Thursday, October 9

Last night I somehow managed to find 14 states of being, read The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen, and bake brownies. I call myself victorious.

MOVEMENT
We worked on our psoas whatnot, which I still can't feel. But I do think that my abs are less engaged than they were before, so maybe my body is adapting and I just don't know it. *shrugs*

We practiced our Capoeira kicks. My professor said that I did one of them particularly well, which is funny, as I thought I was doing it completely wrong. I keep mixing up which kick is which, and I can't figure out how you go into them from "ginga" (the basic step). Ah well. I'm sure I'll get it sooner or later.

We talked a little about the methods of learning in the class. Our professor explained that when it comes to movement, our progression is not linear. We have to trust that all the things that we're learning will add up. We have to come to class each day with a "beginner's mind", ready to learn. She said it's like we're building a violin from scratch. We have to find the right wood, the right shape, the right angles, the right glue... and once we put it all together, we'll have an instrument that's ready to make music. (The instruments, of course, being our bodies.)


VOICE
Our focus tremors today were Dying Cockroach and Half-Plow. I quite like both of them. Sadly, though, I've been a little gun-shy about Half-Plow ever since the day that my knee violently hit my nose. Now I'm afraid to let my legs anywhere near my face, and when my tremor starts to get intense, I feel the need to stop it.

Both my Movement Professor and my Voice Professor have discussed "code-switching" recently. There's this idea that's sort of like compartmentalizing, so that even though we're in neutral, we have the ability to find our non-neutrals in case social climates or roles call for them. My Voice Professor is originally from Boston and says that when she visits her family, she starts dropping "r" sounds. But as soon as she's at school, she code-switches back to neutral. It's nice to think that we can learn what neutral is without completely giving up who we are or what experiences we came in with.

Today, we finally started learning the breathing that we've been preparing for these last six weeks. It's called "rib swing", and I think I've already gotten the hang of it. I'm very lucky, as I have a flexible rib cage and am able to expand it a great deal already (the costume shop told me that the difference between my measurements with relaxed rib cage and "expanded" rib cage was massive). For me, Rib Swing isn't much different from the huge inhalations I take at the doctor's office when I'm examined with a stethoscope (but apparently I'm unusual in this).


MOVEMENT TUTORIAL
Over lunch I had a movement tutorial to discuss my walk. My movement professor videotaped me walking from a few different angles, and then videotaped me standing from a few different angles. I'd actually done the same sort of thing in undergrad, so it wasn't all that weird to me.

She then gave me some "homework" of things to try to adjust in my normal walking. First of all, I lock my knees whenever I'm standing still, which then makes a jarring movement when I begin to walk. I always begin to walk with my right leg, and I don't put enough weight on my left leg. My right hip swivels out to the side. And my pelvis, as I already knew, tilts too far backward. She said that this is just the beginning. Next time I meet with her, she expects that I will have done my best to correct those things so that we can move on to even more problems with my walk.


ACTING TUTORIAL
I met with my Acting Professor to discuss my "memory of physical action" exam from last week (where I made an imaginary peanut butter and banana sandwich). His comments were mostly positive, and very encouraging. I was quite proud of my progress with that exercise, and it was nice to know that he recognized the work I put into it.

He said the biggest thing that I need to work on is recording the sensation of food and drink in my mouth at the end of the exercise in a stronger way. He also said that, while I was able to have a sense of general ease in the exercise, that ease did not carry over to my lips. Apparently, I hold tension in my lips. Who knew?


ACTING
We spent the first hour (it's a 3-hour class, daily) discussing our work from yesterday on archetypal gestures. We had an interesting (and at times frustrating) conversation on the differences between archetypes and stereotypes. I'm not sure that we all came away with the same understanding... Oh well. I have my own definitions, and I'm comfortable with them.

We started doing a brand new breed of etudes, which I'm excited about. In the past, our etudes have been dialogue-based. Starting today, they were silent, and we had no given circumstances going into them. The scenes created themselves. I haven't gotten to try them yet, but it was neat to watch them unfold.

Our professor said that if, at the end of an etude, you want to try it again, then that's usually a good indicator that nothing "real" happened the first time around. I actually kind of wanted to argue that point, but I didn't. But in the past, when I have a really great etude, I want to do another. When I have a bad etude, I want to sit down and watch other people do them for awhile until I can figure out what I was doing that was unsuccessful. *shrugs* Maybe I'm just weird.


ANALYSIS
My Analysis Professor was back today, and we picked up class exactly where we left off. We tried to pinpoint the action of A Doll House. The ideas that we ended up with were things about "taking responsibility" and "revealing truth". Neither of them felt quite right to me, but I couldn't come up with anything better. I think I'm actually sort of terrible at this analysis stuff. A lot of times I end up arguing against the best answers. I think I'm better at finding reasons that things seem wrong than finding evidence to support anything. It's for this reason that I'm terrified about our upcoming paper on The Wild Duck. I'm trying to put it out of my head for the moment.