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...)
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