"And now we invite you to relax, let us pull up a chair as the dining room proudly presents - your dinner!"

Word on the festival proposals came through yesterday. Out of the three my name had been attached to, the one I was least involved in regarding development and the drawing up of the proposal was of course the one that went through. That's life, eh? Doesn't matter, as the company at hand I'll be working with include the ever fabulous creative producer, Maria, and my friend and fellow performing cohort, Lisa, both of whom went through Stage 2 with me, and both of whom I thoroughly enjoy working with in a devising process and on a personal level. The piece has the distinction being the only site-specific offering at this point (it was the only one pitched as such, though others may develop into site-specific work if space is an issue, or if they head in that direction), and revolves around the dramatic repercussions of what can happen over dinner. What will those repercussions be? What space will we finally end up in? What will we cook up for this less-than metaphorical dinner? Who knows. All of these questions will be discovered in the devising process, and I'll tell you when and what we find (without giving too much away, mind). Some of the personal goals I'm setting for myself for this project are the following:

• To have nothing to do with the actual act of cooking the meal (though I am ready and willing to make cocktails)
• To have an ambient soundtrack, full of jazz standards ranging from the 1930s-1950s in recording
• To have Maria sing a song in a very lounge acty kind of way (she does this often on her own without prompting, and it would be lovely to tap into such a natural gift)
• To create a distinct, interesting, slightly absurdist character for the show. Think Gormenghast.

The last one is a big deal to me, as we haven't really looked at character development and it's something I'm interested in returning to for the sake of my own training and my own sense of what I want my work to be about. Since the course is so focused on teaching us how to work in a devising process with other practitioners with different skill sets, some of our own skill sets get put down or brushed aside for the sake of just creating a "whole" piece of theatre. I feel like I've done a lot of things, but if you flat out asked me if I felt I spent a lot of time actually acting (or at least what I define as "acting") then I'd have to answer you, "No." I understand dramaturgy even more than before I came here, and certain working methodologies have been introduced to me, so that's great. But fine tuning my specific craft? No. No that hasn't happened. So I'm going to try to take this opportunity to make something that really calls on my discipline as an actor AND a deviser. It won't be a French candlestick but it'll be something.

"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!

"Out of my reach but always in my eyeline"

(Title comes from Keane lyrics to "Spiralling" off the new album. It is awesome, just FYI.)

This week's project was to deal with site-specificity in our work, focusing on the relationship between the outside and the inside. Two guest artists who had worked in a manner similar to this came in and showcased their work, a piece that involved taking an audience of three in a car through a city, on the hunt for a whale, in a retelling of the Pinocchio tale. They themselves did not believe that their work was truly site-specific in definition, and I tend to agree with them. The key to site-specific work is the correlation between the environment (the "site") and the action--the environment informs the activity of the stage. In this very base definition, it could be argued that any piece of theatre is site-specific. But when looking at a performance, or trying to build a performance in the conditions of site-specificity, there is usually a more direct relationship between the stage action (consider the word "stage" loosely here, as site-specific work usually does not take place on a stage) and the space the action is set against. The reason the guest artists' work was not strictly site-specific was because they had less of a relationship with the outside world than one would expect in a such a work. While the car they drove had to deal with the environment and architecture of whatever city they were in (the piece was re-incarnated in several cities over a period of six years), what they were seeing in the city rarely if ever had to deal with the structuring of the plot or events of the story they were telling. It was incidental, not essential to the production. And therein lies the distinction.

Our assignment read as the following:
"Look at ways in which the audience can be unsure of what is created by the artist and what is not. Look at ways you might frame a vision of the outside or draw our attention to something outside by something happening inside, with the audience (e.g. a performer, sound effects, programme notes). Do you want to remain invisible to the outside world? Or create something strange within it? Will you add things to it outside or give the audience a way of looking at what is already there?
"Working in groups arranged by your workshop leaders, make a short work of 3-5 minutes' duration for an audience the size of the rest of the year group. The piece can be performed twice if you wish to have a smaller audience...The audience is inside, looking out of the windows."

I was in a group of six, comprised of two members of the performance strand (myself and Lisa), the only visual media artist (Connie), two members of the dramaturgy strand (Deidre and Leslie), and one producer (a fabulous Greek named Maria). I won't go into the details of the process (because why ruin the illusion and why air dirty laundry from a subjective viewpoint in a public forum), but finally we came down to the idea of affixing text onto the windows like speech bubbles. The audience would see the text in line with people we would place on the street in specific places, and depending on the floor they were on, they would get a different story. We had five phrases of text that we were going to use repeatedly and move, so that each group was told a different story in how they encountered the text. They were:

1. Stop watching me.
2. I've seen you naked.
3. I'm invisible.
4. I'm looking for a funny sugar daddy, 40+ for romantic liaisons.
5. I'll find you and I'll kill you.

Leslie came up with the idea that they be visually worded phrases, to comment on how the audience was receiving the story. Lisa had brought in the phrase about the sugar daddy which she found in the "Lonely Hearts" section of the newspaper, and perhaps also the "kill you" phrase, though that may have been Connie. "I've seen you naked," was a reference to Say Anything, that part where the characters are talking about sex, how it changes everything, and the next time you see the person you can talk to them very nicely, but the whole time you'll just be thinking, "We had sex." Yes, that one was mine. The other two came from group discussion.

Lisa had gotten really into the idea of the phone booth having text attributed to it, so we got into talks about how to use it on one of the floors. However, later on in the day when we tried out the perspectives, it was discovered that the picture varied depending on height, and there were few options in terms of how to focus the viewer appropriately--a box was suggested so that they would be able to have a specific frame, but we couldn't figure out how to affix it to the glass properly without leaving massive tape residue, and it would have logistically been a misstep--48 people in the program, and only five minutes to exhibit, it would never have been enough time to get everyone through.

While discussing the phone booth in the hallway, another classmate, Chris overheard us. As I was passing him soon after, he asked me, "Which phone booth?"

LEA:
"What do you mean, which phone booth?"

CHRIS:
"There are two."

We had been so focused on trying to figure out what we were doing, we had completely overlooked the other phone booth in plain view near the one we had been fixating on. We had been neglecting observing our environment, the very environment that was to shape our work so fully! It was an amazing discovery, and I ran to my group and said, "Everyone! Chris has just told me: there are TWO phone booths! What if it was a love story between two phone booths, but they could never be together?!"

Some one chimed in: "Yeah, they can only have a long distance relationship."

We went from there and wrote text that we posted above the metal divider that ran through this hall of windows, full of phone puns mostly thought of by Deidre. We ended up with the text I wrote above the pictures in the previous entry (those photos, incidentally, while capturing the site our work was placed in, were taken the day AFTER the presentation, so please understand that you as online viewers of snapshots, are still getting a different experience from live audience members).

On the day of the presentation, Maria, Lisa, Leslie and myself stood on the street in various ensembles comprised of red and black, so that the audience would be drawn to us visually when reading the text regarding the different colors--though I was told later that the black did not read. Oh well. Deidre and Connie stayed upstairs in the building to act as curators in our "gallery," prepare the audience appropriately ("Flash photography is not permitted," "Please do not touch the art work."), and lead them into the hall. We had used tape to create a frame for the section of the window we wanted them to look through. This way was could further shape and control what the audience saw, and ensure that the two phone booths were in the background of every "picture" we made--little details they'd take for granted because they were inanimate objects, and because we are all trained to look for the people we know to be the actors. They would discover at the last frame that there had been a story going on the whole time, right in front of their eyes, one they wouldn't have otherwise noticed had their attention not been drawn directly to it.

It went over well, and we got accolades for keeping our presentation simple. I would not have called the process of getting to that place "simple," so it's funny that in the end that was how we succeeded. There's a lesson in that, to be sure.

To see what it may have been like to experience the speech bubble version of the project had it worked, here's an example I made of one of the stories we came up with. Set the slide show for five seconds. There are only three frames.