"Do you realize that you have the most beautiful [type] face?"

It’s funny how the mind can play tricks on you. What’s stranger perhaps is how dependant we are on our minds to create a logical, structured understanding of our surroundings in order to become oriented. If we can change how we process information, or if we actively choose to acknowledge or apply a different meaning to something other than its common, accepted definition, given enough time we can literally redefine our surroundings. It makes one (who watches BSG) think of the Cylon’s ability to project—to literally create a different perception of their location to wherever they choose to be. It implies a certain amount of psychological escapism, I suppose, to try and change your surroundings by imagining you are somewhere else. But what if you’re not doing it on purpose?

Lately, I keep thinking I’m in New York. Not to any extreme—I don’t wake up thinking I live in Brooklyn around Park Slope (it would explain all the trees I live near), plan to hop on the subway to get to the island and wander around downtown somewhere, looking to satiate a hankering for a hot dog (“Mmmmm…hot dog…”). But there are moments I’ll be walking down a certain street in the center of London, and it will remind me of New York so much that for a moment or a little bit more I will forget that I’m on this side of the proverbial pond. It happened the other day on Dean Street—I was hunting around for the Soho Theatre to catch a play with my friends Lisa and Ronan, and I suddenly felt like I was somewhere around the Lower West Side. It confused me for a second or two, and though I shook it off rather quickly, something still lingered.

I’ve been missing New York in the strangest ways recently. London doesn’t seem to move quite fast enough, and maneuvering the sidewalks is a joke—it’s like people don’t know how to walk here. I still haven’t found a good bagel. I’d like to go out for a drink with someone at 10PM, and not worry about there being no room in the bar, or the fact that it’s going to close in half-an-hour. I miss travel after midnight that doesn’t involve buses. I dislike reading the New Yorker online, but can’t afford to buy imported copies of it, thus negating the joy I get out of the process of reading the magazine—carrying it around in your bag all week, folding it in half so you can read it column by column, getting residual ink on your hands, tearing out cartoons and poems and saving them for journals or bulletin boards or refrigerator doors. In the same vein, I bought the International Herald Tribune the other day because I missed the New York Times’s typeface. Yes: the typeface.

These things seem small, I know, but they are those parts of your everyday experience, the items and actions that beget living habits, that make you feel at home. I am, after ten months, still looking for New York in London. It must be said, the two cities are more similar than they are dissimilar. Both are extremely “international,” have tons of cultural offerings, etc. But still, there is something completely different in the air in London (::insert joke about Thames fumes here::), and I think it has something to do with the layout of the city. New York is a city built on top of itself, with buildings so tall and dense that at some locations you can’t see the next block over from the ground. Sometimes you’ll go for hours and not see the sun. Aside from the financial district, this sort of layout of structures seems far less frequent in London, and the city therefore, aided by its watery bisection, feels more open and spread out. New York towers over you and creates secrets as it looms; London is public and open and available. You can easily feel anonymous in any large city, but in New York you can almost feel anonymous even to yourself. While that can be lonely, there’s also something safe in that, a specific kind of detachment that I had come to know during my sojourn there, and one I cannot seem to replicate here. I don’t know quite why I seek to find this security of solitude, especially as one who is so often lonely, but I do, and London doesn’t cut it the same way.

Now, it must be said: I am far more anonymous in London than I am in New York, if we’re just going on the basis of the number of people I’m acquainted with out of the total population of either city. But London, with its open air and visible sunlight (when there is sunlight), seems to receive me more as a friend than New York did. You can’t lose yourself in the architecture here, perhaps because so much of it is largely historic. Maybe the only way to lose yourself in this city is not to the corners of the unknown, but instead, to the past. To really grasp London, you have to let yourself be transported, daily, back generations or decades, and being young myself (and young to this city), I still perhaps don’t have the experience enough to fully comprehend that.

The musings about these cities and what each has to offer is a topic not new to me or to the returning readers of this blog. It again surfaces as I begin my last couple months of my dissertation work, and my fellow immigrants are discussing their futures. Some seem set on eventually returning to their country of origin, but many of us are looking to be here long term. I’ve started talking to some other American ex-pats, and the UK visa process keeps coming up in discussion. Most of us are confused by what we have to do, or are daunted by it, or frustrated already. Others look at it like a crap shoot—we’ll try for it and figure the odds as best we can, but in the end know that we have less control over the dice than we’d like and we’ll just have to see what we end up with. To call back to BSG again: “Sometimes you have to roll the hard six.” But even if my visa does come through, the question that really lies at the heart of this is: what would I have to discover about London to really make it feel like a home? Or on the other hand, what would I have to be prepared to perceive about London to have it show me these things?

I had a strange run in with a man the other week, who drunkenly engaged me in very pleasant (albeit repetitive) conversation when I was running late to see Lament for Medea at the Arcola. We had ended up on a bus together, and he reminded me (over and over) that if I loved London, it would love me right back. When I went to get off the bus, he gave me a twenty pound note to take a cab to the theatre so I wouldn’t have to wait for the Overground. He kissed my hand as he did it. If that’s London loving me, London is kind of creepy. But at least he’s looking out and taking care of me on some level. On a kind of weird, creepy level, but yeah.*

Now if he could just serve me up a good bagel, I’d move right in.

*(For the record the guy was actually really nice and not at all inappropriate as we spoke, and I do believe the gesture came from a genuine place. He said someone had helped him when he was younger and that someday I’d do the same thing for someone else. Dear God, I hated Pay it Forward, but now it looks like I’ve made a bargain I’ll have to fulfill someday. That’s alright—but I’ll try to be sober when I do it.)

St. Patrick's Day in the UK

Ah, the luck of the Irish.

St. Patrick's was pretty uneventful, but spent amongst friends and over alcohol, and therefore just right. (Above: Maria and Ronan start the festivities after a beat experiment. Maria had Ronan use his accent to get that hat. Oh, the exploitation of the Irish continues...)

When done with school for the day, I headed over with Caitlin to Filthy MacNasty's, a Scottish bar, where you could get a Guinness and a bowl of Irish stew for 5GBP, and be serenaded by a Pete Doherty look-alike, even if you didn't order that. (Sorry: Pete-R Doherty, now. Apparently the "r" is essential.) We joined Max and Heidi, who had gotten there about an hour before us, and were later joined by Ronan, who was possibly the only actual Irishman in the place (and subsequently got all his Guinnesses served to him in actual glass glasses--the rest of us had to settle for plastic knock-offs). I grabbed a cab and headed home early, and my driver only charged me for half the fare after we had a lovely chat about drama schools--he'll be auditioning for one in a couple months. I didn't see quite the widespread drunkenness that you can usually catch in NYC, but considering the Peter Doherty look-alike had been in the pub since 10AM, I'd say the spirit of the day was most definitely still maintained.

No Guinness-staches here!

I am lost/In a rainbow/Now the rainbow is gone

Title of this entry comes from lyrics from the band that's currently changing my life, who I'm heading out to see play live in a couple weeks with members of NASH. For a great clip from the Shelly Love (somebody else currently changing my life) film that they scored and the song these lyrics come from, please go here and enjoy. For reals.

I have felt lost lately, but not in any kind of a rainbow. The grind of school has been overwhelming over the last few weeks, and that, compounded with other activities and the lack of Internet in my room (how I survived that, I will truly never know) has obviously infringed on the bloggation of late. My apologies, but there just wasn't the time. I'll have to give a briefbrief overview of my doings, so as to not completely discredit these past few weeks.

Hotel Medea:

Headed out to the Arcola the first weekend in February for some hardcore theatre going, as evidenced by our blazoned fists.

(Photo courtesy of Heidi O'Connell's iPhone.)

The production was a six hour-long extravaganza, with three twenty-minute breaks, and a breakfast spread<--Did I mention the play started at 11:59PM? I couldn't do justice to the show if I tried to give you a synopsis here, but needless to say the sheer stamina of the performers was beyond impressive, particularly Medea who was at least five months pregnant, if not more. Both she and Jason got totally naked at one point--whoa. The production was also really great at creating an all-encompassing experience for the audience. At one point we were all taken in turn, tucked into cots in pairs, read a bedtime story while we held our own stuffed animals and sipped cocoa--we were Medea and Jason's children, overhearing our parents having an argument with our eyes closed. My friend Max died (Not really: they just used him as one of Medea's children at the very end, and we built a funeral memorial around him. His wife Amy was not amused.). We got stranded in the morning because London is not New York, and there were no trains running to the area of the city we were in on Sunday. Ridiculous. WiFi at McDonalds and Heidi's iPhone saved us. We got home around 8AM and were out of commission for the rest of the weekend.

Complicite Workshop:

Complicite is an institution in England, in terms of the top "known" theatre companies in the country. After seeing A Disappearing Number at the Barbican this past fall, I totally jumped on to the Complicite bandwagon (despite the slight over-use of projection in that production). Their last show that ran at the Barbican this past month, Shun-kin, based on a Japanese story, featuring an all Japanese cast and some puppets by Blind Summit Theatre, prompted a short workshop that introduced and instructed on aspects of said production. Basically, it was an auditorium of students, mostly high schoolers, and a handful of Central-ites, that turned up to listen to Simon McBurney (AD of Complicite, and the director of Broadway's latest revival of All My Sons--hence the projections used in said production...) walk us through the first part of the show, and then call some of us up on stage to demonstrate some of the techniques used in rehearsal, both with the actors (none of whom spoke fluent English) and when dealing with the puppets used in the show. Heidi and her iPhone were there, and caught all the action.

(That's Simon McBurney waving his arms.)

The next day Mark Down, one of the founding members of Blind Summit (pictured above in the foreground all the way to the left) came out to CSSD and did an hour lecture on puppetry that was terribly amusing and informative. The day after I caught Shun-kin, and was happy I'd been able to catch Simon McBurney the day before doing his introduction/summary. As the piece was entirely in Japanese, and I was sat all the way to the side on audience left, I:

1. often couldn't see what was going on/being projected onto the stage.
2. was too far back to read any of the translation text that was being projected on the sides of the stage.

Now, as I've said repeatedly before, I need glasses. This evening confirmed this fact yet again. However, there was a lot of dialogue in the show, too much even for the fully optically functional 20/20 viewing audience, and McBurney, in my humble opinion, did not make up for the fact with his staging. If you looked away from the stage, you missed part of the story for the sake of the text. If you missed part of the text, you missed part of the story in terms of the staging. And neither were totally decipherable all on their own. It was a little like a poorly staged opera that way. I will also say that I think there were one too many narrators. But I'll go no further than that. It was in all ways a Complicite production, and therefore good enough to be one of the better productions I've seen while over here.

Valentine's Day with Tom Stoppard

I spent basically all of Valentine's Day at the National at various events that all had one common thread: the playwright Tom Stoppard. First, myself and others caught a production of Stoppard's play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a play for actors and an orchestra, featuring none other than our very own guest tutor, Toby Jones! My only complaint was that the piece wasn't longer--I could have stayed in the Olivier for hours listening to that music and that text. After that, we sat in on a talk back with the man himself. Stoppard is everything you'd envision in a playwright, right down to the baggy, old man sweater and the slip-on suede shoes that look more like slippers than outerwear. He rolls his r's, probably left over from his Czechoslovakian roots. He reduced Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as just "a play about two courtiers trying to entertain themselves in a boring place." He owns an iPhone, which rang during the talk. He was great. Afterwards, several of us went out to dinner and then returned to the National to watch Shakespeare in Love (co-scribed {or mostly scribed} by Stoppard) from one of the terraces, as it was projected on the side of the fly space of the Lyttleton (one of the spaces in the National). Heidi's iPhone was once again on the scene to catch all the action.


It was a delightful day, full of great art, and a truly unique experience that makes it my top Valentine's Day of all time.<--That statement clearly evidences the fact that I have never had a boyfriend around that date. But no matter. For one day, Top Stoppard was my boyfriend. And I loved him.

Visit from a New Yorker

Right around Valentine's Day, my friend Jen came into town with the transfer of an opera that had just finished it's run at the Met in New York, Doctor Atomic. She had worked on that production and was over here with light plot in hand, and tourist demands. I was happy to oblige her, as I never do anything too too touristy, and it was nice to have the excuse. We spent a lovely day together, watching a busker with a giant unicycle and a chainsaw in Convent Garden, traipsing about the Tower of London, walking along a considerable extent of the Thames, and sharing in a lovely meal. A couple days later, thanks to Jen, I caught Doctor Atomic's dress rehearsal from the best seat I will ever have in that opera house--the stalls, which at this house means orchestra level seating. The design by Improbable's Julian Crouch was great (it always comes back to Improbable, doesn't it?), and baritone Gerald Finley had the most dreamy tone quality. It was far more enjoyable than my last foray at the Coliseum. The final evening I spent with Jen during her visit, we headed over to Gordon's Wine Bar, the oldest wine bar in London. It's largely underground, in catacomb like structures, and you buy a bottle and crouch under brick archways at candlelit tables that are surrounded by mismatched chairs, all the while being dripped on by erosion from above. It was delightful. Moreover, it was wonderful to see a familiar face, and to share part of this experience with someone from home. It gives this journey some context somehow, and is a reminder that there is another world outside this place, and one that's possible to go back to, should I choose to go.

Incidentally...

The evening I caught the dress rehearsal for the opera, I was standing behind a man on the tube who looked staggeringly familiar. I tried my best not to stare or lean into him that much, but I kept glancing to him, trying to catch the side of his face, which he was clearly trying to shield. Suddenly at a stop, he turned his head for a moment and then got off. I instantly recognized his left cheek bone: it was Jamie Bamber, aka Lee "Apollo" Adama, the hottest of the hot, the CAG himself, soon to be president of the twelve colonies, and a cast member of the greatest TV show of the last few years of my life. For days I convinced myself if couldn't have been him (too short), but through Internet snooping I found a picture of him wearing the exact same jacket he was wearing on the tube, and since he's in town shooting Law and Order: UK, I have come to the conclusion that it was none other than the man himself. So close, and still so far...

And yes, I did just say: "Law and Order: UK." To be Dick York right now, I swear...

As far as school is concerned--

Term 2 is winding down in the next couple weeks. Our Stage Two Practice showcases our work Tuesday, for three performances. The piece focuses on web-based culture, activity, and identity. The most compelling part for me as an actor is a sequence where myself and my fellow collaborator Ronan perform a movement piece that's basically meant to simulate cybersex. It's really artfully done, I swear. We intend to film it, but due to intellectual copyrighting, there ain't no way that stuff is going to end up here. Also, my parents and relatives read my blog, so to save them from any possible embarrassment, I will avoid posting it. But for anyone curious (I'm seriously serious when I say it's artfully done, truly), I can figure out a way to show you the footage somehow, promise. Don't expect too much in certain areas--we are fully clothed all the time. But there is a vast amount of lipstick used.

The research group continues to plug along, performing our beat-like experiments (sorry I've still not thrown up any video), and the practice conference is fast approaching. We'll see what comes of that.

Third Term Festival proposals went in today at noon. My name is on three (I think...), and if any of them get selected--there were several submissions, but only ten will be accepted--I'll be a happy duck. Hopefully everything will work out. I will say no more on that topic, as I am a deep believer in the fates, and don't want to jinx anything.

................................

And that's really it from here. It's a lot--I realize that was basically a month's worth of stuff I just kind of threw out there--but in reality, it feels like everything happens so fast that almost nothing has happened at all.

Word keeps coming in from New York, and none of it seems to bode well. Jobs are lost, unavailable, or tightening in terms of hours. Less Equity contracts are being issued for summer seasons (because Equity actors demand a living wage and are therefore more expensive than non-union, and therefore at times unprotected, actors), and arts funding is even less existent than it was before. Everyone keeps plugging and/or struggling along, but the realization that for several life is changing drastically is ever prevalent. It makes me appreciate the somewhat insular environment I've holed up in for the year, despite the occasionally stagnant, claustrophobic, and down right irritating nature it can be at times. Putting up with a little aggravation and being spared wondering where the next meal is coming from is a blessing in it of itself. Even if that meal is disgusting cafeteria food from downstairs.

In the coming weeks I will do my best to be more diligent in my updates. Again, I apologize for having lapsed this long. But hopefully all can and will be forgiven. Take care, my dears.

"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!

"If we could walk like the animals"

This week's assignment was to discuss methods of devising work and create our own methodology from our findings. We actually present tomorrow, but I figured I'd post this now, as I've been really negligent lately (I have lots of blog drafts, but few posts, I know, I know). We chose a story from a book offered to us to find a topic for the piece. My group chose "How the Elephant Became." One section of the story talks about how the elephant attempts to imitate other animals. We latched onto this, and attempted to make our own elephant.

The assignment is really more about the process (which we will have to present) than the product, so I made a short film to help with our presentation of the former from footage we were able to get during the devising. Hope you enjoy it, while I toil over those other entries...