"...all them birds and predators just take from the land/But the beaver always gives a dam"

The title of this entry comes from the Canadian-based band The Arrogant Worms' song, We Are The Beaver. I use it as a nod to my oldest friend, Bobby, who will figure a little in this entry. (That's him there to the left of me, sitting between the paws of the lion.)

The Familie Floez ended up being a good time, with a cast of the highest stamina--four performers probably each tripled (at least) in the parts they were playing, but I didn't know this till the curtain call when there was just a quartet bowing on stage. Really great work, though I think they could have shaved about twenty minutes off. But still very enjoyable.

Seeing this show from the mid-to-rear section of the theater however, once again reminded me: I need to buy glasses. Or price Lasik in this country. Or consider contacts. Something. Nearsightedness isn't the worst problem in the world, but squinting through a theatrical performance or movie, or not being able to recognize your friends at a certain distance gets annoying after a while. And coming up on just over a year without any vision aid, I think the tolerance of this state has just past it's peak. I also have this theory that your physical vision plays upon your psychological vision--if you can only see the things right in front of you, you can't begin to consider the distant or not-so-distant future clearly. That may be a lot of poppycock, but it's my philosophy, not yours, so I'll subscribe to my own personal nonsense as much as I like thank you very much. But in any regard, they'd be useful, at least in so much that I wouldn't furrow my brow for an entire evening--at least not just to see the play.

My research group's last meeting on Thursday left us at a good place. I brought up my feelings of detachment for the subject, and Ronan suggested we all continue to do our own personal research about things we liked, and then when we were done, try to connect them in terms of interior rhythms. This may be a little foolhardy, but it's definitely worth a shot, and will at least keep the work interesting for us all. We met with two of our tutors and introduced this idea, and one of them suggested a rather mad, spontaneous, beatnik-ish exercise to try, which really excites me. I'll report back with more details and with findings once it's completed.

Our research groups have been put together into a bunch of larger groups for our "Stage Two Practice." Stage Two Practice will basically take the place of the small labs from last term, with one big long one. We have a set ensemble (mine consists of ten people, the largest has around thirteen or so) and will have to work with this group for the whole of the term, generating something to be shown at the end. It has been stressed to us that we don't have to present a polished/finished performance; moments, pieces, or scenes will do for our final presentation. However my group, now complete with a practitioner from the MA Writing course, Chad (I love him, he is awesome--AND American! w00t!), has decided to aim for a complete work, or at least something with a coherent storyline. All that abstract stuff from last term will hopefully fuel our creativity, but enough of the disjointedness, and let's create a narrative, already, please? At our first rehearsal/meeting, we each shared a story we knew, that had left an impression on us. I selected "The Soldier and Death," an old Russian folk tale, and still my favorite episode of Jim Henson's The Storyteller. Other contributions were: The Boy Who Kicked Pigs; the work of Matt Haig, specifically his one sentence stories; Sleeping Beauty; and Three Men in a Boat. The next day we had an outing to the Whole Foods down by High Street Kennsington to people watch. To focus our minds a little, Chad provided us each with the same quotation to consider as we observed people around the store:

"What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment." --Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning*

We shared our findings over lunch in their cafe (I had a super lame burrito). The next day we were meant to bring in stimulus for the designers in the group--scenographer Caitlin, and sound designer James. We decided that we would keep what we had talked about during lunch and the quotation in mind while selecting what to bring in. I ended up with the following:

• A very sexy dress
• A shoulder badge my great-uncle wore when parachuting into Cuba during the Bay of Pigs
• A broken necklace I used to wear
• "Hear My Song, Violetta" by Glenn Miller's Orchestra
• "H in New England" by Max Richter

Other people brought in various pictures, a worn and tattered copy of The Little Prince that travels with them everywhere (rock on, Ronan), other music, and a book of collected secrets from anonymous submitters (Caitlin--what was the title of this again? I loved it so, but I forget...). Then the stimuli were divided up amongst us and we were paired up to create something around these things to present on Monday.

I know there's a lot of grouping, and then dispersion, and then re-grouping, and then re-dispersion, but right now the ensemble is still looking for a central idea. When we have a unified thought, I'm sure this will by and large end, since we'll all be working with one central focus. But right now, we're still in that generating head space, so, there you go.

Caitlin and I were paired up, and worked a bit over the weekend on this last assignment. We had a few pictures for our stimulus, but the one we most responded to was of a teddy bear faced down on top of a bunch of other trash in a dumpster. Lisa had found it randomly on some one's flickr account. To try to engage more fully with the image, or to just use that as the excuse to bring him out and about, I brought my small stuffed animal, Bobby Beaver, to our meetings. Bobby is just over twenty years old, having been a Christmas gift from many years back. I had not anticipated bringing him along to England (we've lived apart all through college, and for most of my time in New York post college), but upon my mother's insistence, he came along. And how fortuitous that he did. I've been trying to get him into a performance piece since last term when I thought I could fit him into my solo presentation, but to no avail.

Here he is, hard at work during a devising meeting:

Look how happy he is: "I love collaborative theatre!"

And here, feeding that damn caffeine addiction of his:

"I've sold my soul to Starbucks..."

Whether or not Bobby will end up in our final piece of dra-ma remains to be seen, but he's a nice artifact to revisit and is, I think, partially responsible for actualizing part of our stimulus for what we'll be presenting tomorrow. I like to think so, anyway. And so does he.

In other news, I've been helping my friend Ariana with a piece of theatre she's currently creating about immigration, assimilation, and cultural identity. The picture below is from an exercise she held for myself and the other artist assisting her, our friend and classmate Loukia. I had to get in front of Loukia at any cost, but whenever I did she'd change her facing, thus putting me behind her. Finally, I got in front of her and grabbed her around her knees in one last desperate attempt to win the game. I did, but cracked up in the process. I corpse like anything, it's so bad.


Someday I'll be a professional. But not today.

The Space (in) Between has also been doing a little better, with some new blood in it this past week, and some really interesting conversation to go along with the presentations and feedback. I get really excited during these meetings--there's no crazy pressure to compose something since things aren't assigned, but you're still encouraged to be creative and say "yes." I like that environment, and I'm happy to contribute and help create it.

That's basically it, but before I go, here's an overview of what I'm doing this coming week:

• Seeing a friend's stand-up show
• Going to a lecture on plagiarism
• Attending a D&D satellite event at SHUNT
• Participating in a day long phenomenology workshop
• Hanging out, drinking, and enjoying a whole night long production of The Medea (from midnight to 7AM, oh yes).
• Drinking more coffee
• Participating in more theatrical brilliance

Oh, and Happy Langston Hughes's Birthday to you, friends.

*(Side Note: When I first read this quotation, I felt I recognized the title and the author from somewhere. While writing this entry, I suddenly realized I did a report on this book in the 11th grade for my Holocaust and Humanity class. That being said, I must admit to you: I have never read this book.)

"There's thoughts in my head/like brass in my head/When I start to speak/it all disappears..."

I keep meaning to blog, and then I don't. Trying to engage in normal life more fully, as well as keeping a personal journal, as well as keeping an art school journal, as well as keep up this blog is...difficult.

My group hit a major snafu regarding our research project this week. We came to the sudden realization that there is no way to actually document the rhythm of a space scientifically (unless we had some mad equipment we don't know exists/don't have access to), and came to wonder if that was really necessary to have proper research. This idea in science of measurement is to have a scale to compare your results to--a control group or location, if you will. Makes sense. But what room has a neutral rhythm, and by whose definition? We lost heart for a bit, and decided to spend our time together on Thursday running small workshops for each other. We were each meant to bring in an exercise that would incorporate something we were interested in, in terms of our subject. Ronan had us cross the space a few times, creating a physicalized crescendo and decrescendo. Next, he had Lisa draw a line on a chart that rose and fell, followed by a physicalization of that. Then he had James play impromptu piano as inspired by the chart, and the rest of us (Ronan, Lisa, Maria, and myself) each wrote according to the tempo we heard in the music. I turned this out:

Slow December waltz, at home with Henry. Everything in order and children in bed--oh but Jeffrey's forgotten his teddy bear. Never mind it, he'll get it tomorrow, no doubt. And where did I put that--my knitting, I know, I know it was here somewhere, somewhere, I pricked my hand the other day, with my broach and stained my best day coat. Could it have meant something? Surely not. I'm just being silly. How foolish I was to cry over that. Just a little blood. Just a pin prick. It will come out in the wash. Just like a little girl, like a silly little girl, Rosie the other day over her bear and her milk all over her dress, silly girl, and the wailing the wailing, I never wanted to be a mother, I hate my children and I hate myself for hating my children but such a nuisance. Always under foot.

James had been playing something in 3/4, hence the waltz reference and subsequent Victorian/Edwardian dialogue. Also: I'm certain I have a woman of that era living inside me, somewhere, so I'm sure that has something to do with it...

For my part, I ran a short and somewhat bastardized Shakespeare workshop (I skipped over scansion completely--I am ashamed), trying to emphasize the rhythm found in his text by accessing the aural signifiers as well as the punctuation. It succeeded for the most part, which made me happy, but I don't know how much of that work has anything to do with our topic. This brings up a small problem that has me again revisiting the idea of not wanting to research anything, but rather just wanting to do something. Today it's Shakespeare, tomorrow it'll be aerial silks--I'm fickle like that. (Oh, and how I dream of aerial silks...) Then Lisa had us try to incorporate some of the Shakespeare work into a piece of modern text--namely from Sarah Kane's Crave, ala a workshop Martin Wylde, head of the MA Classical Acting program led a couple weeks ago.

After the mini-workshops, we met with company members of Present Attempt, Velna and Alex, both working at Central currently and having small experience in producing work from a place similar to our research topic. They assured us it would be all right to work from research that wasn't completely scientific in nature, since trying to replicate anything on stage essentially fails from the get go--you have to re-think what you're replicating just to have it come off theatrical, so why worry so much? It was nice to have this support, but I'm still trying to re-engage with this topic. Outside of my fascination with rhythmic texts, I don't really know where to go with this one, and certainly not in a group setting. As always: we shall see.

Friday was the second week of "The Space (in) Between." Classmate Mauro and I met beforehand to discuss what we were actually doing, what the purpose of The Space was, and what kind of weekly assignment/stimulus we'd be doling out. As suggested by Ronan, we continued on with the structure of providing restrictions and provocations, modeled off of the Toby Jones lab week. I also personally liken this to an aspect of Moment Work, but let's not lose ourselves in a realm of theatrical jibber-jabber for the moment, all right? Mauro had the idea that we would weekly offer five sentences to the group to create work for the following week. As the course goes on, more and more work seems to be piling up, and I am worried about The Space's success hinging on people's time to consider these mini assignments. But hopefully, if nothing else, The Space will provide an allocated time for people to try out their ideas, research related or otherwise, and will prove a comfort in that it will always be there. And of course, because it seems to be the only way I deal with anything these days, I created a blog for the function. If you want to know more about what we do and why we do it, just check it out here.

My last encounter with the London International Mime Festival is today. I'm seeing Familie Floez's Hotel Paradiso this evening, and I'm quite excited. I'm hoping it will be as great as the last show I saw at Southbank, also part of the Mime Fest's offerings, Tomas Kubinek. This man was simply amazing: funny, specific, engaging, musically talented (it must be said: I love a ukulele), and just sheer joy. So much joy, that I found myself crying at the end I was so happy. These tears varied greatly from those cried during a very mediocre circus show I'd had to sit through two days prior in the very space, called Circus Klezmer. I won't get into the reason for those tears (let's just say I have a very personal relationship with circus), but I will get into the mediocrity. The thing I hate about circus that tries to apply a narrative is how often that narrative is just there as filler. If you're composing a circus piece with a narrative or theme, I think you have two options:

1. You just let the acts be linked by a common idea, and don't try to add too much story wise;
2. You allow the acts to help promote and advance the narrative, like what makes a musical a musical, and not just a show with music and dancing and lights.

Or you can just do a show full of acts and antics--that's fine too, and is a big part of what makes circus circus. But these lack luster attempts at making a story are just awful: "Here's a scene, and now suddenly as if out of no where, an aerial silk act! And now another scene, that in no way refers back to that last act whatsoever!" And so forth and so on. And quite frankly: the show wasn't that funny. They company members did "funny" things, but it just wasn't funny. People laughed at antics, not at what was REALLY happening on stage. Most audiences can be bought through desperation, it seems. I grow more and more suspicious of this as time goes by. God, I kept hoping there'd be an intermission so I could leave. Luckily, it was only seventy minutes. Seventy minutes I'll never get back...

Yesterday I also saw The Kid for the first time, the last offering of the Early Chaplin Program at BFI. And thus ends the first, pretty full couple weeks back. I don't expect too much activity in the next few days as far as outings. Despite the incredible drop in the exchange rate (Britain has FINALLY entered the recession, whoo hoo!), I need to give my wallet a rest (I have entered my own recession) and try to re-engage a little more with school work (yuck).

It's raining, which reminds me I'm supposed to be reading King Lear today. Wish me luck! w00t!