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.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Going back for more
On my way back to London again, Philly airport again, layover again. But this time no free wifi so it’ll be tomorrow before I can post. Before I left London, a classmate told me I had to buy a pretzel in the Philadelphia airport and have it for him, which I have. I may have a second. Yes, Frank, they’re that good.
But as this isn’t a culinary blog, I digress.
It’s hard to believe that we only have one more quarter left in this year. Then again, starting classes last October in the Hackney space does seem a long time ago. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, though what exactly is hard to encapsulate. A neighbor back home asked me what I’ve learned (Midwesterners being innately practical), and what I found myself saying was “Something about presence. And timing.” Not a very definite answer, I’ll admit, but it does touch on the essence of a lot of what we’ve done.
I should probably write just about that sometime, but as I go back, presence and timing are on my mind in a different way. A few months ago I was sure that I wouldn’t come back for the second year. I thought I might not even finish the first. It was in that period of time last winter when I just didn’t have a sense of where I was on the learning curve, or whether I was on it at all. And no sense of where I was in terms of why I'd thrown myself into this whole mess (for a mess it was, then). I’d also lost a sense of my own presence to myself, you might say, because I just didn’t feel at home anymore in whatever had brought me to leave everything I was doing “in my previous life” as well as where I was living, my home and my community. The vocabulary that I’m newly immersed speaks of being in your body and there was a sense of estrangement because I had little or no sense of what I looked or sounded like. I felt vacant, empty, alien even to myself physically and spiritually. I wouldn’t have thought to say it in these terms, but I just wasn’t very present to myself or to others at that time. So in moving through that, I feel like I've regained a sense of presence in my own life. That’s not what I had in mind when I answered my neighbor’s question in the driveway the other day—I was speaking more of stage presence and awareness of others in an ensemble, which also has to do with timing (knowing when a scene or a story needs you to say or do something, or needs it from someone else so it’s your job just to hold on and allow for it to happen*)—but there’s something of presence and timing in this larger life sense that I’m also learning in new ways through this Lispa experience.
Part of that knowledge comes in a confidence that it’s not time for me to leave Lispa yet, that I'm making some headway now and that I'll continue to do so. I do go back, however, with the awareness that time is going really fast, and I want to be more aware of each thing that I do. To continue to exploit this metaphor—I’ll let loose my grip and release this poor thing soon. I promise.—I want to be more present to this sense of passing time and to make better use of the time I have left in London. Just a small example: We concluded last term with The Brawl, as mentioned before. My part in our presentation was as a quiet, fussy laundromat owner, every thing having a place and everything in its place, cleanliness being next to godliness, and all that. My character kept to himself as tensions rose around him, straightening up, taking an almost fetishistic pride in keeping the floor mopped. This was, as they say, my mask. Not a physical mask, but it was what you would have seen of my character if you’d watched the presentation. It was my character’s persona. (Somebody pointed out to me a couple of years ago, talking about “the three persons of the Trinity,” actually, that our word persona comes from a (Latin? Greek?) word for mask.) And when everything was falling apart at the laundromat and everyone was making such a mess of things, flinging clothes around, using a bra as a choking rope, you name it, my “countermask” emerged as my character went berserk, screaming, throwing things around, dumping bags of clean and folded laundry on the floor, until another character floored me with a strong right hook. I think I realized at the time, though not at the level of full consciousness, that I was talking way too fast in my berserk state. I was paying more attention to the rest of what I was doing. But I want to have a fuller awareness of the moment to be able to attend to more than just the most obvious elements. A fuller sense of presence in the moment, both to be more intentional or practiced in what I’m doing, and also what others are doing around me. (On the flip side of all this, as my laundromat guy was mopping earlier in the scene, so into that activity that it was almost as if waltzing with my mop, I missed the moment in which I was to do a key physical element of the story: I was to pick up one woman's panties that had dropped out of her laundry bag and mistakenly put it in someone else’s bag. The whole brawl eventually would spring from that. Luckily I found the bright red panties on the floor just in time, and actually had to cross the stage with them to catch up to laundry bag #2, which ended up working out better anyway since it drew people’s eye to them in a way that picking them up at the moment we'd practiced wouldn't have. But one of my scenemates told me afterward that I'd almost given him a heart attack when I’d missed my cue. As you might expect, I still have a lot of awareness to cultivate going in both directions.
That last was an awkward sentence, I realize, written as they were calling my flight in Philadelphia. And I was going to go back and rewrite it, but now that I look at it again, having just arrived back in London a few hours ago, it gives me a chance to segue into an item I just read in the Guardian:
Once again, I digress, but wasn't it worth it?
More later. I have to get out and enjoy this lovely day.
* footnote to the asterisk above: looking back on this sentence later, it kind of describes parenthood too, doesn't it?
But as this isn’t a culinary blog, I digress.
It’s hard to believe that we only have one more quarter left in this year. Then again, starting classes last October in the Hackney space does seem a long time ago. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, though what exactly is hard to encapsulate. A neighbor back home asked me what I’ve learned (Midwesterners being innately practical), and what I found myself saying was “Something about presence. And timing.” Not a very definite answer, I’ll admit, but it does touch on the essence of a lot of what we’ve done.
I should probably write just about that sometime, but as I go back, presence and timing are on my mind in a different way. A few months ago I was sure that I wouldn’t come back for the second year. I thought I might not even finish the first. It was in that period of time last winter when I just didn’t have a sense of where I was on the learning curve, or whether I was on it at all. And no sense of where I was in terms of why I'd thrown myself into this whole mess (for a mess it was, then). I’d also lost a sense of my own presence to myself, you might say, because I just didn’t feel at home anymore in whatever had brought me to leave everything I was doing “in my previous life” as well as where I was living, my home and my community. The vocabulary that I’m newly immersed speaks of being in your body and there was a sense of estrangement because I had little or no sense of what I looked or sounded like. I felt vacant, empty, alien even to myself physically and spiritually. I wouldn’t have thought to say it in these terms, but I just wasn’t very present to myself or to others at that time. So in moving through that, I feel like I've regained a sense of presence in my own life. That’s not what I had in mind when I answered my neighbor’s question in the driveway the other day—I was speaking more of stage presence and awareness of others in an ensemble, which also has to do with timing (knowing when a scene or a story needs you to say or do something, or needs it from someone else so it’s your job just to hold on and allow for it to happen*)—but there’s something of presence and timing in this larger life sense that I’m also learning in new ways through this Lispa experience.
Part of that knowledge comes in a confidence that it’s not time for me to leave Lispa yet, that I'm making some headway now and that I'll continue to do so. I do go back, however, with the awareness that time is going really fast, and I want to be more aware of each thing that I do. To continue to exploit this metaphor—I’ll let loose my grip and release this poor thing soon. I promise.—I want to be more present to this sense of passing time and to make better use of the time I have left in London. Just a small example: We concluded last term with The Brawl, as mentioned before. My part in our presentation was as a quiet, fussy laundromat owner, every thing having a place and everything in its place, cleanliness being next to godliness, and all that. My character kept to himself as tensions rose around him, straightening up, taking an almost fetishistic pride in keeping the floor mopped. This was, as they say, my mask. Not a physical mask, but it was what you would have seen of my character if you’d watched the presentation. It was my character’s persona. (Somebody pointed out to me a couple of years ago, talking about “the three persons of the Trinity,” actually, that our word persona comes from a (Latin? Greek?) word for mask.) And when everything was falling apart at the laundromat and everyone was making such a mess of things, flinging clothes around, using a bra as a choking rope, you name it, my “countermask” emerged as my character went berserk, screaming, throwing things around, dumping bags of clean and folded laundry on the floor, until another character floored me with a strong right hook. I think I realized at the time, though not at the level of full consciousness, that I was talking way too fast in my berserk state. I was paying more attention to the rest of what I was doing. But I want to have a fuller awareness of the moment to be able to attend to more than just the most obvious elements. A fuller sense of presence in the moment, both to be more intentional or practiced in what I’m doing, and also what others are doing around me. (On the flip side of all this, as my laundromat guy was mopping earlier in the scene, so into that activity that it was almost as if waltzing with my mop, I missed the moment in which I was to do a key physical element of the story: I was to pick up one woman's panties that had dropped out of her laundry bag and mistakenly put it in someone else’s bag. The whole brawl eventually would spring from that. Luckily I found the bright red panties on the floor just in time, and actually had to cross the stage with them to catch up to laundry bag #2, which ended up working out better anyway since it drew people’s eye to them in a way that picking them up at the moment we'd practiced wouldn't have. But one of my scenemates told me afterward that I'd almost given him a heart attack when I’d missed my cue. As you might expect, I still have a lot of awareness to cultivate going in both directions.
That last was an awkward sentence, I realize, written as they were calling my flight in Philadelphia. And I was going to go back and rewrite it, but now that I look at it again, having just arrived back in London a few hours ago, it gives me a chance to segue into an item I just read in the Guardian:
One evening about 150 years ago, a busy House of Commons was listening patiently to Sir Robert Inglis, a High Tory and bitter foe of Roman Catholic and Jewish emancipation, or anything with a taint of liberalism, although he happened on this occasion to be complaining about an injustice. A prisoner had been denied visits, known in the legal phrase as “right of egress and ingress”. Or, as Inglis unhappily put it, “Things have come to pretty pass when an Englishman may not have his wife backwards and forwards.”¶ We know this scene from a famous pen. “The shout of laughter in the house was electrical,” Benjamin Disraeli recorded. “Sir Robert Peel, who was naturally a hearty laugher, lost his habitual self-control and leant down his head in convulsions.”
Once again, I digress, but wasn't it worth it?
More later. I have to get out and enjoy this lovely day.
* footnote to the asterisk above: looking back on this sentence later, it kind of describes parenthood too, doesn't it?
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Three terms behind me
Heading home for the break, battered and bruised but happy. The past couple of weeks have been focused in large part on stage combat, which is one of those paradoxical things in which the person who is apparently getting beaten up on stage is (supposedly) the one who is safest, and the one who’s doing the beating or making the sounds that make the whole thing convincing is the one who gets bruised up. Of course, tumbling around after having just apparently gotten the punch to the face or the knee to the groin leads to some bruises and scrapes, too. So I’m heading home with sore knuckles and bruises on my legs, hands, and arms, but little worse for wear.
We prepared fight scenes for two classes—Creation and Acrobatics. And each group of 3 or 6 or 7 set, developed, and choreographed their own scene, so fights were set in dining rooms, offices, emergency rooms, rec halls, laundromats, tea shops, county fair pie judgings, bakeries, even ballet studios and Lamaze classes. Some were comical, some terribly unsettling.
We also did final presentations of closely observed animals in Movement class, with even more variety, each person choosing whatever animal interested them. Noah might not have had such a variety. Elephant and giraffe, yes, and snow leopard, goat, and horse. But also starfish, komodo dragon, osprey, sloth, and amoeba. And on and on. A classmate and I were iguanas, and thank God for YouTube. (OK, maybe not God directly, but…) It’s amazing how much stuff you can find videos of online—I’m talking educational stuff here, by the way—and it’s fascinating to pay really close attention to how an animal moves. And often frustrating to try to make a human body move the same way. So the goal becomes (and here comes a favorite Lispa verb) to transpose it, to give the essence of your animal through a human body. So much of it, and so much of this term, has been about specific details. With all the mask work we did, again and again the goal was to boil down the movement, to find that essential detail and surround it with enough focused stillness that it has the impact that a lot of movement never could. At one point I was reminded of a phrase from E.B. White’s classic little book on writing The Elements of Style: the point is to make “every word [or here, every movement] tell.”
This week also included continuing work on passages that we’ve memorized from whatever source. Some were dramatic monologues, some were poems, some passages from novels. First the process of working with the text to memorize it was fascinating. I think I wrote something about that previously. And it got even more interesting when we moved into the speaking phase. One week we split into groups of three, and first we reacted silently to where each other was in the space. No script, no agenda, no words. Just three people starting out about a meter apart from each other, and our entire vocabulary for responding to one another was to stand, sit, lie down, walk, run, or stop. After a few minutes of moving around the space in reaction to the other two people, we started speaking our lines to one another. Contexts emerged as if out of nowhere. The second time we did it (in our final class this week), we stared in our groups of three and eventually were interacting as a whole group of 20 or so, each bearing our our own text in mind. Then each would choose the moment to speak their lines. Usually it came in response to what someone else had spoken, often a text we’d never heard before, and so it became this ever growing dramatic piece that had its own logic and probably could never be the same again. I’d memorized a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that I ended up speaking after a classmate did a monologue about a madwoman from Cork. Others who are more theatre-literate than I am can probably identify the madwoman piece, but I didn't know it. A short speech by one of Lear’s daughter’s (from near the end of the play) came in response to my little part of the drama.
I guess I’m ever the old guy in this group, but there are worse things to be, and much worse characters to be compared to!
In the first term we focused on closely observing nature. In this term we were closely observing animals. Next term we delve more (among other things) into building characters through close observation of people. At times the progression of themes at Lispa isn’t apparent, but at times I can glimpse the grand arc.
As I write this I’m in the Philadelphia airport, waiting for my connecting flight. It’ll be good to be home for a couple of weeks, to reconnect and heal up a bit. I’m sure the next term will fly by.
We prepared fight scenes for two classes—Creation and Acrobatics. And each group of 3 or 6 or 7 set, developed, and choreographed their own scene, so fights were set in dining rooms, offices, emergency rooms, rec halls, laundromats, tea shops, county fair pie judgings, bakeries, even ballet studios and Lamaze classes. Some were comical, some terribly unsettling.
We also did final presentations of closely observed animals in Movement class, with even more variety, each person choosing whatever animal interested them. Noah might not have had such a variety. Elephant and giraffe, yes, and snow leopard, goat, and horse. But also starfish, komodo dragon, osprey, sloth, and amoeba. And on and on. A classmate and I were iguanas, and thank God for YouTube. (OK, maybe not God directly, but…) It’s amazing how much stuff you can find videos of online—I’m talking educational stuff here, by the way—and it’s fascinating to pay really close attention to how an animal moves. And often frustrating to try to make a human body move the same way. So the goal becomes (and here comes a favorite Lispa verb) to transpose it, to give the essence of your animal through a human body. So much of it, and so much of this term, has been about specific details. With all the mask work we did, again and again the goal was to boil down the movement, to find that essential detail and surround it with enough focused stillness that it has the impact that a lot of movement never could. At one point I was reminded of a phrase from E.B. White’s classic little book on writing The Elements of Style: the point is to make “every word [or here, every movement] tell.”
This week also included continuing work on passages that we’ve memorized from whatever source. Some were dramatic monologues, some were poems, some passages from novels. First the process of working with the text to memorize it was fascinating. I think I wrote something about that previously. And it got even more interesting when we moved into the speaking phase. One week we split into groups of three, and first we reacted silently to where each other was in the space. No script, no agenda, no words. Just three people starting out about a meter apart from each other, and our entire vocabulary for responding to one another was to stand, sit, lie down, walk, run, or stop. After a few minutes of moving around the space in reaction to the other two people, we started speaking our lines to one another. Contexts emerged as if out of nowhere. The second time we did it (in our final class this week), we stared in our groups of three and eventually were interacting as a whole group of 20 or so, each bearing our our own text in mind. Then each would choose the moment to speak their lines. Usually it came in response to what someone else had spoken, often a text we’d never heard before, and so it became this ever growing dramatic piece that had its own logic and probably could never be the same again. I’d memorized a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that I ended up speaking after a classmate did a monologue about a madwoman from Cork. Others who are more theatre-literate than I am can probably identify the madwoman piece, but I didn't know it. A short speech by one of Lear’s daughter’s (from near the end of the play) came in response to my little part of the drama.
I guess I’m ever the old guy in this group, but there are worse things to be, and much worse characters to be compared to!
In the first term we focused on closely observing nature. In this term we were closely observing animals. Next term we delve more (among other things) into building characters through close observation of people. At times the progression of themes at Lispa isn’t apparent, but at times I can glimpse the grand arc.
As I write this I’m in the Philadelphia airport, waiting for my connecting flight. It’ll be good to be home for a couple of weeks, to reconnect and heal up a bit. I’m sure the next term will fly by.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Beware the chair, and note the socks
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?
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?
Monday, April 20, 2009
Stepping it up a notch
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.
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.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Transformations
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.
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.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Breezy like spring
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.
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.
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