw Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Simon Callow in Waiting for Godot. Yes, it's a truly odd play, but the actors played it with such humor that it was a treat to watch. I read an article a month or two ago in which comedians spoke of the influence that Beckett has had on them (the illustration was a famous photo of Beckett with a clown's nose added). I'd never known that so many people see his plays as comical, but it worked really well with Godot. Maybe that's the way it's always done, I don't know, but clownish or vaudevillian treatment really made the play move along, at times in a touchingly endearing way. There's a lot of cruelty in it, too, but that works well pushing hard against the comedic elements. It was also reassuring to see actors of that caliber stepping on each other's lines occasionally (once, anyway) and dropping their accents from time to time.

And yes, Robin, to answer your question, they pronounced it GAH-doh. Who knew?

¶ I've seen a few plays lately: another odd one (this by Wallace Shawn) called Aunt Dan and Lemon. A one-woman show called Kafka's Monkey, starring Kathryn Hunter. I'm too ignorant to know how famous or well regarded she is but it was an amazing performance. The character is a chimpanzee who's learned to pass as a human, who thinks and feels like a human, more or less, but who still moves and acts like a chimp. Then there was an experimental theatre piece that a few classmates were in and one devised, with all the aspects (for better and for worse) that "experimental theatre" implies. Overall recently, quite a range.

¶ Last night I went to a two-hour African dance class. What a workout, and what fun! Led by a Ghanaian god of a man with incredible stamina, and charisma, and what a body. Oh my Lord...

¶ And today, the 29th of June 2009, some eight months later than most of my classmates (the whippersnappers), I was able to consistently accomplish the headstand.

(He takes a long slow bow.)

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Into the homestretch

2009-06-28T12:29:00.001+01:00

The lack of posts recently reflects, at least in part, the pace of things. With only three weeks ahead, everything is accelerating. Just a few notes here and then, I hope, more short posts in the next three weeks.

The schedule changes from here on out, to give us more time to work on our final group presentation (for me, that's the community folk dance thing) as well as individual presentations in acrobatics and what they call the 20 movements, which are choreographed moves that we each string together in a unique flow. Many are mime-type movements (like climbing a wall or punting a boat on a river), some are a succession of specific postures or "attitudes," some are acrobatic moves. Each is quite specific and some are complex, so we'll be getting a series of refresher sessions over the next week or two. The acrobatics presentations (one set routine, one of each student's devising) have me a bit distressed. I had to take it easy for a couple of weeks since I'd reinjured my neck (yet again!) and now there's not a lot of time left, especially for someone like me who really needs to do it on the padded mats that are in one of the classrooms, and the classrooms are almost always in use. I'm going to have to cut back on the hours I work at my job in the next few weeks to prepare.

A few brief notes:

¶ I may have mentioned earlier that we'd watched a film on CG Jung a while back. I've started doing some reading on him (finally getting around to Mary Ann Mattoon's book, for those back home who also knew her--and of course I wish I'd read it years ago). I'm seeing where some basic elements of the Lispa approach reflect Jung's thought. For example, that the unconscious is the source of creativity, and how the mask and countermask work that we did a bit ago parallel his ideas about persona and shadow.

¶ We also watched a film on the director Peter Brook a week or two ago. At one point he talks of contrasting kinds of improv. One is where they tell you you're so many years old, and you're dealing with these pressures at home and at work, and this is where you are, and these are the things around you, and this is what happens to provoke you. Now improvise. And the other is, Here's a shoe. Improvise. Occasionally we shade toward the first of those scenarios, but for the most part we deal with the second.

¶ So often my movements in improv are too small, too relaxed. A lot of that, I recognize, reflects my personality. But I also think it comes from my having watched so much more film than stage work. So much of film is amplified by the camera so the movements can be--have to be--small, and the intensity is in the magnification that the camera does of the small movement and gesture. Also, as an audience we often don't believe things on film that are done too big (regarding character, not action like blowing things up). So also with personal interactions, sometimes (at least in an understated culture like in Minnesota): smaller things seem more trustworthy, or at least there's a distrust of too much emotion or movement. You know the old joke: How can you tell if a Minnesotan is outgoing? He looks at your shoes when he talks to you.

¶ I'm only just starting to understand how live theatre is so much different from film. For example, if you see two people in a film who are hiding from (or looking for) each other backing up toward one another and then, butt to butt, pivot around each other, never knowing the other is there, it may be amusing but it's a bit like, C'mon, we've seen this before. Seeing it in live theatre is more enjoyable because you're part of it. Yes, you've seen it all before, but what's enjoyable is how well they do it, not that they do it. We watch differently because we invest differently in a play than we do in a film or a TV show.

More scattered thoughts later.

Have we really gotten that bad?

2009-06-11T15:38:00.000+01:00

... I wondered after presentations last Monday. The criticisms were pretty pointed again, and interruptions were standard. I think we're all feeling a bit out of rhythm, and we've lost some of the fun of it all, which is coming through in the performances. But we've had an unscheduled two-day break yesterday and today because of a Tube strike in London, so maybe we'll come back a bit fresher.

Meanwhile, I've been back to the osteopath twice this week. The less-than-graceful forward-roll I ended class with last Friday caused increasing pain over the weekend. I'm feeling much better now, though still a bit stiff and sore. I'll be sitting out of much if not all of the Acrobatics work tomorrow and maybe next Wednesday and Friday, until I'm pain-free again.

The neck didn't keep me from going Morris dancing on Tuesday night. The long bike ride didn't do my neck any favors (again, Tube strike) but the dancing was a lot of fun. A friend and I went this week. We're hoping to bring along several others next Tuesday.

Louie, Louie

2009-06-06T15:24:00.000+01:00

It's been another week of character creation. This week Louie emerged. Louie wears aviator-style sunglasses and a shiny black shirt. I think he'd like to slick his hair with Brylcreem, but I haven't found any yet. He's from Harrisburg, PA, but runs a sex shop in Soho. Married three times, has two sons named Louie Jr. (He calls them Louie 2 and Louie 3.) Louie's a bit like our dog Finn in that he's just sure everybody likes him, but unlike Finn, Louie's confidence about that may not run very deep. He's been through a lot, is just who he is, and wants people to like him. But if you don't, who needs ya? (Life's too short, y'know?)

I'm enjoying this. I think next week we get into situations where we switch back and forth between our characters very quickly. Too bad that Louie and Bobby Lee won't ever meet face to face. I'm not sure how that would go.

Meanwhile we're back to handstands and such in Acro. A bit of a sore neck today, and I can feel the fatigue in the front of my shoulders from working on the handstands--a feat I haven't accomplished yet, but it's starting to come along. Slowly. I've learned (again but probably not for the last time) to pace myself better so as not to suffer too big a setback.

We also formed groups for the long-range project that will become our final presentation. I'm in a group that will be creating something that comes from participating in a community folk dance group. What a stretch, huh?

No such thing as easing in

2009-05-30T18:55:00.000+01:00

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!

Summer comes to London

2009-05-24T13:11:00.000+01:00

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.

Going back for more

2009-05-23T13:17:00.000+01:00

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:

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?

Three terms behind me

2009-05-09T23:22:00.000+01:00

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.

Beware the chair, and note the socks

2009-04-26T13:56:00.000+01:00

It all seemed so innocuous at first. Thursday in class we began by taking a chair and noting how many separate movements are required to approach and sit in it. To be sure this came after a brief and seemingly unrelated comment about how music is distilled emotion and how certain chords or chord progressions are known to evoke strong emotion (and how advertisers manipulate us through their use). But that dropped from notice as I counted 1) look at the chair, 2) turn toward the chair (beginning with the pelvis!), 3) step toward the chair with my left foot, and so on. Sitting down took me 20-24 movements. Then all of a sudden we're in a different world. Amy told us she was going to put on a piece of music and wanted us to imagine returning to an important place and finding it destroyed. See it, walk through it. Touch parts of it.

I didn't notice other people, but I know I wasn't the only one bawling a couple of minutes later. I didn't think I had it in me. (One draft of a blog piece I never published reflected on how I think I've forgotten how to cry freely. It's not that I never cry. It's just that I always rein it in as soon as the emotion crosses a certain threshold.) Then she put us through the exercise once more without the music. Tears again. Then she offered some of us the opportunity to do it again wearing expressive masks, which cover your whole face except for the eyes. Which all led to a discussion of the need to and difficulty of moving past the point either where your own emotion overtakes you, or where it simply runs out and you're still in the position of sharing that experience with an audience. This is where relying on the space you're in and the specific objects around you comes in. (Thus the chair exercise, I guess? I'm still not sure. Some of us wondered afterward how we got from Point A to Point B in this lesson.)

For any others who also wonder about such things, I think Amy said the music was from Elgar's Enigma Variations. She also used Barber's Adagio for Strings later in the hour.

When I wrote my essay as part of the application to come here, I mentioned how sometimes in preaching the connection that happens is when the person speaking reflects and expresses the thoughts and emotions of those who are listening, and how that's probably a bit like theatre in some way. Not that you should gin up the emotion just to make a point or to manipulate those you're speaking to. Then again, that wouldn't be theatre at its best either, so it's another similarity. I've been thinking again over the past several weeks about how there's a generosity in theatre performance (I find myself avoiding the word acting) in helping the audience feel something deeply by feeling it yourself and reflecting it back out again. That's not the most elegant way to express it, I'm sure, and no great insight to some who might be reading this, but for this novice to this whole endeavor it's important. This whole experience is certainly giving me an even deeper respect for actors.

Show and tell

I mentioned expressive masks above. It's always better to show these things than to describe them. The video on Lispa's new website shows some of them, as well as the neutral mask and some of the larval masks (and other masks made by students). It also gives a general taste of the school and of Thomas's approach. And an extra bonus: if you wait and watch through the stills in the five panels at the top of the webpage, you'll see Isabel a couple of times.

The billionaires' convention

OK, this one has nothing to do with Lispa. The company I work for as an "administrative associate" (that is, a lowly office worker) had a booth at an exhibition for investors yesterday. We were told to be at our most professional as we handed out information because the people who'd be attending have beaucoup moolah--millionaires and billionaires. Who knows how many fit whatever category, but it was clearly a mixture of people enthusiastic either to give advice or to get it. There was a mad rush to the podium after one guy finished giving his tips for the coming year. (Which included be patriotic about Britain, wait for the Tories to come back to power and reinstate Mrs Thatcher's policies--and buy German real estate. Not quite sure how those go together, but I'm not his intended audience anyway.) Men in suits were running down the aisles to be the first to get whatever materials this man was giving out as soon as he said thank you and turned from the mike. The program said this guy--whoever he is--is worth about £700 million and that his predictions of a year ago proved dead accurate. I was curious, though, to note that he had the most nervous ways of wringing his hands and brushing back his hair as he spoke. (The jumbotron didn't do him any favors in the credibility department, I thought. Then again, I'm just a part-time administrative associate at a small company.)

Anyway, the convention made for great people watching. We've often worked in school with the idea of noting whatever animal seems to animate different people--how some are like mice or ferrets or komodo dragons--and at times yesterday was like a day at the zoo. Great fun. An arkful of eccentrics.

I'm not sure which animal another particular fellow was, but he stood out with his (seemingly intentionally) ill-fitting gold and black sports coat, oversized black horn-rimmed glasses and electric blue socks. I was told afterward that there's an an image among the British that the wealthy are particularly known for wearing bright (usually red) socks, and that this fellow is very well respected as an investor.

As a Minnesotan, it makes me wonder what this says about Garrison Keillor's portfolio (he of the trademark red socks)--no surprise that he's wealthy, but is his sock choice at all influenced by the current market? Someone will have to fill me in. Or for that matter, what would Brits think of the mayor of my hometown, who's known for intentionally wearing mismatched socks. If he were in politics here, would people read anything about his fiscal policies into what peeks out above his shoetops?

Stepping it up a notch

2009-04-20T23:36:00.000+01:00

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.

Transformations

2009-04-12T11:27:00.001+01:00

Before I get to any reflection and recollections about this week at Lispa, a Happy Easter and a Happy Passover to you all. I went to a Seder the other night at school. Seemed like as good a way to mark Good Friday as I could think of.

I read this morning about an Easter celebration in Sulmona, Italy, a ritual called "the Madonna who hastens in the square." The article describes this as taking place with statues carried around, but in my mind it's huge puppets. Anyway, thousands gather in the piazza to watch as statues of St. John and St. Peter knock on the doors of the church, announcing the Resurrection and imploring the mourning Madonna to come out. On the third knock she emerges, dressed in a black cloak. Slowly she walks into the square. Suddenly she's raised up as if on tiptoe and, seeing her resurrected son, breaks into a run. She throws off her shawl, releasing a dozen white doves and revealing her splendid green dress, a symbol of hope (and I would guess, spring). She drops her handkerchief, showing the end of her grief, and in its place there is a red rose.

The article in the Times concludes: "Claudio Pantaleo, prior of the Confraternity of the Madonna of Loreto, hopes that the ritual of hope and rebirth will be all the more poignant for the town this year, in the wake of Monday morning's earthquake which devastated L'Aquila, just 60 km away. He says that the parade will 'absolutely still go ahead...'"

I wish the article had ended there, but the last line of Mr. Pataleo's quote is "'unless the Bishop decides otherwise.'" Can you imagine canceling such a thing? Anyway, here's to loveliness, joy, and hope on this and every Easter day.

I'll be going to a friend's church for this afternoon. Afternoon seems an odd time for an Easter celebration, but I assume there are various services throughout the day. From what I can find on the internet, the church (St Leonard's, Shoreditch) has a long connection to theatre. The actor Richard Burbage, among others, is buried there. No surprise, I suppose, that a classmate would pick that one! And before that, I'm getting together with some other classmates for lunch.

Keepin' it larval

This week in school we've been working with larval masks. They're unpainted masks with simplified and exaggerated features and come from Basel, Switzerland. Many are basically just a nose on a face. They're related to the Fasnacht carnival masks used in that city at the beginning of Lent. My nephews and in-laws who lived in Basel will have special interest in this, though I'm sure we use them in a very different manner in class than they do at Fasnacht.

The first set of masks we used had no eye holes, so we couldn't see a thing. It's all about listening and reacting and moving slowly. It's a lot of fun for those who are watching. You read so much into the simplest of movements, like the tilt of a head. As you can imagine, though, it's quite a challenge for the person wearing the mask. And it gets so much more complex when you have two, three, or five actors on stage wearing larval masks, with no one being able to see what anyone else is doing. You're also not supposed to speak. Which again, makes it all the more enjoyable for the audience.

A side note here, which I may or may not have written about when I learned it in first term: In English we call the people watching the play an audience, which actually emphasizes that they are listening. In many other languages they're called spectators, which emphasizes the visual aspect. In English and American theatre, we tend to privilege language. In French and many other cultures, it's the physical that gets the emphasis, or certainly more of it. (This probably explains the French appreciation for Jerry Lewis. Whether it justifies it or not is another question. Do they love Jim Carrey, too, I wonder?)

As the week progressed, we worked with masks that were more and more human looking, though still very cartoony and all unpainted. And they did have eye holes, though tiny ones and not always in the most useful places. It's a real discipline to learn to do very little but to do it with a lot of focus. There seems to have been a theme in our work of late of doing less. It's becoming more Zen in a way, you could say.

I keep trying to include photos in my posts, but thus far have been unable to. But if you google larval masks you can get some pictures, including this one which also has another Lispa student's comments about the kind of thing we do in class.

All of this makes me recall one of my frustrations last term, having no idea what I look like performing. Working with larval masks takes that to a whole new level! But I'm really enjoying it and feel like I'm learning a lot. Plus, I just enjoy the mask work generally, as hard as it is. I'm less self-conscious, somehow freer when my face is hidden. We're also making our own masks this week, as I mentioned in my last post. I've made mine out of the kind of material that they used to to make plaster casts with. This morning I sealed my mask with glue. Tonight and tomorrow I'll paint it. (No school tomorrow. Bank holiday.) And then on Tuesday we start to see where we go from here.

Breezy like spring

2009-04-05T18:48:00.000+01:00

OK, it's been a long time, but here's a quick breeze through the past few weeks.

Robin arrived on March 18 and is here for just a few days more. It's really great to have her here. She's been able to come and see our presentations each Monday. The first Monday we presented "a journey through a landscape with materials." My group used tupperware lids of various sizes and created a seascape, with crabs, a seagull, waves (of course), a surfer, fish, and a sting ray. Other groups' choices included umbrellas (theirs included a moon landing as well as a seascape), feather dusters (eventually forming a peacock), three-ring binders (a land- and seascape), bananas (dolphins, fish, and a shark in yet another seascape), and paper (sorry, I couldn't quite make out the landscape or story). The second Monday was animals behaving as animals do, without imposing stereotypes or much of a story (monkeys, moose, meerkats, lions, vultures, wolves). Those were great fun to watch for me as well, because I didn't perform, since I'd missed classes the previous Tuesday-Friday when Robin and I went to Cornwall. I must say I was impressed with the quality of the work that my classmates did. It's really easy to overhumanize animals--especially monkeys and apes--and they did a great job of including a lot of details without overdoing it. At the end of last term when we saw the second-years do their presentations I was so aware of the gap between what they were accomplishing and what we were, but since then there have been moments when I've glimpsed how this group of first-years can be very good indeed.

Tomorrow is the third set of presentations since Robin came, so she'll get to see one more round. This time the task is to take the animals and put them in a human situation. This is where it gets even harder to let animals still be animals without Disneyfying them. I'll write later to tell you how it went.

Cornwall was wonderful. We spend four nights in St. Ives, which is on the Atlantic coast, a lovely little cobblestone town with a long history of attracting artists. The Tate museum even has a branch there. (There are two Tates in London.) We got a really good deal on a self-catering apartment right in the center of town, and it was great to get out of London and have time just for the two of us, walking on the sand, taking photos, visiting art galleries. One evening we went to a bar that had a mixed bill of entertainers, original songwriters doing their own songs and a few old standards, as well as two local poets reciting their work. Another night we took in a movie, The Young Victoria. If you're in England when a movie about the monarchy is playing, you have to see it, right?

This coming week we begin working with what are called larval masks. Not quite sure what this will entail, but apparently a larval mask is a big white mask with no eye holes, so "your whole body becomes your eyes." Tune in for an update later. Today Robin and I got together with a few classmates to begin making our own (non-larval) masks. As with everything here, the teachers didn't give us any specific instructions on what to do or how to do it. The masks are due in a week, when we'll find out which ones work and which ones don't, and why.

As for London, it's actually an attractive city at this time of year. We've only had a day or two of rain since Robin has been here, and lots is in bloom. From this visit she has no idea of how dreary it really is in winter here, but even in this weather Robin can see what I meant when I described living in this damp and dark house. After leaving the mask-making session at a classmates flat today (and having had dinner at other Lispians' flat a week ago) she said, "Why do all your friends live in such nice places and you live in such a pit?"

Sigh.

The body knows

2009-03-17T22:37:00.000Z

I'll be blogging less frequently for a while. Two main reasons: One, with classes starting up again plus my job, I just won't have as much time. And two, Robin arrives for a three-week visit tomorrow (hurray). One thing that's good about a blog is it gives me somebody to share experiences and thoughts with—that phantom You out there. One thing that's even better about Robin's visit is that I can share my experiences and thoughts with her. (That and several other good things about her visit...)

But there was one other thing about last term that I've been thinking back on that I wanted to record here. At times last term felt like a complete waste, or at least I was afraid that I'd squandered it and not gotten anything out of it. Whether I'm here for one year or two, a whole term is too much to feel that way about. And so I keep going back and mulling over it. Michael (one of our teachers) commented today that with so much that was abstract last term, it would have been hard for us to get much perspective on our work, but that it will pay off this term. We're doing much more concrete work now, observing animals and portraying them, though not simply in an imitative way, and also starting to build characters. He said we'll find that we can physically express more now after having worked so hard with much less accessible material. God, I hope so.

One thing I've been recalling again of late is this odd and wondrous thing that is part of the approach here: Don't try to think it out too much; your body knows, even if you aren't aware of it. That's such a different way of approaching things (and trusting yourself) than I've ever been at home with, or even been encouraged to give way to in the circles in which I've moved.

There was one exercise we did late last term that reminded me of the insight I can sometimes get from my body. We'd learned a particular stylized movement that's based on poling a boat on a river. Kind of like punting, to give it a British term. And then we started to abstract the movement. Then at one point—any point—to go so far with one part of the movement so as to fall off-balance. I didn't know why I found myself going with my one particular moment. It simply happened, and felt natural. As we kept working with our chosen moments, Thomas called one person up in front of the class after another to do their movement, and then he kept pressing: Why that one? What does it mean? What's your feeling there? Give words to what's going on.

I wasn't one who worked in front of the class that day, but it was amazing how telling my moment was when I started to look at it. It had simply felt like an easy and fluid motion, but it actually showed something of the state I kept finding myself in last term. The moment of off-balance came for me after the point where I had just pushed the pole to the stern, thus propelling my (imaginary) boat forward. The next thing you do is pull the pole out, which entails first shifting your weight toward the bow of the boat as you pull the pole out of the water at the stern. Then you shift your weight so that you're leaning back, and looking forward, before moving forward again as you basically throw the pole end into the water out in front of the boat. (The boat's momentum then brings to boat alongside the pole, making the pole vertical in the water, then slightly past vertical as you then push to the stern to propel the boat further.) But when I did the backward shift of weight while looking forward toward where I was heading, I found myself falling off balance to the stern. It occurred to me that that was an apt picture of the frustration I'd been feeling. I'd been wanting to move forward, even seeming to look forward, but I kept falling backwards though how easily I got discouraged.

Writing all this out makes it seem a little woo-woo out there. Kind of a "sure, Eric, whatever you say" kind of thing. But it makes sense to me. And it also makes some sense that there was part of me—and not my rational faculty—that knew it and could find a way to express it, if only I'd pay attention. I find that quite hopeful and encouraging, actually.

The body knows. My brain keeps dismissing that or coming up with arguments against it. But maybe my brain should just shut up every once in a while and listen.

Catching my breath, part 3

2009-03-15T16:07:00.000Z

On the train back from Exeter. It’s a three-hour ride so, like the train, this post will cover a lot of territory. I start back to school tomorrow, and a lot has been simmering for a while.

Yesterday I took a bus to Okehampton, then made the long uphill hike onto the moor, past the military station from which they sometimes do maneuvers and fire shells up on the moor. Yesterday (not a shelling day) the camp was marked by young men shouting—from a distance it looked like they were engaged in what was for them surely an epic match of tug-o-war—and sheep grazing in the fields. Nice little contrast. The day was blue and blustery. After getting battered by the wind up on one of the tors (the bald, round, rocky peaks) I decided I preferred the wooded hike of the day before. But all in all a lovely day.

Three days out of the city, and not a word about Jade Goody. All that is about to come to an end. Sigh. London tabloids are obsessed with this woman. She made her fame on “Big Brother” or some such reality TV show, on which she was told (on camera) that she has cervical cancer and that it would probably kill her. Now at age 27, she’s on her deathbed. Every day brings reports of how Jade is doing. Her wedding day a couple of weeks ago was a media event. (She wore a dress fitted with a morphine pump.) Then came her husband’s trial for assault or something (not against her, blessedly). Then the baptism of Jade and her two young sons. Then her checking back into the hospital, where one day Jade awoke to find an odd woman with a hammer in her bag standing over her bedside. Then the discharge from the hospital so she can die at home. The tabs have no end of material. If Jade is still alive, I’m sure she’ll be front-page material on the Tube again tomorrow morning.

This is a really odd time we live in, where so little is private anymore. (Yes, blogs are part of that.) There’s another row going on these days over a book published by an apparently well-known writer (Julie Myerson’s “The Lost Child: A True Story”) in which she details her 20-year-old son’s drug abuse, whether with or without his permission is a matter of some debate. What’s private? What’s appropriately public? What’s fair game for a mother to publish about her children?

The Guardian carried an essay last week about such matters, in which it quoted an American writer from 50 years ago (Philip Roth, I think it was; he must have been young then), commenting on how reality was surpassing fiction for inventiveness. The same day carried a review of TC Boyle’s novel about the real-life story of the women in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life—the nonfiction story is gripping enough; why Boyle had to novelize it I’m not sure—and a piece about how somebody other than Maya Angelou has been writing Maya Angelou’s Twitter page. Who can even tell what’s true anymore? Then again, Pontius Pilate had the jump on that question 2000 years ago.

The essay in the Guardian (largely about Myerson’s book) said: “Philip Roth called the memoir ‘probably the most manipulative of all literary forms’: it could never be as frank as it presented itself to be—true frankness was to be found in fiction. ‘With autobiography there’s always another text, a countertext, if you will, to the one presented,” said the US writer. Partly what he meant by that was that the things a writer excluded in a memoir were as interesting as those included, and also that, this being the real and not fictional world, others would have different versions of the same experience. Counter-texts often remain invisible…”

A blog is like a running memoir, I suppose—or rather, a memoir without the tempering process that happens as memories sit over time, like wine aging in a bottle. (Which probably makes it unlike a memoir at all, but humor me.) What to include, what to process privately, what’s worth neither, I suppose anyone who blogs ponders these things. I hope so anyway.

And this brings me back to that play I was part of last December, as promised. This being March, you can see my ambivalence over whether to write about it at all. But this one has gone through the moderate deliberations of a short aging process, so here goes. (And not to be coy here, but as always, what I leave out, you simply don't know. Or why. It’s all part of the conundrum of getting what we trust is information from what we read.) ("Ooooh," he added with some self-mockery. "How post-modern is that?")

First of all, my qualifications for being part of this endeavor came not through acing an audition or my having any particular talent. A classmate invited me simply because I have an American accent. Not that Brits can’t speak with an American accent, but that's how I got cast. There’s a series on London called Showflat in which artists present exhibits or installations or theatrical works in their own homes. My classmate shared a house with a guy who organizes the events. And thus I was invited to take part in a provocative piece on waterboarding. (Waterboarding, as you may recall, is a practice that the US used recently in interrogations of suspected terrorists. It’s often described as “simulated drowning.” There’s been a lot of debate over whether it’s torture.)

An American expat artist in London decided to do a piece on waterboarding. He invited friends and the public to his Showflat event, but didn’t really explain what it was about. For the first part of the evening people milled about downstairs, drinking wine, noshing and schmoozing, and looking form time to time at video monitors showing a chess match. After an hour or two they were invited one by one to come up into the attic, where they found the artist, hooded, strapped to a board with his head lower than his feet, two masked people standing by him and another sitting in the corner making drawings of the event. The chess board was off to the side. Loud music was playing, some of it quite insipid and ironic, like the theme song for Barney the purple dinosaur, which is a saccharine song about friendship. (Apparently some of these songs have been played loudly and incessantly during waterboardings abroad.) As the person from the party below climbed the ladder into the attic, she or he was given a piece of paper that said the artist is on the board and he wants you to pour water on his face. It identified this practice as waterboarding. (I was one of the masked figures, but since the music was so loud and I was standing on the other side of the board to which the artist was strapped, there was nothing for me to say. So much for the reason I was cast.) Then the person had to confront the decision of whether to participate or not. As masked figures, we were simply to point out the water, hold a towel tight over the artist’s face, and leave the person to decide. We were not to try to persuade them one way or the other.

Jon (the artist) had worked out a signal with us whereby he would indicate when he wanted the person to stop. When we got the signal, we stopped the person and checked to make sure Jon was OK. Then the person would go back downstairs again, sworn to secrecy until the end of the evening as to what was going on upstairs. I’m told several troubled-looking people descended the attic stairs, but there were very few who decided not to pour the water when given the choice. Some seemed very uncomfortable but did it anyway. A few did it with smiles on their faces. One or two were uncomfortable and smiling, both.

I was invited into this about a week in advance, and I was really torn as to whether to take part. Jon and I exchanged extensive emails over several days. You can read Jon’s description of the project, along with some excerpts he took from my emails here and here. (The second one gets more to the meat of the matter.) I’m still troubled by the whole thing. I can see what Jon was trying to provoke in his audience (I think the chess match was to add a horrid sense of rational detachment), but I wonder, by domesticating waterboarding—literally domesticating it—did he actually make it less horrific? As I continue to reflect on this, I think he (we) did. Still, was it worthwhile? Maybe. Of course, there’s a lot more that could be said.

Not to distract from the event itself, but one of the spookiest aspects of the whole evening for me was leaving his flat and knowing what had gone on behind closed doors there. Each house on the street looks the same from the outside. Each gives no sign of what goes on inside. With the news stories of Josef Fritzl still relatively fresh (Fritzl is the Austrian who kept his daughter in his basement as a sexual prisoner for 24 years), I found myself wondering what was going on behind other closed doors on that or any other block.

The ironic coda to all this was that when I left Jon’s house that night, the last thing I said to the man I had recently stood by while he was strapped to a waterboard was “Merry Christmas.”

A few excerpts from the papers recently:

¶ From a review of the book “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better": “We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks’ holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year longer or so, and we’d trust each other more.” The book tracks all sorts of scales of social wellness and ill health (e.g., mental illness, obesity, child mortality), and sets them against scales of economic equality, country by country. In almost all categories, the most equal societies like Japan and Sweden fare best in social wellness and the least equal (the UK, Portugal, and the US) fare worst.

[Eric’s editorial comment: Is anybody in the US taking note?]

¶ The British Medical Association is calling for elimination of charges for all prescription drugs in England—as is already the practice in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. As it is now, those who do not qualify for free medicines pay only £7.10 per prescription (about $10), and given the extensive list of conditions that exempt people from having to pay for their drugs, only 11% of prescriptions require payment. “The BMA chairman, Dr Hamish Meldrum, said: ‘Free prescriptions for people with long-term conditions is a laudable aim, but it does not go far enough. The system we have at the moment isn't working, and is unfair on many patients. Making the list of exemptions longer will not make it fairer. Ultimately, we could end up with a situation where only a tiny proportion of prescriptions attract a charge, which would be nonsensical. Abolishing prescription charges altogether is the fairest and the simplest option.’"

[Eric’s editorial comment: See above.]

Back in London

... and I have my window open for the first time in months. Time to air this musty old house out a bit. Birds are singing. I have my sheets on the line for that fresh spring smell. Robin arrives for a visit on Wednesday.

I feel like I've caught my breath. Tomorrow we start up again.

Note to self: Remember to breathe...

Gee, Toto...

2009-03-13T19:12:00.001Z

... I don't think we're in London anymore.

No, we're definitely not. I'm in Devon (about 3 hours west of London) and spent most of the day in Dartmoor National Park. Unfortunately, I couldn't get "up on the moor," because at this time of year the buses don't go up there in the part I was in (except for Sundays), which the guidebooks--and the staff at the Exeter visitors center--don't tell you. Ahem. Still, I had a lovely 10-mile hike through field and forest, up hill and down dale (now I see where those phrases come from), and with the help of two farmers in the field and a knock on a farmhouse door, I didn't get lost, though I did lose the trail once.

Yesterday I came to Exeter on the train from London and went to Evensong in Exeter's marvelous Gothic cathedral. This morning I started the day with a bus trip to Moretonhampstead, from which I'd been told I could get up onto the moors, but couldn't. Moretonhampstead is a lovely little town, and the folks at the visitors center there dissuaded me from trying to walk the last 4 miles up onto the moor on a very narrow road. "It's just not safe," they said, and later I saw how narrow the roads are, with hedgerows nearly thick as thatch that simply won't let you jump far from an oncoming car. Tomorrow I'll try to get to the northern part of the park via a bus to Okehampton, if the weather isn't a factor. From there (I'm told), I can hike up onto the moors. The folks in Moretonhampstead talked me into a hike over to Fingle Bridge and the River Teign gorge, under the shadow of Castle Drogo. (Don't you just love these names?) I had the walk to myself, except for the farmers, their sheep and dogs, and the woman in the farmhouse who put me back on the trail when I'd missed a signpost. ("Do you want the long way or the short way?" she asked. I took the long way.) I scared up a pheasant, saw some wild ponies, hawks and ravens, and came upon two standing stones. There were other people hiking in the river gorge, and there's a cozy riverside pub and inn at the bridge, which made for a nice stop in the afternoon.

All in all, a lovely day, and not a drop of rain.

Odd product of the week

2009-03-09T22:42:00.000Z

Walker's "Cajun Squirrel"-flavored crisps (a.k.a. potato chips).

No, I haven't tried them. And really, who's going to argue that they don't taste authentic? How would you know?

Catching my breath, part 2

2009-03-08T14:31:00.000Z

My housemates are fleeing town for the break. Two took the bus to Edinburgh Friday night. Another bikes to Brighton today. The fourth is going somewhere soon, Liverpool tomorrow, I think. Feels like Spring Break in a dorm. Which isn't far from the truth. I'll have the place to myself for a day or two before I go to Exeter and Dartmoor from Thursday to Sunday. Until then I'm pounding out the hours at my jobs. I look forward to my out-of-town break. As these term gaps approach, I've been looking forward to opportunities to get together with classmates to reflect on what we're doing, what we've been through. But so many of us leave town that it's not as easy to have those conversations as it might have seemed.

I've been thinking back on another of the films that we watched this past term--the one about different ways of seeing. It was called something like "Window of the Soul" or whatever that phrase translates to in Portuguese. In particular I've been thinking of the blind photographer who was one of those featured in it. It's not just a surprising thing that there would be a blind photographer. How can he see what he shoots? is an obvious question (and reminiscent of a very funny David Sedaris vignette about how blind people can get a hunting license in Michigan, but that's another matter entirely). But of course this particular photographer has found ways, even without an autofocus camera. The film showed him taking close-up portraits by measuring how far away his subject is and focusing the camera in that way. He also tells a story about having his niece wear a small bell as she ran through a field, and him pointing the camera according to where he could hear the bell's sound. (I assume he used autofocus then.) It produced quite a lovely shot, which someone else must have printed for him. That's all interesting, but what intrigues me more is this: He can't see the results of his own artistic process. As I mentioned before, one of the difficulties I've been having here is that I have little or no sense of what I'm doing well, of how I look, of how I sound. It's not exactly analogous to the blind photographer's art, but it's close enough, and I suppose that's what keeps me hearkening back to him. The Initiation Course at Lispa isn't much about results, but it's hard to find the mileposts on your journey in a situation like this. As I think I mentioned before, the goal here seems to be to foster a creative drive that isn't too dependent on or cowed by others' reactions to one's specific artistic vision. But getting there takes one through a bit of a Tolkeinish swamp.

Nights at the theater

I know I should be seeing more shows, but I've seen few thus far, partly because of my schedule, partly because of finances, partly from my own inertia. The production of "Brief Encounter" I wrote about last fall has definitely been the highlight. Other than that I went to a Butoh piece at Sadler's Wells (my first and thus far only exposure to that art form--the set and costumes were in shades of sand and bone that reflected the spareness of the movement; a few arresting images in a long and slow drama without an apparent narrative), and a pair of events that were part of the London International Mime Festival. One was a collection of mechanical Rube Goldbergesque thingamajigs that simply took turns doing their thing. The other was, for better and for worse, an example of what happens when creative people say yes to every impulse. It was a Russian trio who presented an over-the-top high energy hour of high decibel music, mural painting, hammering light bulbs on the back of each other's heads, and audience involvement (including passing out fruits and vegetables for people to throw at their naked drummer--a guy who looked like he must have been Paul Shafer's separated-at-birth Russian twin). It was either simply awful or admirably bizarre. I don't think this is quite what Lispa is after--clearly these guys didn't give a shit about what their critics might have to say--but they certainly were committed to whatever their artistic vision is. And I came away amazed that they have enough of a following that they get a booking at an international arts festival.

Oops, my mistake: There was one other highlight besides "Brief Encounter." A production of Tom Stoppard's "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" at the National Theatre, a witty, haunting, technically brilliant piece that is rarely staged, in large part because it requires having a full orchestra on stage for the whole show.

And I had plans to see a couple of other pieces with Isabel (one that she wrote music for, another that she was to be in), but her getting turned away at Heathrow prevented those.

Oh, and there was my own theatrical debut. If there's a London equivalent of off-off-off-off-off Broadway, this was it--in an artist's attic way out in a suburb. But that one may get its own post, another time.

Preview of coming attractions

2009-03-03T23:12:00.000Z

One of the teachers promised us a couple of weeks ago that London would be a much more pleasant place after the break. Apparently this is the hinge of the year weatherwise, when we finally move from the bleakness of gray winter to the daylight of spring. And it seems to be so, though I’m not about to make a declarative statement yet. It’s been too bleak for too long. Still, we’ve had hours of sunshine each of the past several days, something that was a rare occurrence in the past several months. And so London is indeed becoming a more livable place again.

[The previous paragraph was from yesterday. Tonight it's cold and rainy and windy. A dose of reality for those of us dreaming of spring. Then again, it is only the first week in March. But spring, like baseball, has a way of raising your hopes, luring you with siren song to set aside what you know is really true but seems suspendable--Maybe this will be the year. Yeah, this will be the year!--and then reminding you of what you already knew but had tried to wish away. Spring, cruel as only the sweetest child can be, loves to break your heart.]

This coming term we’ll be working with masks again. I’m looking forward to that (I think). Having a mask to work behind is helpful for me somehow. Freeing. Still, it makes the bodywork all the more essential since that’s basically what you have to express yourself with. We’ll also be making at least one of the masks we use, and I look forward to the hands-on creativity.

(PS—Add Tamil, Japanese, and Irish Gaelic to the list of languages in the previous entry.)

Catching my breath, part 1

2009-03-01T20:54:00.000Z

So Term 2 is over.

You'll note that I didn't complain once in the past two months about landing on my neck. I confess that I had resolved not to speak of it anyway, but it's also the case that I paced myself in Acrobatics this term and came through in better shape. (Now if I could just stop wrenching my neck in Improv classes where the motions are more spontaneous and less controlled! I did that repeatedly in the past eight weeks but less and less so as the term came to a close.)

I'll be working a lot during the next 10 days--a student visa allows 20 hours of employment per week during terms, 40 hours between terms. As of about a week-and-a-half ago, I'm fortunate enough in the midst of this awful economy to have two part-time jobs, one of which pays twice what the other does. I know things are hard in the US right now, but Britain is really tanking, and the government is expecting violence this summer because of rising unemployment. Layoffs and lost jobs are combining with pockets of xenophobic and sometimes racist British-jobs-for-British-workers protests in industrial areas, especially in the north. Meaning: lay off the immigrant workers first. Or don't hire them in the first place.

I plan to get out of town at the end of next week for a few days into what I keep hearing is such a green and beautiful country. I can't wait to be a few hours away from London. I may head west to Devon--Exeter and Dartmoor National Park. In the meantime I hope to blog shorter and more frequently since I'll have my mornings free.

This blogging thing is still a bit odd for me. First of all, I never know who I'm writing for. For me, yes of course, but since anybody can wander in and hear my soliloquy, I don't put every thought and feeling in here. Still, it's a bit odd not knowing who, when, and even if anyone is passing through the room. Whatever. Now I really feel like I'm talking to myself!

As you (whoever you are) may recall, we dealt some with poetry during part of this term. One of the richnesses of a program like this is that it includes people from such a variety of countries. Each of us is encouraged to work in our mother tongue. And so when we were asked to bring in a poem from our home country, we had poems in English (of three types--English, American, and Australian), poems in Norwegian and Swedish, poems in Spanish and Portuguese and Euskara (from Basque country), in French and Italian, in German and Swiss German, in Croatian and Hebrew and Bembe. And I'm not sure I've even remembered them all.

So how do you appreciate a poem in a language you don't understand? The answer here is that you actually do have some understanding of it, through the sounds of the words. Because it's a poem, not a scientific treatise. And so, one morning found four or five of us huddled with a Croatian woman, hearing her read her poem once, twice, three times, and then moving to the sounds of it--first individually, then as a group. She wasn't to tell us what the poem was about, but we talked about what we heard and what images came to our minds from the rhythms of the lines and the sounds of the words. And of course from the way she read it, which clearly had some influence, though there was little or no acknowledgment of that, obvious though it may be. The poem's rhythm advanced and circled back, it pulsed, the sounds were often rounded. We ended up creating a narrative of a young woman in the circle of her family, breaking out of it and getting pulled back, the tension of youth and age, innovation and tradition, individuality and family. After we were finished, Sonja, the Croatian woman, said we were very close to the sense of the poem, which was written by a man who lived near the sea but who had never seen it because of the mountain range that separates his home from the coast. The Israeli woman in our class who worked with a group who knew no Hebrew said she saw things afterward in her poem (a poem written by her father) that she had never seen before. People are very generous here, but I do take their comments on this matter as genuine. I've been playing with writing poetry for a while now, and this experience makes it all the more fascinating. And daunting. If I needed an experience to make me even more appreciative of actors and poets (and painters and architects), my time here is reinforcing that.

This weekend I also returned to Kew Gardens. Twice. The purple and white crocuses (and some other small lavender-colored flower) are up by the thousands beneath the bare-limbed trees. It's a tonic for my soul to visit there.

Lessons learned, forgotten, remembered

2009-02-21T00:59:00.000Z

We’re coming to the end of Term 2. Just a week to go. I need some perspective on all of this and hope to get an outside eye on it through conversations with other students and a teacher or two between now and the beginning of Term 3. We get a two-week break between terms. Maybe I’ll find a way to get out of town for a few days, too, though even more time by myself isn’t specifically a goal right now. I’m hoping the break will afford me some time and separation to get a better look at things. It’s been a hard term. Quite discouraging at times.

In my “previous life” (back in Minneapolis, in ministry), I had a pretty good sense of what I was good at and what I wasn’t. Much better than here, anyway (though an appreciation of my own gifts and efforts has never been my strong suit). Here, so often, I just can’t tell if I’m doing anything well. Almost all my efforts feel poorly executed, poorly received. If that previous quote from Beckett (Samuel, not Thomas) is a saying to live by, I’m certainly achieving my dose of failure, but I don't feel like I’m “failing better,” whatever that might mean. It’s disheartening, sometimes depressing. Today I took myself aside on the lunch break (literally, finding a place alone way off in a remote corner of Three Mills) just to give myself some distance and avoid conversations for a bit while I tried to work through my reactions to something that happened this morning. Going off alone isn’t always helpful, I’ll admit, but today it helped me get back in touch with an awareness that was helpful last fall: I didn’t come here as an actor, and I won’t leave here as one. (That’s even clearer to me now than it was when I arrived!) Remembering that can help me draw more general learnings from things here rather than getting too down on myself for doing poorly. For example, I rarely choose to put myself in the center of an ensemble improv. I feel better suited to supporting and responding than to leading and proposing. Today I did step into the center with a proposition in a group improv, and apparently did it poorly. Or at least that’s how I understood the feedback, which was all about how nothing held together, with one cryptic comment about how I in particular hadn’t appreciated the impact that one small thing can have. (The feedback I usually get is that I’m doing things too small, too internally. Go figure.) I too could feel that things hadn’t gone well, and the whole thing reinforced my feelings of incompetence. Which made me even less confident about stepping into that kind of role again. Which will probably undermine my ability to do it any better the next time. (Which may not be soon!)

If I can pull my ego out of it a bit, though, and try not to give too much weight to what I see as the repeatedly lukewarm (at best) responses to my efforts, both from teachers and my fellow students, then I can redirect my focus to more constructive learning—about dramatic structure, for example, or storytelling. Otherwise I simply replow the overly tilled ground of my own feelings of inadequacy. This is a really hard discipline for me, trying to redirect my inclinations like that (and it’s yet another thing I haven’t been good at it over the past several weeks!). But it’s certainly a more productive path for me while I’m here.

When creating flows freely

Thursday brought one of the rare occasions when I felt that something I’d done truly found affirmation—and damned if I even knew exactly what it was I did! It would take too long to describe exactly what the exercise in Voice class was, but it put us in a place where we were doing free-form vocalizing, alone and in front of a group. When Simon first described what it was we’d be doing, and then demonstrated it, I thought for sure this was something I’d be just as happy not getting a turn at. But something about the way we went onto it brought me to a place where, when it was my turn, I could hear the surprising quality of what was coming out of me. The problem was I wasn’t in a frame of mind really to take note of exactly what it was I was doing! So how to replicate it?

I asked Simon about it afterward, and he said it has to do with creating an environment where you’re so relaxed that your creating freely flows. And that what you need to figure out, over time—and then demand—are the conditions you need in order to work from that place of trust and safety. I know what some of those conditions are, and I recognized some of them in the build-up to the time of vocal improv—but there’s just not the time (or indulgence) to incorporate those all the time. Still I do recognize that confidence and creativity and … something else—it’s not really comfort, but that’s the word that’s coming to mind now—go hand in hand.

So in the midst of all of this I’m back to trying to figure out what it is I want to create. And how to go about it. And what I need in order to be able to do it.

Quite a task, all in all. But perhaps we each have our own version of it.

Beauty and brutality

2009-02-15T14:51:00.001Z

Took a day off this week and went to Kew Gardens, a huge botanical park west of London. I'd mistakenly assumed it would be among London's extensive free offerings, but it's not--£13 admission. (Student concession reduces it by all the way to £12!) Still, since it took me so long to get there, I wasn't going to turn around and head right back to East London. I ended up enjoyed it so much I became a member. I'm now a Friend of Kew. I hope to go back regularly. It's good for my soul to get out of the city and stroll in open spaces. The indoor areas at Kew (the word "greenhouses" doesn't do them justice) are remarkable. One room in the facility dedicated to the Princess of Wales has stunning cascades of orchids. Another small building is an ingeniously designed shelter for alpine plants. The palm house is like a well ordered jungle. (That has to be as glaring an oxymoron as I've written in a while!) I spent most of a day at Kew and saw only a small portion of the Gardens. Among my favorite parts was the patch of witch hazels, one of the first outdoor flowering plants. (Across the street from my house a bush has been in bloom since New Years, but most everything is still dormant. I do see daffodil spikes standing in some garden plots though.) I'm sure there will be new things to see at Kew the next time I go.

I took the day off because I've been quite discouraged of late. I won't go into much of that here, but it's been hard. A combination of the classes, my other work schedule, the weather, my continuing sense of isolation, and living in a cold damp house that just isn't a place I'm inclined to go back to to relax. There's mold growing in my bedroom, I discovered yesterday. But I also read that February is the coldest month in London, and Isabel says the second term is the hardest one, so hopefully some of this will lift soon.

In class we've moved from paintings to poetry and back to painting. I think I mentioned that our final Creation project is to present a painting--my group chose a cubist painting by Braque (a painting I really don't like but am having some fun working with anyway)--and somehow to incorporate music and poetry into our presentation, or at least into our preparation. How, of course, is left up to us. A lot of what we've been doing is listening to a piece of music, or observing a painting, or working with the sounds of a poem, and then setting the music or painting or poem aside and continuing to work out our expression through movement without the presence of the piece of art that inspired it. So what you would see or hear us do in class doesn't include the painting or poem or musical piece itself; but is rather the interpretation of it. It's not exactly modern dance, but that's probably the easiest way to describe it. That makes it sound pretty dreadful to some, I know. And maybe it is dreadful--it's really hard for me to tell, which is part of my discouragement these days.

The poetry section was close to my heart. I enjoyed much of it, especially the search for a poem to work with. I knew they wouldn't really want me to work with this one, but I chose to share Billy Collins' "The Lanyard" with my classmates anyway. Several asked about it afterward. It's just so accessible, and beneath the humor, subtly lovely. Spurred to find another poem, I came across several by James Wright. It was hard to choose among them. I settled on one that latched onto me quite slowly, but I really came to love it. It has something to do with the stretched yearning of the long vowels ("dreaming of heroes") and the tragic, almost fatalistic imagery of the last verse, bending back on the opening lines and the boys' fathers' lost and ruptured youth.

Next week we move on to architecture. One of the teachers wants us to visit St. Paul's cathedral, so I went there for Evensong yesterday. Another place and time to which I'll return. I do find that there's something in the artfulness of that kind of liturgy, sound, and space that I miss.

London wants for beauty. Yes, there are great collections of art in museums you can visit for free, and some of the buildings are beautifully proportioned, but much of the time this city feels cold and brutal. Or if not brutal, then certainly impersonal. I'm rediscovering my need for courses of beauty in my life's diet. I'm not getting enough of it. Interesting that the poem I found so moving ends with such battering images, perhaps redeeming or reclaiming them in some way.

Fado night and Giacometti

2009-02-08T14:34:00.000Z

Since last I blogged, I've been to Portugal to see Isabel, who was spending time with Diogo. (This was after Isabel got turned away from entry into the UK. She flew into Heathrow and they wouldn't let her past customs and immigration. Put her on the next plane back to Newark. Long and frustrating story. You can find some of it on Isabel's blog.)

So, since she couldn't get into the country--and they wouldn't even let me see her at the airport--I went to Portugal to spend a few days with her. One highlight of the trip (besides seeing Isabel and enjoying the hospitality of Diogo and his parents) was going into Porto for a fado night. Fado is perhaps the characteristic Portuguese music (from what little I know)--very soulful, full of heartache, much like the blues but without any blame on whoever done you wrong. It's more like whatever happened was simply fated, and loss and grief are as much a part of life as breathing. What we heard was Lisbon fado, ("the real fado," I'm told), sad to the point of heartbreak, even to those of us who couldn't understand the words.

This was in a small cafe, crammed with maybe 40 people. All the singers that night were mid-40s and over, but several folks in their 20s came to listen. Fado is making a comeback, though there is some tension between traditionalists and some innovative stylists. One Portuguese guitar (it looks like a big, teardrop-shaped mandolin with six pairs of strings) and two "regular" guitars accompanied a series of solo singers. If the setting had been Sicilian, it would have looked Mafia. It seemed pretty blue-collar. One singer wore a shiny gray suit with big pinstripes. The men who wore suits (fewer than half) had the kind of wardrobe where the shades get darker from the tie to the suit to the shirt. This guy's companion--a bald man dressed completely in dark brown--flashed a little gold jewelry. Most of the singers were men. One was a woman in a fur coat with an amazing tenor voice. This is the kind of music that people sing with their eyes closed and brow creased, hands and head punctuating the words with tight gestures. It's passionate as flamenco, but if flamenco is fire, fado is the slow inextinguishable burn that goes deeper and deeper and never lets you go.

If, as we keep trying to achieve in our classes at Lispa, the voice can truly come from the belly, this is the kind of music that's rooted there.

Had my flight back from Porto had been a couple of hours later, I might have gotten an extra day or two with Isabel and Diogo. During my bus back into London from Stansted, it started to snow. And it snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed. And snowed. All night and the next day. This wasn't just little rainy snow, this was big flurries. It even felt like Minnesota for a while. The airports closed that evening. Then buses and the Tubes stopped running. On Monday, London took a snow day. Pretty much all of Britain did, I think.

Our school day was canceled for one day, shortened for the next two. Then we got back to what is our new regular schedule.

We’ve now had a week in our permanent facilities at Three Mills. Before this, half of our classes were in a lovely wooden room with a high ceiling and skylights which, unfortunately, was really too small to have 20-25 people moving around in. Our other classes were in what felt like an airplane hangar with a hugely loud heating system that had to be on full blow almost all the time to keep the chill down. The two spaces were separated by a 5-minute walk and a security gate. Now we’re in two large renovated spaces separated by a short cold hallway. They don’t quite feel homey yet, but they’ll probably start to when they get a few scars on them.

We’ve moved on to poetry as the thing to move us, physically and emotionally. The sounds of poetry in particular at this point. (How do you move each sound in the word “crack,” for example? Or “dozing”? and then how do you move the whole word?) In our Creation small groups we’ve set about choosing a painting to develop a piece around, eventually to include musical and poetic elements as well. If I can, I’ll post a link to the painting we settle on next week if I can. How all this will come together I have no idea. But we’ll develop something. Stay tuned.

I'd mentioned the Andy Goldsworthy film we saw a few weeks ago. The series continues. One film was about Evelyn Glennie, the percussionist who hears through her body. Another was about Alberto Giacometti--he of the spindly spectral sculptural figures. The most recent was a Brazilian film about different ways of seeing, including interviews with blind visual artists. I liked the Giacometti film the least and not surprisingly, it's stuck with me the most. I'd always liked his sculptures, but after the film I had less appreciation for them (and more for his paintings). Part of the problem with the film was the self-consciousness of its construction of the image of the Great Artist, which was a bit comical as well as frustrating. But more to the point, Giacometti says at several points that his obsession sculpting comes from his really not understanding sculpture. I don't understand sculpture either, I'm sure, but after listening to him and seeing the same kinds of forms from him over and over and over again, I think he's right. Not that that's a fault. But it occurred to me that what he seemed to be doing with one sculpture after another was the equivalent of a singer singing scales. They were all practice, in a way. Necessary exercises for one who's working on his or her craft (or art--where's the line, I wonder sometimes). But is that enough?

Which got me to thinking: Mightn't the same be said for a lot of Picasso's works? The other day I went to the Tate Modern. Enshrined on the walls there are a quick pencil drawing Picasso did (the card next to it mentions several other known drawings he did the same day) and a cubist painting that looks unfinished. OK, maybe intentionally, maybe not. Or maybe it doesn't matter how it looks to me. It's not a new insight to say there's a cult-like fascination with anything created by certain artists after a certain point in their careers--probably more so with visual artists than with writers, directors, or performers, or maybe this is more a sign of how things were in the art world several decades ago--but this all has gotten me thinking. It used to be, for example, that music was more of a participatory art than it became with the advent of recording. How embarrassing to falteringly play an instrument in front of your family or friends when you could hear perfection on an LP or CD. And so experimentation became discouraged. Maybe the same could be said for drawing and painting in an age of mass publication of high-quality color images, and the mass copying of sculptures. Buy your favorite Rodin in any dimension you want in the museum shop. And so perfection and some kind of critical authority squelch the showing of any kind of exploration. With the internet and GarageBand, maybe that pendulum has reversed, but with the huge budgets needed in the main current of dramatic arts like theatre and film, the same danger has shifted to another arena. This is some of what Lispa seeks to counter, I suppose. Long live the experimental artist. And here's to iconoclasts breaking the idol of perfection, I suppose. Go off-balance, as they'd say here. Discover something that's more than you could plan or strategize. And then have the discipline to refine it while also keeping it open.

(Yes, I know. Blogs are supposed to be short. But this is what I get for not writing more often.)

‘Yes, Pecan!’—and weightier matters

2009-01-25T15:28:00.000Z

I feel a bit removed from all the Obamania at home, but I do get it filtered through my favorite British newspaper, the Guardian. Very happy to see that the new prez is taking steps to dismantle some of the ugly and/or stupid remnants of the Bush legacy—Guantanamo and the secret CIA prisons, the gag rule on abortion funding and insistence on abstinence-only education, dreadful decrees of environmental degradation which Bush opened up with a stroke of the pen at the end of his days in power.

The British also have enough distance to delight in the more trivial aspects of this celebration, like Ben & Jerry naming a new ice cream flavor in echo of Obama’s campaign slogan. Sometimes there’s a bit too much distance, however, as in what may have been the unkindest cut of the week: a letter to the editor that read, “It was interesting to see that President Obama’s first change was to have the fat lady sing first.” All humor has an edge.

I didn't think I would, but I confess to moments in the past week when I wish I were still ministering in a congregation. Not only do I miss the community, as noted at Christmas, but I also can't help but think how fruitful a time this would be to be in an articulating place in such a community back home as the country moves into this new era. And also (on the shadow side) in dealing with the horror and conflict of Israel's assault on Gaza.

I really don’t miss the budgeting morass that goes with ministry in a time like this, but altogether what a fascinating time. (But no, for any who are wondering, I'm not putting my denominational Profile together.)

I do wonder if the papers back home are covering the attack on Gaza as fully as the British ones are (the US being so self-defined by its support of Israel). What I read here is truly horrific. The white phosphorus burns, the physical and psychological toll on children and dismay over the longterm effects this past month will have on a generation of Palestinian kids. One of Britain’s leading playwrights, Caryl Churchill, was so outraged by recent events that she wrote her newest play—started and completed it—in just one week. “Seven Jewish Children—A Play for Gaza” will be performed next month at the Royal Court theater. Admittedly it’s only 10 minutes long, but in a remarkable turnaround this play will go from inception to stage in less than a month. It will be performed for free, with donations accepted afterward for a charity called Medical Aid for Palestinians. After it’s performed here, Churchill will publish it online for anyone to download, and they can perform it for free as long as they take up a collection for the people of Gaza afterward. Theatre groups in the States should keep an eye out for this. Community and church groups, too, I’d think.

Less globally, more personally...

Closer to home: In class we've moved from colors and paintings to music this week. Each Movement and Improvisation teacher has brought in a different piece of music for us to respond to. Quite a range: from a contemporary piece by a group called the Rachels, to Bartok, to Miles Davis ... to the soundtrack from a Looneytunes cartoon. (Just try to express that one with your body! If you get a chance sometime, close your eyes during an old Looneytune and listen to the music by itself. Then imagine somebody composing it. And then imagine an orchestra recording it. There's incredible artistry there. And here all I thought was that it was simply Saturday morning entertainment for (Baby Boomer) kids.)

At times I feel like I know what I'm doing here at Lispa, but only at times. A week ago was another low point, as you may have gathered. This week has gone somewhat better, but at times I wonder if in smoother times like this I've just pushed my difficulties underground again. Sometimes it seems that that's not completely a bad thing. When I bring up whatever it is that pulls me down and hold it before me as if it were a mirror, I just get stuck in it. (Hmm, interesting Narcissistic reference there that I didn't intend.) But if I can draw from this darkness like a tree draws from shit in the soil, maybe I can convert it into something more fruitful. Perhaps.

Anyway, I continue to work on this.

Thomas holds three-person tutorials each week in which students do some free-form two-handed charcoal drawing with eyes closed. Then we see what came of it, talk about the experience, and try to discern something from what emerged on the page. It's not as much like reading tea leaves as it might sound, but yes, it is very subjective. That's the point, really, I think. Anyway, this was my week to take part. What emerged in the first of my two drawings was very dark—bloblike, I thought initially. But Thomas has a away of reframing things, eliciting insights that are quite helpful and more than wishful thinking. He also has a knack for drawing on observations of how we've expressed ourselves in our Movement and Improv classes. He mined some helpful imagery from my "drawing" which I first found so very ugly and formless. He saw in it (and so in my efforts) something reflecting a wild dark flower, marked by a strong male energy, fed by anger and struggle. Something potentially poisonous, perhaps more in its being bottled up than in its expression. He always encourages us to hold onto those drawings. Maybe I'll bring mine home and post it on my wall. I do think there's something there.

20 January 2009

2009-01-20T23:41:00.000Z

For several years after 9/11, the seventh-inning stretch at Minnesota Twins games was fouled by the Twins organization encouraging the raucous singing of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American.” Actually that last phrase is redundant. Nobody ever sings that song any way but raucous. Adding it to the seventh-inning stretch always seemed a corruption of innocence to me, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” being the most harmless of songs.

I would have used the title of Greenwood’s song as the heading of this entry if it wouldn’t have rung the echo of the jingoes’ anthem. Because the inauguration of Barack Obama did indeed make me deeply proud to be an American citizen. There are a lot of us who nodded in agreement a few months ago when Michelle Obama--now our First Lady--said something about how being proud of her country wasn't a feeling she could take for granted.

I’d unwittingly signed up to work the night at my call-center job tonight, but arriving a few minutes early for my 5:15 shift I saw one of the TVs in the lobby tuned to the swearing-ins and the inauguration. Another American and I stood there for over half an hour watching as much of it as we could, from Rick Warren to Aretha Franklin to the swearing in of Joe Biden, to Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman (and a couple of other instrumentalists I didn't recognize) playing Aaron Copland. And then came the swearing in of Barack Hussein Obama--as amazing in name and it was in deed--and his inaugural speech. Surely I wasn't the only one who was relieved even for him to make it to the end of his presidential oath without the in-breaking of some ballistic mayhem that would threaten his life. And then came the resonance of his somber, uplifting speech. My fellow American and I ended up being late to work, staying there in the lobby until the end of his speech. No one could have gotten either of us to move. Being on time for a few hours of market research couldn’t hold a candle to the most important event of the day. Even the Brits, both black and white, who put other things on hold for a few minutes to watch were caught up in what was happening.

More on this later, I'm sure.

Headline of the week

2009-01-18T16:16:00.000Z

From the Guardian, Tuesday 13 January, over an article about Bush reflecting back on his presidency:

9/11, two wars, Katrina: 'We had fun', says Bush

Painting with a darker palette

2009-01-16T15:40:00.000Z

This term at Lispa we're working with color and paintings. Apparently Jacques Lecoq, from whom this school's approach to theatre grows, had his own theories of color, and so following his language we speak of how fast colors are, what are their dynamics, how much space they take up. For example, according to Lecoq, red is the smallest color or the most compact. Blue might be the biggest? Green has its own distinctive sense of direction. On some of this I'd agree. On other bits I'm not so sure. Anyway, as you might guess, it's all quite abstract. Much more so than when we were observing how a piece of paper reacts when crumpled and released, or how a balloon inflates. And so when we work in Improv class and move as we think green moves, or make sounds to express how we think the yellow in a Van Gogh sounds, well, this is an entirely different level of challenge.

Off the cuff the other day I said in a conversation that I have a clear and definite idea of what I'm trying to express in Improv maybe 3 times out of 10. These days I'd say that ratio is a bit optimistic.

And, you might ask, what use is all this? I can't give an answer right now. But I can't help but ask the question, too, even though I keep telling myself I need to allow more time before I impose those questions on this experience.

Maybe it's having turned the corner on the new year, but the questions of where all this is going--what it's opening up for me--are more present than they were last fall. Surely some of this has to do with conversations Robin and I had when I was home for Christmas--in particular, questions about whether she can or will join me for the second year. Frankly this whole thing is a struggle--financially as well as in terms of relationship and coordinating with each other's plans. So there are lots of reasons why I might be increasingly concerned over where all this is leading. There's little justification for staying the second year if it won't help me get to wherever I want to go afterward. And Robin in particular needs to know whether to plan on coming for Year 2 because that decision determines whether she looks for arts residencies for the fall and for a renter for the house. Those things just can't wait till I finish the school year in July.

In short, I'm feeling pretty weighed down with all of these indefinites. And working with such abstract subject matter ... I was going to say that it doesn't help, but maybe it's an apt reflection of these other things I'm dealing with. Thomas warned (or promised?) that this term would take us into darker emotional territory. This is my shade of it for now, or part of my experience anyway. And I'm coming up against challenges (again) of how much of what I'm going through I'm willing to share with my others, which furthers my feelings of isolation and marginalization. Emotionally, this is a hard time.

I skipped out of school early on Thursday and took Friday off today, too, hoping that constructing a long weekend for myself would help me get a handle on some of this, or at least re-establish enough distance that I can work with it more productively. Before leaving school Thursday, rather than just sending word with a classmate, I decided to go tell Amy I'd be skipping her class. It seemed the more appropriate way to go about it. On the way over to Studio B (in a different section of Three Mills) I ran into a fellow student whom I don't know well. She asked how I was doing, etc., and when I indicated that I might skip the afternoon class she asked, "Is it the age thing?"--which I thought a very surprising question, coming from someone I've only talked with 2 or 3 times and have never had a class with. Am I that transparent? Or are others as aware of this as I am? (I'm afraid it's more the former than the latter.) She also told me what we'd be doing in class, just coming from it herself: viewing and doing improvs on a painting by Francis Bacon. Which one I'm not sure, but this is the kind of image that comes to mind. (What my classmate described could have been a painting like this one or one of Bacon's others that include images of flayed bodies.)

Part of me thought, well, this is exactly what could be helpful right now, to give expression to this kind of darkness. But I still decided to pass for the day. That kind of expression is where I think I'm headed, but I want to develop my skills a bit more first. Otherwise I think it might be too much like a beginning swimmer jumping into the middle of the English Channel in the midst of a storm. There is a bit of a therapeutic element to this school, but I don't want to use it that way too much. Self-absorption isn't the route to go. I've seen a bit of that in others here (though not too awfully much) and I really don't want to go there myself.

What lies beneath

One aspect of the program that's different this term is watching films with Thomas on Monday evenings. There've been two thus far--"Rivers and Tides" about environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy and "Touch the Sound," a documentary about deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie. I'd seen both before and skipped Evelyn Glennie this time around, but watching "Rivers and Tides" the other night reminded me of how you see different things in a good film when you see it again in a different context. Just one example was when Goldsworthy spoke about how what you see on the surface is affected by what's beneath it. Two images that accompanied that were watching a river flow over a rock and a wood-and-clay installation he made in a village in France. The installation looked at first just like a wall that was being plastered with local mud, but as the mud dried, a pattern emerged in the cracks that echoed a serpentine pattern he'd built in underneath.

Artistic expression is like that, of course, always influenced by what's going on below the surface. And (having stepped out of the practice of ministry myself, I'm more willing to reveal) the little secret that ministers seldom speak of publicly is the worry over the nakedness of their own preaching. They so often preach the message that they themselves long to hear. Faith is so personal, so autobiographical, so often formed by need, desire, and circumstance. It's a crime when people bleed it dry.

So I come back to the question of how much of my own soul and emotion to pour into my work here--and how much to reveal. At the foundational level, I think we all have to draw from what lies beneath the surface. But if expression is too self-referencing, it's not enough of a communal event and experience. I think the task is in large part to give expression to what is honest and personal in such a way that others can read themselves into it. (I always thought that was the best preaching, too.) But these days I feel like my awareness of my own inner state is too out of balance with my capacity to express it with the combination of power and subtlety that I want. Yes, I know that adage "practice makes perfect" as well as anyone, but with so much of this being so intensely personal, it's not quite like staying late after baseball practice to take some extra grounders. I'm trying to find my way here in what is still new territory for me. And sometimes it feels a bit like venturing onto thin ice.

A new home at Three Mills

2009-01-07T20:33:00.000Z

Classes started again this week. Everything feels a bit unsettled and new. The school’s new location is Three Mills Studios, which is home mainly to film and TV studios. Eastern Promises (a recent David Cronenberg film starring Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts) was made there—sorry, no celebrity sightings so far this week—as were Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and (I think) the recently released RocknRolla. Some West End theatrical productions also use it for rehearsal space, though there seems to be some prejudice against the East End, which is where this is. Danny Boyle, on the other hand (director of Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later, among other films), lives in Hackney, which is close by, and does apparently enjoys using Three Mills, among other locations. Much of this information comes from the administrator who welcomed us on Monday. And who also asked us not to hassle any stars who show up on the premises. Not that we’ll necessarily see them. Apparently Madonna never left her Winnebago except to go through a tunnel to her studio when she was here, whether to shoot a music video or when she was still with Guy Ritchie, who made Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and RocknRolla.

And—coming attractions—a film to watch for this summer, at least for the Three Mills connection, is Lesbian Vampire Killers. Sorry to have missed the filming of that! How would that have been to run into those folks in their make-up in the on-site café?

Follow this link to find out more about Three Mills Studios. For a fuller look, check out the downloadable brochure from their website.

More on classes later. I fully intend to write less about Acrobatics this term! But a fun side note: Robin emailed me a song last night she said really reminded her of me. The lyrics go something like "I tried to do handstands for you and now you've left me black and blue..." I'm told that we can include music when we do our end of term acro presentations. Maybe I should play that song.

London: City of Canals?

2009-01-05T21:06:00.000Z

Actually, yes. It’s cracked with them.

Sunday I explored a part of town called Little Venice, over by Paddington station. When you debark from the nearest Tube stop you actually walk uphill toward Little Venice, which is a bit odd, but there you have it: the canal is higher than some of the surrounding streets. And actually it’s nothing like Venice aside from having a canal or two. No charmingly decaying buildings, no labyrinthine waterways. At first I was a bit disappointed as I walked the street beside the canal. But when I crossed over to the other side and could get down to the walkway right by the water, its charm grew on me. Canal boats—many of them some 20 yards long and maybe 8 feet wide—line the waterway, a few tied up side by side. Many are residences to what I assume are independent-minded people. A welcoming sign indicates that boats can be moored here at no charge for up to 14 days a year, with a fine of only £25 a day for overstaying. There are also tour boats, of course, plus a floating puppet theater and a delightfully cozy canal boat/café. The canal itself was covered with broken ice. A pair of swans made their way slowly through the alleys between the ice sheets.

The stately beige three-storey buildings that overlook the canal indicate a high income level for the area’s permanent (unmoored) residents, but the canal boats themselves look comfortably downscale. Wood smoke drifted up from little chimneys, and many boats had old bicycles roped to their low roofs.

I took a side jaunt to explore a distinctive-looking old church with a long narrow footprint reminiscent of the boats themselves. I think it was called St. Mary Magdalene. Though it was 2 in the afternoon I could hear a service going on inside. As I got closer I made out what was apparently a small African Pentecostal congregation, with trumpet, drums, and a miked singer. Apparently it’s an Anglican church, but my guess is another congregation uses it on Sunday afternoons. I looked for an open door, but gave up shortly after finding a very cold-looking African youth in a thin white liturgical robe pounding on a door to no avail. Apparently he was supposed to be inside, but either the loudness of the music, the powerful presence of the Spirit among the worshipers, or the remoteness of the door from where the action was in the long building prevented anyone from hearing him.

A couple of other vignettes from Little Venice: The surprise of coming upon a sailboat with a tall mast on a waterway crossed by very low bridges (though there is another waterway leading in that I didn’t explore). And watching a Canada goose (or whatever the British equivalent is), sliding along on the ice, head bent over to concentrate on its own feet as it flapped its wings for balance.

Just another lazy Sunday afternoon in a city full of unexpected delights.

Silent night, candlelight, ember, and flame

2009-01-01T16:02:00.000Z

I was home for Christmas. It was great to be among the family again. Didn’t make much of an attempt at all to see other people. Once you start, where do you draw the line? I did get to catch up with some friends and neighbors, but the main goal was to be with Robin and the kids. I’d say “Mission accomplished,” but besides being a bit impersonal, that phrase has a hollow ring anymore and the experience was anything but hollow.

One aspect was a bit empty, however, at least temporarily. I did miss having a larger community to celebrate Christmas with. After 16 years of ministry at the church in our neighborhood, it felt a bit odd not to go there for the Christmas Eve service. But professional boundaries and courtesy being what they are, it wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to show up at First Church on Christmas Eve this year (or next year either, for that matter). I was keenly aware of the time that evening, and as people were in church just a block away for the last part of the service, Robin, Isabel, Tucker, and I were gathered around the piano in our front room singing carols. It was actually a lovely way to spend that part of the evening, singing with the family, but I was glad that no one suggested singing “Silent Night.” I don't know if the tradition still holds at First Church (though I assume there’d be a rebellion if anyone tried to change it), but that’s the carol that has concluded the Christmas Eve service there since before I came. The whole congregation stands in a circle around the sanctuary, candles in hand, the lights are turned off, and the flame is passed from candle to candle all around the room till the sanctuary glows with warmth as people sing that loveliest of carols.

A year ago at the end of the service, right in the middle of “Silent Night,” it occurred to me that that might be my last Christmas with First Church. I didn’t know what was ahead, but I had a feeling that 2008 was going to be the year that I made a change. That wasn’t a particular goal. I just knew the time was ripening. So, looking around the candlelit room one last time, I’d gotten quite choked up. It made it hard to speak the benediction right afterward. I’ve known many of those people for so long, did their weddings, baptisms, confirmations, memorialized and buried their loved ones. The warmth of candlelight ushers in a silence and reflection that we lose with incandescents and (especially) fluorescent lights. It was one of those moments I’ll probably always carry with me in memory.

So as we sat around our piano at home this Christmas Eve and sang, I was grateful for the silence regarding “Silent Night.” We did end up singing it as a grace for our family meal right afterward, but I sat silently, not wanting to break down and hijack the emotions of the evening. We went to a different church for a midnight service, and I was quite blue for the first 15 minutes or so, but by the end all was calm, and more bright.

Now I’ve just arrived back in London (I write this on the train in from Gatwick to Victoria), and it will soon be time to turn my thoughts to the coming year again. But not just yet. Though home is now, in very quick order, some 4000 miles away again through the bewilderments of modern travel, you always bring parts of it with you. It’s like those stories of the ancients carrying an ember from hearth and home to kindle their fire in a new place.

Christmas markets

2008-12-17T08:54:00.001Z

One more post before I leave London for the holidays. I've been immensely enjoying the market culture here. Every weekend, and sometimes during the week too, there are open-air markets. Food markets, flower markets, any-variety-of-goods markets. Streets are blocked off for them. Covered courtyards are home to them. At the Greenwich market, buskers play classical music. At Covent Garden opera singers appropriate a staircase and sing to one another. At a flower market in Hackney a young adolescent auditions "Two for a fiver" in his boyish tenor, anticipating the day he'll have his father's baritone. In the East Ham market I couldn't even understand what a Cockney barker was saying.

The Portobello Road market is intimate and eccentric, Camden Town is punk, Greenwich and Spitalfields are tony, while sprawling through the streets near Spitalfields is a very cheap and somewhat down-at-the-heels market that, except for the skin color of almost everyone there, could have been in Istanbul. And there are surely dozens of markets I haven't seen yet.

Last weekend I went to Camden Town, where four or five markets shoulder their way into one another. Camden High Street/Chalk Farm Road connects them all (street names here change every few blocks), and while it's not a pedestrian throughway, you wouldn't know it at first glance. Pity the driver who needs to pass through on a weekend day, or anytime right before Christmas. The storefronts could be on the Midway at the State Fair. Rough and sometimes gloriously grotesque sculpted pieces give it all a fantastical dreamlike aspect. Heavily pierced men and women in leather or Goth black, many with high pointed Mohawks--think the Statue of Liberty on a 3-day binge--stand on the sidewalk looking like street prophets warning that the end of the world is near. Their signs point you to tattoo and piercing parlors with names like Dark Angel, Metallic Militia, and Chrome.

This is not the part of town you go to if you're thinking Starbucks (though sadly you could probably find one there). Minneapolis by comparison, with its sterile glass skyways, feels like a laboratory in a research hospital.

I do look forward to going home to see friends and family, but the vibrancy of this city--exhausting though it can be--is magnetic.

Reflecting at year's end

2008-12-15T23:23:00.000Z

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.

The end is near

2008-12-10T22:56:00.000Z

The term is almost over. Classes one more day, then we get to see the Advanced Course's final presentations tomorrow night, then we have one-on-one conferences with the school founder and present our final group Creations on Friday. Today, as you may recall, were our Acrobatics presentations...

Anticlimax ahead.

Yesterday morning I fell awkwardly on my neck yet again. How many times I've done this now I've lost count. Besides my deficit in physical skill, I must not be communicating very clearly. Either that or I'm not being picky enough in choosing my spotters. (Frankly, I think it's the latter.) As on Saturday when I fell hard on my shoulder, yesterday I'd explained to a classmate beforehand what I didn't want to happen--what I wanted his help in preventing--and the support I hoped I wouldn't need (but did) came too little and too late. When I fall, I fall fast. And hard. And, I'd guess, not too gracefully.

In a word: Ouch. Though that's not the word I said at the time.

I had called the London School of Osteopathy on Monday to try to get an appointment to have my shoulder looked at. I was to go in yesterday afternoon. That was fortunate. Now I had yet another sore spot to add to my litany of injuries--right shoulder, left knee, right hip, right elbow, and now the neck again. As I write this, I have a pack of frozen peas lashed to my neck with a tea towel. When the osteopath took notes on my history, he must have felt like he was writing a novel, probably a comic one. And after examining my shoulder and neck (there simply wasn't time in an hour-and-a-half appointment to get to all my sore spots--how telling is that) he told me in no uncertain terms that I really shouldn't try the Acrobatics routine this morning. So of our class of 21--and as far as I know, of our total first-year class of 45 or so--I was the only one who sat out. To prevent bodily damage I injured my pride. So it goes. Instead I became the designated videographer and occasional spotter for others.

To be sure, I wasn't looking forward to doing the Acrobatics routine today. Dreading it is probably a more accurate reflection. But still, I had the adrenaline build-up, and then came the let-down. Why do the body, mind, and emotions combine to play such games?

I do hope to be able to fully participate in Acro next term. I AM going to master this headstand. And the handstand is still in my sights. And so is a flexible and functional neck.

The bane of my Lispa existence

2008-12-06T16:41:00.000Z

Because Acrobatics is so difficult for me, it's one of the areas that gives me fruitful ground for learning. Not just learning how to accomplish a headstand or a handstand, though I do want to do those things. It’s also what I learn through failing when trying to do them.

Today we had an extra time set aside to go back into the Hackney space to practice on the mats. (The space … I know how odd that sounds. We basically have one large room that's our classroom and lab for everything. People just refer to it as the space. As I may have mentioned, half of us have our classes in the borough and town of Hackney in the East End. The rest have their classes on Latimer Road on the West side in what is probably Kensington and/or Hammersmith. Occasionally we visit each other's spaces for presentations. In January we all move into a new space in East London. More on that next month.) Back to today’s events…

I was working on various things, especially the headstand and handstand. Without having to plan to, I was also working with my feelings of discouragement. I know that no one at the presentations on Wednesday will be overly critical of how well or poorly I do things—probably not even critical at all. We’re all agreed that the main thing is to do your best, in Acrobatics at least. (The Improv classes, on the other hand, have a higher standard.) But I get so discouraged when I can't do things. I'm sure I could just say no, I'm not going to do a presentation. But that's not what I want either.

Take the handstand. Basically you approach it like a cartwheel but head on. And you're supposed to put your hands to the floor, arms straight, and kick up into a vertical position, head down and toes pointed to the ceiling, balance for a moment, then tuck your head, bend your arms, and roll out of it down the curve of your spine and back up into a standing position. I just can't get the hang of it. A couple of times I've gotten into the vertical upside-down position, but only with two strong people assisting me. Part of the problem, I know, is that I hesitate. You just can't hesitate in this or you don't get the momentum. But I've done it in so many wrong ways--not keeping my arms straight, trying to kick up before having my hands on the ground (which is akin to trying to dive into a mat that is so very much not water), looking too far forward and so having my shoulders and spine in an impossible position to get my legs vertical ... see how much I'm learning? a thousand ways from Sunday how not to do it. Now if I could just get my body to do the right things! Anyway, I've attempted this so many wrong ways that it's very hard for me not to hesitate when I go to try it again, which often leads to discovering a new way not to do it, and a heightened likelihood of hurting myself, which leads to more of a feeling that I can't do it, which leads to discouragement, which leads to more hesitation... You see where this goes, and it's not pretty, and it's not fun.

How do you talk yourself into a feeling of "I can do this" when your experience is repeatedly one of not being able to? Where's the road from I can't to I can? Your mental state is so very important in these things, but there's only so much that talking yourself into it can do, especially when personal injury is a likely result of not getting your body to do the right things. But this is the challenge. Yes, I know, you can break it down into little steps, and I'm trying to do that, but ultimately it's also about flow. The steps aren't discrete and separate, like knots on a rope. Without momentum, it won't go. And hesitation and over-thinking it just get in the way. I don't mean to say this is all impossible--it reminds me of some classic philosophical conundrum from one of my college classes, Zeno's paradox it might have been called, where in order for an arrow to strike a target it has to go half way first, then it has to go half way of what's left, then half of that, then half of that, and you can halve the distance so many times that after a while you think it's impossible for the arrow to get there at all. But the arrow does get there. And somehow it's possible--even for me, I trust--to accomplish a handstand. And I want to do it. But I hurt myself yet again trying it today, landing hard on my right shoulder. I heard something crack when I landed. I iced it and am dosing it with ibuprofen, and nothing swelled up. So I'm hoping that what cracked was nothing more than a bit of my resistance. But it'll be a bit harder yet not to hesitate when next I try it again.

The other day someone posted this quote from Samuel Beckett on the bulletin board.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

Maybe that's my task for now.

Voice lessons (or, Simon says)

2008-12-04T23:38:00.000Z

Simon, our Voice teacher, said something today that I thought described the apparent goal of Lispa in general. (When I think about it, It seems a bit odd that I've never even heard the last names of almost allof our teachers (or of my fellow students, for that matter). And no one ever refers to "the teachers" as faculty, certainly not as professors.) The gist of what Simon said was that what he's trying to do is help us to recover good and healthy ways of using our voices that, through bad learning, misuse, or disuse, we've forgotten--ways that will help us to communicate more effectively and more naturally if only we can get our bodies to remember them and retrain ourselves into using those practices again.

The school, by focusing on what is called physical theatre, aims to help us use our bodies in such ways. My middle-aged body is a good example of the stiffness that comes from inattention, bad habits, and years of neglecting to keep myself limber. My distress has been that I won't be able to regain the flexibility that I lost as a child. I literally can't remember the last time I could sit cross-legged on the floor, for example, and I've always felt clunky and awkward in any kind of freestyle dancing. But Ilan, our main Movement teacher--a very childlike, limber, and young-acting man whom, rumor has it, is 76 years old--keeps assuring me that I can indeed regain lost flexibility. And, bless him, he also says he can already see a difference in the way I move.

The recovery of something childlike, young, creative, expressive, something that (we are repeatedly told) our bodies know even if our minds no longer remember or understand: this seems to be a lot of the aim here. That and encouraging us to find the bold and generous creator/artist/communicator within. And a more harmonious unity of body, will, and spirit.

Or so it seems after seven weeks.

I can see why Thomas keeps saying not to think of this as an acting school.

PS -- Speaking of stiffness, the hot Epsom salts bath seems to have headed off a lot of the pain I expected after Acrobatics class yesterday. I decided not to try a headstand again today. But I need to try to get back on that horse again tomorrow or Saturday. Our Acrobatics presentations are less than a week away. I need to set aside the hesitations and fears that hold me back and just go for it. I want to do that. After all, that's what I'm here for: to push through the things in my own head and habits that hold me back.

It all lands on the neck

2008-12-03T21:48:00.000Z

Well, I guess I was due for a fall. (How Minnesotan is this?) Yesterday was such a good day, and today... well, let's just say things balanced out again.

One of the highlights yesterday was that I accomplished a headstand! With only the most minimal assistance from a classmate, there I was, crown of the head and both palms on the floor (head cushioned by two pillows), my body vertically up-side down, toes pointing to the ceiling. It was an amazing feeling. Finally! We're working up to a presentation next Wednesday that has a scripted acrobatics routine of 16 figures, with cartwheels, headstand, handstand, forward rolls, side rolls, even a figure approaching that thing you see men do in the gymnastics part of the Olympics--on the horse, I think--spinning one leg in circles horizontally beneath their crouched body, switching hands to let the leg swing by. We're to do three of those. I can't even do one, but so it goes. As a matter of fact, there are many of the moves I can't do very well or without assistance. Which made it all the more rewarding to do a headstand (which almost everybody else could do weeks ago).

Then today we had Acrobatics class. And I kept landing on my neck and hard the middle of my back when I was trying to do the forward roll again (which, yes, others were doing with ease weeks ago). And I strained my neck when my weight shifted to the side when practicing a headstand. Arrrrrggggghhhhh. And I was so close yesterday.

On top of the discouragement, I could feel my neck and back tightening up, so I skipped the afternoon classes and called in sick to work. Came home and soaked in a hot bath with Epsom salts and am hoping for the best. So far not too bad. These old bones need some TLC.

Yawning for credit

Tomorrow begins with Voice class. I may have mentioned that we got cheated out of Voice the first two weeks due to teacher illness and a scheduling snafu, but I've been enjoying it once we finally did get started. We do a lot of yawning in that class. Apparently it's very good for the voice to open up the throat like that. And we've even been taught some of the finer points of not popping the jaw too wide open in a full yawn. No need to go into it all here, but Voice is often quite a relaxing class, and sometimes the most common things can be both more beneficial and more complex than I'd ever realized.

As in all the classes, much of the focus in Voice is on the breathing. (Thus the title of this blog.) It's amazing how often we forget to breathe when concentrating on something difficult or new, and how remembering to breathe can help a lot--I'm sure I must be forgetting to breathe during my headstands! And since to date we've used our voices very little in our Movement and Improv classes, this one gets to a very important but unstressed aspect of communication here.

More on this at another time. Right now I'm just looking forward to a more relaxing start to the day. Today was pretty discouraging.

Promethean fire (or at least a glimmer of insight)

2008-12-02T23:29:00.000Z

It helps to have struggled aloud (struggled ablog?) with this question of who the neutral mask is. Perhaps yesterday's questions put me in a position to have a bit of an epiphany today. It came in a class with Thomas, whom many people have rightly called a master teacher. He has a way of presenting things in such a way that doesn't quite take you all the way there, but leads you to the threshold of discovery and puts you in a position to step into a new awareness.

What I think I understand better today is this. For today anyway, I think the best way to describe the neutral mask is to say that he or she is Promethean. I don't remember that Greek myth in detail, but what I do recall is that Prometheus was the one who stole fire from the gods and brought it to humanity. Why? That may never be explained, but his urge, his act, his story reflects something in the human spirit that rebels (or rather that pays no attention to the things that would hold it back), something that reaches for transcendence, that embodies human striving. Something that does what it has to do, not out of duty but out of what it naturally desires and needs, and for the good of us all because it's what we all want and need.

Jotted below are my notes from a three-minute break between Movement and Improvisation classes today. I recognize that they might not make much sense to some readers--I never could quite understand what Isabel was talking about when she blogged about her first-year experience here two years ago--but it will to others. The break between classes came just after a short talk by Thomas following an exercise in which we were playing with the dynamics needed to lift a hugely heavy barbell from the floor and hoist it over our heads. (There was of course no barbell. It was all an imaginative exercise in which we had to explore and act out the most efficient way of doing it using just body dynamics):

I think the mask is Promethean.

[Quote from Thomas:] "If you want to create something original, you have to learn to swim against the current. If you're satisfied just to be a nice performer, that's something different."

This is why the mask knows no small movements. This is why its psychology never second-guesses and its thoughts never hold it back. The mask says yes to its creative impulses. It is alert. It generates and it reacts. It is fully alive. It is not 'sentimental.' (But if it is to have an exodus, it has to be more complex, less of a jumbo jet. So part of the problem yesterday was the mismatch of the assignment.)

The key is in the question Why? [and especially in its unanswerability.] "Why should you lift that great weight?" Thomas asked. "You could just let it lie there." Similarly: Why create? Why journey? Why even breathe? That question--why breathe?--may best reflect the motivation of the mask. So it's not just remember to breathe. It's remember that you do. And know in your body that if you don't, you can't even be. If you don't breathe, you are nothing. If you don't breathe, you die.

So much of this first year is designed to get people to find the Prometheus within. To discover what it is we deeply want to create. To push each of us to discover for ourselves What is my vision, my gift, the specific creation that only I can bring to the world? What is my Promethean fire? And if we really find that, and if it truly is Promethean, then we will have to find a way to bring it forth. Otherwise it's simply an idea, a whim, a hobby.

As always there's a lot more to say about this, and it touches on some of the most obvious questions--why did I choose to leave ministry after some 20 years? why did I leave home, partner, and country to pursue this holy(?) grail in a far country, even and especially when i don't consider myself an actor or a performing artist?

I'll surely return to this question from time to time, but a quote has been echoing through my mind of late when I've thought of these questions. It really doesn't address some of the weightier parts of my decision, but I'll mention it here because it's a familiar way into the question. From Thoreau's Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Stay tuned.

Neutral mask, revisited

2008-12-01T20:46:00.000Z

Time for another update. For any who are checking this blog regularly, I apologize for the sporadic rhythm of my posts.

Only two weeks left in this term. Next week we each have a conference with Thomas to evaluate how it's going and whether we'll each be coming back for more in January. I assume everyone will have the option, and as far as I know everyone will choose to come back. I embarked on this journey assuming I'll be here for two years. It's too early to make a decision yet, but I've been thinking more and more that one year might be enough.

I think I'm rising to the occasion of the end of the term, but I've been in a bit of a doldrums for the past couple of weeks. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe fatigue. Maybe because some days this whole experience misses the mark for me. We've been in kind of a no-man's land for a while--or at least I have. All the improvisations for a few weeks now have been in the neutral mask, which I described earlier. The teaching style here is often, shall we say, indirect. And while they never out and out say "That's the wrong thing to do," it's clear that there is a kind of personality that they all agree that the neutral mask has, a certain kind of movement that the mask requires of its wearer. The neutral mask is unintimidated by anything (even earthquake, wind, and fire). The neutral mask is at home in all kinds of (imagined) natural environments. It is at home in the world of giants. It's a jumbo jet, one of the teachers likes to say, "and you don't drive a jumbo jet to the corner store for a gallon of milk." So while they never use this word, it seems to me that the neutral mask (that is, its character) could be described as heroic. It's mythical, maybe archetypal, but archetypal of what exactly, I'm not sure. And so the fact that we're always putting on the mask for our improvisations shapes the way we are to do things. "You can be much bigger," they're always telling us. "The mask is bigger than that." "Look at the mask. It knows no fear."

Is this an acting style they're encouraging us into? In a way, yes, but somehow it's more than acting. It's really a way of being in the world. But the settings in which we are to enact that way are always extraordinary. If you don't drive your 747 to the corner store, neither do you use it in your everyday life in any way. So there's something very artificial about all of this--even though in the vocabulary of the teaching here, the mask is by definition natural, but not normal. (Normal being our usual ways of living in the world--characteristically at a low energy level, in kind of a J. Alfred Prufrock state of being ("I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short I was afraid...") The mask is its antithesis.)

So what I think they're really about here is trying to pull the heroic, the brave, the extraordinary out of people as artists. And they're trying to nurture a feeling of connection with others, a generosity that wants to communicate and is always aware of others--your co-creators on stage at any given moment as well as your audience. I'm all for that. But there's no room for the small gesture in the world of the neutral mask, and sometimes I find that too limiting.

A small example from today. Our task was to present something on the theme of exodus: a group of people who have to leave home and go on a journey. They would prefer to stay, but some circumstance we've decided on as creative collaborators makes it necessary for us to leave home and go. Our group decided to portray a family having to leave a farm because of drought. (All of this is done nonverbally, and in mask.) Without saying so, my character was the old man (yeah, I know; go figure...), the one who had lived there for the longest, who probably built the house, perhaps had cleared the land. As we left, after finding the crops parched and no more water in the well, I bent down to scoop up a handful of soil and put it in my pocket. The teaching critique that came later was that's too small a gesture for the mask, and it just comes off as sentimental.

So is the mask human? subhuman? superhuman? Probably not exactly any of the three. And there's no point in asking for an answer to such a question in class, because none will be given, though the question itself will be celebrated.

It's not that this is frustrating to me--I've always been better at asking questions than at answering them anyway, and I know that a question stays alive, keeps working on you, pushes you to newer and deeper understandings when you can hold it in suspension and not demand an answer (which often reduces the question to a smaller level anyway). It's more that the questions I have are not primarily about who the neutral mask is. They have more to do with who I am and who I'm still becoming. Yes, it will be great if all this work will spur me to more boldness, to knowing what it is I want and to having the fire in the belly to pursue it. That's what I'm here for. But will learning to express a near-mythic drive through large bodily movement translate into that?

(I can hear it now: Greaaat! Yes! A very good question!)
But I'm not looking for praise for asking questions.

So I wonder how this will all progress in the months to come.

And by the way, I still think there's a place for the small meaningful action, even if there's no place for "sentimentality" in the world of the neutral mask.

Moving on to other topics...

Not acting. Reacting.

The focus in the improvisations isn't on acting. It's on creating a world--helping the audience to see a world--through our reacting to it, through having that imagined world work on us. We communicate through reacting to what only we can see (since we have no props, no costumes, and usually no dialogue). The mantra recently and again today, it seems, was "Give us the experience, not the idea." There's a lot of "Don't think. Do." "Turn your brain off and allow yourself to be surprised" by what comes to you in your improv. This is really hard--and means that it only gets in the way to start with much of a plan of what you want to do. And it's an open question to what extent it's a way of doing things that's transferable outside this program. Though I recognize that there are times I'd have been a lot happier, a lot freer, and might have created something better for myself and maybe also for others if I could just have quieted the eternal chatter in my brain.

Teaching gems, part 2

One day, as a way of spurring creativity for our Creation group times later, one of the teachers (Michael) led us in this exercise where we were to say yes to whatever anyone else proposed. The scenario was that we were put in groups of about 5 and given some silly product to create an advertising campaign for. Whatever proposal anyone came up with was supposed to strike us as the best idea ever. And we'd just build on it with whatever other suggestions arose. It was a lot of fun, and it also was remarkable to see how much energy was generated by the simple fact of not worrying over what others would think of your idea. Surely a broader lesson there somewhere.

And remember the blog entry about false starts and "It begins before it begins"? Teachers have continued the occasional practice of stopping people right as they start and having them start again. A scene has to begin with energy. You have to "take the space" to command people's attention from the very beginning. One of the teachers said "Josephine Baker used to get fucked right before she went onstage. Literally." But apparently (we heard later), not quite to the point of orgasm.

Talk about an entrance! Imagine how she must have commanded people's attention from the moment she stepped on stage!

(For any who are worrying, we don't have practicums in "How to take the space like Josephine Baker.")

When the cows interfere

2008-11-25T22:31:00.000Z

My call center job--oops, I mean my call centre job--isn't as boring as you might think. All the calls are made at random, but it seems that every night there's one that makes the whole evening worthwhile. Once it was an interview with a 68-year-old woman who was celebrating her birthday. I offered to call her back another day so she wouldn't have to spend 20 minutes of her birthday answering questions about how well she likes her phone company, of all things, but she was in such a great mood that she insisted on continuing, even though her grandsons were sitting right there with her. And she was a delight.

Tonight it was a conversation with a 16-year-old farm boy from the north of England. He was really sweet and wanted so much to be helpful. I also think he doesn't get many calls. At one point we ask how many people live in the household of the person we're interviewing (15 people in the farm boy's, including "my closest cousin; his name is Jimmy"). At another we ask them the question, "How important it is to you that your phone company makes it easier to maintain relationships and build your network of friends?" And then we read out the choices: "Extremely important, Very important, Important, Not very important, or Not at all important." He simply replied, "I really don't have many." Which was innocent, sweet, and sad. A few other times were touching as well, like when he said he doesn't think he gets great service from his phone company "because I don't think they like me." We're not supposed to go too far off-script, but I tried to reassure him that I'm sure it wasn't personal. Generally he had a good sense of humor about everything. When he told me about not getting good customer service in a phone store he said, "I think they think I smell. But then again I do. I live on a farm, you know." (As if I could forget.)

Calls usually take about 15 minutes, 20 at the most. My conversation with him--broken in half when he had to go help his dad with the goats--took over 40. When I called him back on his mobile phone half an hour later to finish the interview, I asked if it was a good time and he said, "Sure, I'm just on the toilet, havin' a poo." This was the only interview I've done where a respondent's complaint about poor phone reception was due to "bein' out with the cows a lot, and I think they block the signal." There's also a time at the end of the interview when we're to ask if it would be OK for someone to re-contact them at some time in the future to ask more questions. Usually people say yes, occasionally no. His response was an enthusiastic "Fock, yeh!"

I wish I could call him again next week just to check in. I'm afraid he'll be disappointed if no one gets back in touch.

Mr. Nelson's neighborhood

2008-11-23T20:40:00.000Z

The house I live in is two-and-a-half storeys, a rowhouse like so many in East London, sharing walls with its neighbors on either side. To the right as you face our house is a shut internet shop, then some florists. To the left, houses stretch endlessly, their chimneys and chimney pots punctuating the habitually low gray London sky. I have three housemates, actually four now that one’s girlfriend moved in a week ago.

The ground floor has a living room that’s used more as a bike garage and laundry-drying area, though if the house weren’t so damn cold we might use it as more of a lounge. There’s a nice little kitchen and a small eating area. Out through a sliding door is a small overgrown grassy yard or garden with a shed built into the back wall.

Up the stairs are three bedrooms and a bath. One room is quite large. The other two considerably smaller. Up another flight of stairs is the largest bedroom. My room has a good double bed in it and a wardrobe. And room for nothing else. If I lie crossways on my bed, I can touch opposite walls with tiptoes and head.

Have I mentioned how cold it is? (Robin: you are forewarned.) Many a night I’ve jumped under my duvet wearing a T-shirt, cotton pants, a sweatshirt, socks, and fingerless gloves like someone from a Dickens novel. The woolen prayer shawl that women in my church gave me when I left ministry doubles as a wrap under the duvet to keep my dreams toasty. I may add the practice of a hot bath before turning in. I’m certainly appreciating a good cup of hot tea when I have the leisure. (As I sit typing, cup of tea steaming within reach on the tabletop, in addition to what I put on this morning I wear a sweater, my shawl, and Bob Cratchit’s gloves. A hat may come next.)

Over the wall in the back garden is the East London Cemetery and Crematorium. (No, we don't see smoke rising ghoulishly from a smokestack. This isn’t Schindler’s List.) The cemetery entrance is a short walk from our front door. Just to your right when you enter the cemetery is the area where people’s ashes are apparently interred, very small stones in a close grid. Each has a well-pruned rosebush, a lovely touch. I’d never seen that before—and I’ve been in American cemeteries a fair amount. But that’s not the only difference here. Something about the rest of the cemetery has brought me to tears on two of my three visits. It’s somehow a very intimate place where the grief is made permanent, literally carved in stone.

The larger part of the East London Cemetery is jammed with monuments, many of them bearing a first name more prominently than the family name. Many bear doggerel verse of almost unbearable sentiment. A monument that caught my eye on my first stroll through the cemetery is dominated by a stone dartboard where you might expect to see a Celtic cross or an angel. Topping the stone, the name Billy in big letters. Carved into the polished stone below the dartboard:

BILLY GILL
TRAGICALLY TAKEN FROM US 5TH FEB 1990
AGED 24 YEARS

HAVE YOU EVER LOST A SON WHO WAS EVERYTHING TO YOU,
ONE YOU LOVED SO MUCH AND MISS HIM LIKE WE DO.
HAVE YOU EVER HAD THE HEARTACHE OR EVEN FELT THE PAIN.
WE PRAY YOU NEVER DO.
BECAUSE IF TEARS COULD BUILD A STAIRWAY
AND MEMORIES BUILD A LANE,
WE WOULD HAVE WALKED TO HEAVEN
TO BRING OUR SON BACK AGAIN.
LOVE YOU FOREVER, YOUR DEVOTED MUM & DAD
XXX XXX

And further toward the front of that same grave, upright on the horizontal marble slab, gilded letters carved into two panels forming a heart-shaped with a jagged break down the middle:

A THOUSAND WORDS
WON’T BRING YOU BACK.
WE KNOW BECAUSE WE HAVE TRIED.
NEITHER WILL A MILLION TEARS,
WE KNOW BECAUSE WE HAVE CRIED.
YOU LEFT BEHIND
MANY BROKEN HEARTS,
MANY MEMORIES TOO.
BUT WE NEVER
WANTED MEMORIES.
“BILLY, WE ONLY WANTED YOU.”
LOVE FROM YOUR
BROKEN HEARTED
MUM & DAD

I'm just here for a short time--maybe two years at most. I'll never be a true East Ender. But there's something sweet and sad here that touches me.

Lewis Carroll writes again

2008-11-23T12:05:00.000Z

From a review in the Guardian of an Eddie Izzard stand-up comedy concert, 22 Nov 08 by Brian Logan:

"It's fabulously polymathic: not many comedy shows reference the battle of Thermopylae. Izzard credits Wikipedia, but the thanks should flow in the other direction. After all, Izzard was hotlinking between screeds of erudite waffle when Wikipedia was but a glint in the programmer’s eye.”

Setting aside that I don’t even know what polymathic means, “hotlinking between screed of erudite waffle”! Where else but in England do concert reviews read like “Jabberwocky”? If our columnists were so original, perhaps the American newspaper wouldn’t be following the dodo’s path. I do love the love of language here.

Catching up a bit

2008-11-22T21:27:00.000Z

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.

Stiff man poster pop

2008-11-14T23:53:00.000Z

I finally got internet access at home this week via this curious little memory-stick kind of a wireless thing that plugs into a USB port. So I should be able to post more conveniently now. My school and work schedules often combine to mean I'm away from home from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., though, so these posts may still be spotty from time to time.

Isabel passed through town this week from Portugal on her way to Berlin. She arrives again tomorrow for seven days before going home for several weeks. It's great to see her. She's beautiful and looks so happy. Tuesday she stopped by school at the end of my classes to see Thomas (the school founder) and several of the second-years. Some of my classmates also got to meet her, which some found confusing and others intriguing. After asking how old Isabel is, one of my classmates said I'm old enough to be her grandfather. (My classmate's, that is.) Not quite, I thought. I am by far the oldest in my class, though. The next-oldest student is 15-20 years younger. The youngest is 32 years younger than me. (The original title for my blog was "Old man plays the fool.") One of the early-20-somethings told me she wishes her dad would do something like this. I guess I can be the poster pop for the school's AARP recruiting, if they ever decide to do such a thing.

***

The tone of the teaching changed this week. Every day we have 75-90 minutes of Improv (I can never quite remember the schedule, but I don't really have to), and the teachers always give some feedback on what you might have done better. But starting this week they've been interrupting people from the very beginning. An example: Today when Amy (one of the five Movement and Improv teachers) asked for someone to "open the space" and go first, everybody hesitated, so I volunteered. We're working with the neutral mask--a plain brown stiff leather mask that covers your whole face, large holes for eyes, no particular expression in the eyes or mouth--and doing stages of what they call "the fundamental journey"--from the ocean, through a forest, up and down a mountain, across a river and a plain, and ending in the desert. Today we were working our way across or through the river. Generally we face away from the audience while we put on the mask, then turn around when we're ready and begin.

As soon as I turned around to start, Amy stopped me. "No," she said. "That's not it. Try again." Four times this happened. "Nope." "There's no energy there. Show us something." "Still not it." I never even got close to the water's edge, and it was time for someone else to try. (I did get a second chance later, which was much more satisfying.)

In the first two or three weeks we never got stopped like that. Now, in Week 4, it's happening to somebody every day.

Actually I don't mind it. It's all part of the teaching, and we all learn from it. Plus, I don't consider myself an actor, so it doesn't cut into me to be told I'm not doing well. Generally people take it fine, but I imagine it must be harder for some who do see themselves as actors and are a lot younger, more vulnerable in that way.

I also decided back on Tuesday in Thomas's class that I'm going to approach the improvs differently than I had been. It occurred to me that I wasn't drawing on my life experience, and that's what I have a wealth of, especially in comparison with many of my classmates. I'm 53, a father, have been married for longer than probably most of my classmates have been alive, have lived through the death of both my parents, was in ministry for almost 20 years. I have a lot to draw on. And so even if it's not exactly what the teachers are asking us to do, I decided to bring that experience into what I do, even if I'm the only one who knows I'm doing it. It's working pretty well--making the work more meaningful for me, anyway, and I do think I'm understanding what the teachers are getting at in a very different way than many of my classmates. Even if I'm a lot less talented--and a lot stiffer in the body--than so many others are.

The point the teachers are pushing, by the way, is that you have to have a reason for whatever you do. Or if reason is too intellectual, too heady, there has to be a why, an oomph, a desire beneath it. I can hear that many of my classmates aren't tuned into that yet. And I can see it, too. And yes, it was also what Amy was (not) seeing in my many non-starts today. This is hard, good, deep work. And a very bodily form of expression for it all. One of my subsequent posts should be called "It all comes from the hips." The pelvis, actually.

I feel like I've come a long way already. With an inexhaustible horizon of how far there is yet to go, of course, but still, this time has been productive already. The first week in our Acrobatics class--which is worth a blog entry in itself; maybe later ("It all lands on the neck (even though it's not supposed to)")--anyway, as I was saying, the first week in Acrobatics I was so distressed at how little I could do in comparison to others. There are some astounding athletes in my class. And while I'm fit for my age, so much of this whole experience is both physically and metaphorically about becoming more flexible and unlearning years of habits that have stiffened me. A classmate from India (who was also having difficulties in Acrobatics) helped me a lot that first Wednesday by saying, "It's not about getting it right. It's about seeing what your body can do." That perspective helped me get through the whole first week. Now, after some pretty severe plunges of the spirit during the first two weeks, I've been on a much more even keel for the past fortnight. (Gotta love some of these British words.)

So on I go. The stiff man is learning to bend. And to be resilient. And to ground himself.

More later.

Brief Encounter

2008-11-09T19:28:00.000Z

Went to a play yesterday at the urging of Ilan, one of our teachers. Not sure how often I can do this (even with the discount, it cost £20), but it was so highly recommended as a piece of physical theatre, which is what the school's about, that I splurged and went. i was glad I did.

The play was a staged version of “Brief Encounter,” played in a grand old movie theater on Haymarket Street near Trafalgar Square. Kneehigh Theatre was the company. A very talented ensemble. The production was very creative, incorporating projected scenes that looked like an old black-and-white film. Early on one character stepped through the screen from in front of it (the screen had vertical slits in it) and then appeared in the movie itself. The show included a lot of music, a bit of puppetry, a lot of movements by the actors to indicate things like a door opening and the cold wind blowing in, or how everything jumps and rattles in a café that sits right next to the tracks as a train rumbles by. Projected images of the ocean became a metaphor for passion and turmoil. And the pacing was so very tight. So well done.

When I met Thomas Prattki, the school founder at the Guthrie this summer, I remarked to him that i"d love to get some insight into how he watches a play. Maybe this is a first step toward that. There's so much to attend to in a production--so much more than I paid attention to before (like how the stage is or isn't balanced by the placement and movement of the actors, or the pacing and rhythm of the dialogue). The mind reels with all the elements that go together in those fleeting moments that build the whole experience.

I'm getting closer to being wiling to try to describe what we do at this school actually, but I don't want to get too bogged down in the details. Especially for someone like me, this isn't only a theatre school--though I am getting a better sense of how to watch a play. (Maybe it's a bit like how I thought, a while back, that the best way to learn how to be a lay member of a church is to serve one as clergy. But that's a longer story too.)

Sold my soul to the telemarketing devil

2008-11-07T10:18:00.000Z

Well, it's not exactly telemarketing--marketing research, really. (Do you use a cell phone? Who is your carrier? How would you rate [insert name of carrier] in terms of not cutting you off in the middle of a call? Would you say they are Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, or Poor? ...)

I've only worked a few 4-hour shifts, but the time goes fairly quickly, and thus far anyway, the British are generally more receptive to such calls than I would have expected. I for one hate getting such calls, especially at the dinner hour--guess when my shifts tend to be--but at least I'm not expected to hassle them or try to get them to buy anything. I really had to find a job, and this is the only one I could get so quickly. (An American accent seems to help here, too, kind of like how we like British accents in the States.) I figure I'll hold onto this job through December, at least. Unlike at some other jobs, they never even asked if I could work over Christmas. Maybe that's because their terminology for someone like me is "part-time casual worker." Minimum wage here is something like £5.45 an hour (which is close to $9.50)--much closer to a living wage than at home. And this pays a bit more.

I've also finally gotten registered with the National Health Service and opened a bank account--on the fifth visit to the branch! You'd think banks would be leaping over each other to get people to deposit money in them these days. But they make it very hard to do business with them. At least twice I rushed to the bank right after class, waited in line for 45 minutes (the English stand in queues a lot), only to be told that there just wasn't time for me to open an account before they closed for the day. (Would it break the bank for them to staff both of their Meeting Point/information kiosks so the could handle twice as many people?) OK, maybe I'm being the impatient American, but really...

Classmates, eggs, and eels

2008-11-06T17:22:00.000Z

Three weeks into our classes thus far. I hope to get to the point of expressing some of my reflections, but I think it's too early yet. So for now, a setting of the scene and a little local color.

There are about 45 students in the first-year class at Lispa. Twenty-one of us have our classes in Hackney, in East London, and the rest have theirs on the West Side, on Latimer Road. All of us in the Initiation Course, plus the second-years (a.k.a. the Advanced Course), meet together on Monday afternoons to watch short pieces that we first-years have put together, fulfilling vague assignments like "A place, an event" or "The invisible man or woman." Come January, we'll all have classes in one location--Three Mills Studios in East London, which is closer to where I live, in Plaistow. At the initial getting-to-know-you meeting of first-years, we told where we're from. Our full class includes people from (as I recall) Portugal, India, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Israel, Puerto Rico, Japan, Zambia, Greece, Italy, Croatia, Ireland, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, France, Bermuda, Australia, England, and the US. Whew! The London International School of Performing Arts, indeed.

I share a house with three other students, one from England, one from India, one from the States. They're all second-years, so their classes start when mine end in mid-afternoon. I get a lot of time to myself at home, which is fine. I had my worries about where we live, though. The first night I was to sleep here, I walked the last half-mile from the nearest Tube stop. I could have waited for a bus, but it seemed just as quick to walk. On the final leg, I heard a car accelerate from behind me and felt something splat right between my shoulder blades. Something wet sprayed on the back of my neck and in my hair. When I got home I found that I'd been egged. Welcome to Plaistow.

I don't walk from the Tube stop late at night anymore.

On my second weekend here, Richard--a classmate who's a Cockney East Ender himself--took one of his housemates and me out for a traditional meal of "pie and mash with green liquor." (Steak-and-kidney pie, mashed potatoes, and a non-alcoholic green gravy that looked like a weak soup flavored with some pulverized herb.) It was really pretty good. And then he ordered three bowls of jellied eels. He must really like them, I thought. But no, he was ordering one bowl for each of us. And he told us he'd never had them himself.

Mmmm, jellied eels... can you even imagine it?

You may be afraid to, but I'll bet you can.

But can you imagine eating them? Me neither. Still I figured, why not? I'd had haggis in Scotland. Why not jellied eels in the East End? (Though I'd never have ordered them myself!)

I'm not quite sure how you cook eel, but they came sliced into rounds about 3/4 of an inch thick. The meat is a bit flaky and not too bad. I expected it to be all slimy, but thank God it wasn't. The jelly is some kind of translucent light green Jell-O kind of substance. Best not to ask what it's made of, I figured. The whole thing was pretty mild in taste, only vaguely fishy.

We were in a small white-tiled diner in East Ham. Narrow marble-topped tables and benches on the side. Robin's, it was called. Two women who'd probably presided for decades served from behind the counter. Three other women at the table behind me told us as they left that we should put a lot of vinegar and pepper on the eels (though that just made them taste pungent). And the women behind the counter scolded Richard for not ordering them hot, as that's apparently the proper way to eat eel.

But hot jelly? Sorry. Not willing to go there. Though I did tell Richard I'll buy him a bowl of hot jellied eels sometime to pay him back.

Cricket and fireworks

2008-11-06T16:41:00.000Z

My baseball buddies back home will be pleased to hear that I've already had my first cricket lesson. Last Saturday I was biking through Victoria Park trying to trace my way back home from school, and the path took me past what was a bit like batting cages. Men were taking turns bowling (what we'd call pitching) balls for another to hit. I stopped to watch for a while, and one of the guys asked if I wanted to "have a go at it." Sure, I thought. Why not? So he pulled out another ball for me to try bowling with. They're a bit smaller than a baseball, cork on the inside and covered with red leather with stitches around what would be the equator to hold it together. You take a running, hopping leap and then throw the ball with a straight-arm motion over the top. It's a lot harder than it looks. My first throw went straight into the ground. (OK, some of my teammates from back home will tell you that that happens with my first throw of the day with a baseball, too, but this got only marginally easier with practice.) The guy who lent me the ball gave me a few more pointers, so I wasn't embarrassing myself too badly by the time it started raining some 25 minutes later. I biked home happy and with my pointer and middle fingers stained red from the dye on the leather.

Last night I went out in search of a Bonfire Night celebration and ended up in Southwark Park (pronounced suthuk). I asked the guy next to me in the food line for a bit of background. "Basically it's a celebration of the torture and assassination of a Catholic terrorist," he said (see PS below), and went on to tell me more of the story. He also lamented that Bonfire Night has turned into these huge gatherings of people to watch fireworks and eat food from trailers serving things like burgers and hot dogs. When he was a kid, people didn't really celebrate Hallowe'en but instead would make an effigy and go around asking for money ("a penny for the Guy") that they'd buy their fireworks with. Then they'd gather all the scrap wood they could find and build bonfires on the 5th of November in which to burn their effigies. Now nobody has bonfires, he said, because of the safety issues. So to my eyes it looked more like a small county fair (little rides for the kids, loud thumping music, fast food), and a fireworks show that lasted maybe 10 minutes. I hear they do it up bigger in other parks, but the only thing big was the crowd, which was massive. Even the fireworks didn't have the towering dandelion-flower-type explosions that so dominate the Fourth of July (which was kind of refreshing, actually).

Only in Istanbul have I been in crowds as thick and as often as I have here. For being a famously standoffish people (that's a bit overrated) Londoners don't seem to much mind being crammed cheek-by-jowl in parks and on the Tube. There is no such thing as personal space on public transit here in rush hour. London on the Tube at the beginning and end of the work day: a claustrophobe's hell.

PS added later.

A Londoner emailed me two traditional Guy Fawkes poems:

Guy, guy, guy,
Poke him in the Eye
Put him on the bonfire
And there let him die.

and

A rope, a rope to hang the Pope
A piece of cheese to choke him
A barrel of beer to drink his health
And a right good fire to roast him!

Nice little rhymes for the kiddies to chant, eh wot?

Truly a new day

2008-11-05T17:33:00.000Z

Since I arrived here I've gotten into all sorts of conversations simply by wearing my Obama T-shirt or hat. Everyone I've talked with was rooting for Obama. Classmates from Ireland, England, Mexico, Sweden, Norway, Portugal, and a handful of other countries. Somalis at an internet point. Black British and West Africans. Everyone--except for two Americans on the Tube the other night, one of whom wouldn't even look me in the eye as she told me she didn't vote "for him."

Last night a friend texted me of Obama's victory at 3 a.m. Robin called during his acceptance speech at 5. Later this morning when I started to read the newspaper account of his win, I broke down and cried on the street. That in itself would have made quite a picture, I suppose--an American, walking down the street holding a Guardian with the headline "It's President Obama," crying. The significance of this election continues to bring tears to my eyes.

Yes, emotions are closer to the surface when you're living in another country, but it wasn't simply that my guy won. And it's a lot more than the awareness that the Bush era is finally coming to an end, as much as that in itself is worth celebrating. The other students in my class--from about a dozen countries--are happy for his victory, but they don't quite get what a huge thing this is. As an American, this goes so much deeper for me. What this feels like a step in the long road of national redemption, a step that may jump us a bit ahead on the path of transcending our racism, past and present. It's dangerous territory, and I pray that the Secret Service can keep him safe. (Even more, I hope that no one attempts a hateful and violent act. Assassination is such a part of our history.) But this day truly marks a momentous event. Deep down, I yearned for this, but I guess I wasn't sure we were up to it.

I'm sorry to be missing the celebrations back home. But with all the fireworks in the air tonight (Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes Day), maybe I can just translate it in my mind to a celebration, not just in Obama's honor, but in hope of the nearer fulfillment of America's promise.

The Mike Mulligan dance, and a telltale street sign

2008-11-05T16:30:00.000Z

Two and a half weeks ago I arrived in London. So much has happened already that I won’t even try to record it all. Bits will leak out from time to time, I’m sure. But for now, a glimpse into my journal from my second day, just as a tone setter:

I headed off to London Fields and the Broadway Market [in the East London borough of Hackney, where my classes are this fall]. The Broadway Market is a street market on Saturdays. At least I think that’s the only day. Anyway, it’s a delight—fresh vegetables, baked goods, a pig roasting on a spit that they carve right there and make sandwiches of, fresh fruit smoothies, racks of clothing, crowds of all ages. I’m limiting myself to two meals a day—this evening I noticed that Lispa recommends a food budget of £35 per week, ouch!—and had the first one there. (Each of my meals today cost about a daily budget’s worth.) And then I went back to London Fields, which may be my favorite place in all of London. And there I happened upon a wondrous thing.

I was sitting on a park bench jotting down to-do notes, when I heard an aria being amplified through the open air. I looked behind me toward the music, and there was a big Komatsu digging machine, a more modern Mike Mulligan the Steam Shovel kind of thing, if I remember the name of the children’s book correctly. It was sitting in the middle of a platform made of some kind of flat squares to protect the grass. The aria was blasting from speakers at the four corners of the platform. And a man about my age, probably a few years older, started to dance with the machine. The digger’s big claw swooped down to him, and he climbed on top of it. As the music soared, he stood and the Komatsu lifted him about 30 feet in the air. It brought him down safely. It spun in circles chasing him. He beckoned to it lovingly. It spurned him. He begged it to come back. At times what I was watching was very funny, at times very sweet. It turns out they were rehearsing for a couple of performances in the afternoon as part of London’s International Festival of Contemporary Dance.

I returned this afternoon to see it again. At one point, I started to cry, it was so moving. (The recording was Maria Callas. Go figure.) Mostly I laughed and was amazed. The Komatsu has tinted windows, so it looks even more nonhuman. I assumed it was computer programmed, though this afternoon after the dancer took his curtain call, he opened the door, and the machine operator stepped out and took his own bow. (Still, when they acknowledged the Komatsu, I expected it too to do some kind of bow in response.)

I’m sure Lispa folks will call this great theatre, and surely it is, but I’m going to resist using that term too much. So what was it? A moment of grace? surprise? delight? A thing of transcendent imagination and beauty? All of these things.

(As I left London Fields after the afternoon performance, I saw a traffic sign I hadn’t noticed before. It’s a red rectangle, with white letters and reads “Changed Priorities Ahead.” Maybe that describes the effect this Lispa experience will have on me. Not that everything will be artsy fartsy for me, or that I’ll become a theatre person. But I do hope to be more attuned to beauty and wonder, and more involved in it. These may be among the changed priorities that lie ahead.)

The afternoon crowd had lots of children in it, but I think the adults were probably even more amazed than the kids were. The dance of man and machine certainly came from a childlike place in someone’s mind and heart. Kids seemed to enjoy it, certainly, but not to be particularly amazed. That was more the privilege of us adults, who live with less wonder and more worries. (The performers/creators/artists, by the way, were Compagnie Beau Geste. Somehow it did seem very French, in an imaginative, innocent, Jeune Lune kind of way.)

After the rehearsal I wanted to call someone and tell them to come see it, to share it with somebody, but I didn’t have anyone I know that well in town to call. A moment of loneliness. Not the first. Certainly not the last.