"Vacation, all I ever wanted..."

The first week of break turned out to be not very break-like, but more of a preparation for the rest of my time off from school—time off that seems like it will be pretty full, dominated by work that is going to lay the foundation for a lot that I need to accomplish in the upcoming third term.

The first few days were pretty loose and relaxed. I slept A LOT, napping more than once a day on occasion. I read the Guardian most mornings, and plodded through the web-based copy of the New Yorker I receive (thank you, online subscription). I spent a lot of time in coffee shops, trying to convince myself to go do something, then failing and not caring. One of the more productive things that hasn’t got anything to do with schoolwork: my friend Max and I have taken up jogging together on Sundays (we were at it again today). Max is a pretty big runner, and I can usually get myself out two, three times a week, but we’d both fallen out of the habit during our respective Stage Two Practices that essentially took over our hearts, bodies, and souls February onward. As one of my goals during this break was to get back into shape, having a running buddy seemed a very novel indeed, especially considering how much I loathe running. Truly: there’s nothing I dislike greater than starting running again after a long absence—but then after it becomes a routine, I start craving it like a crack fiend. Addictive, but at least it’s a healthier habit. But starting out is always so dreadful. Having company at least once a week is nice. And in all truth, we came to the decision to run together in order to “train” for a hash.

My friend Abby first told me about hashing when I visited her this summer while she was doing Doubt in Cape May, where she is huge. We got onto the topic of things I needed to do while I was over here, and suddenly she gasped and squealed out: “You have to go on a hash!” Now, before your mind wanders to illicit places, no, “hashing” has nothing to do with marijuana, though it does involve some kind of substance abuse. Essentially, you follow a path that has been laid down for you on the road with chalk markings or piles of sawdust (apparently) and you jog for quite a while. The catch is: the path always leads to a pub. So after you’ve jogged for a substantial amount of time, you drink. I think it’s genius, and all the more reason to bother with running in the first place. And I’m pretty sure Max agrees with this. Abby did tell me, however, that on your first hash, you’re meant to drink your first pint from your shoe, which sounds just awful. I’ll keep you lot posted on our progress.

In my effort to get into shape, I also registered for some yoga classes. The first day I went, I saw a London fox standing by the entry way to the studio. My deep-rooted affection for these little guys makes me believe this was a very fortuitous sign. The studio I’m going to is kind of a trip, in that the company seems to be the UK equivalent to the yoga corporation I used to work for (strange that phrase: “yoga corporation…”), which is both reassuring in its familiarity, and bizarre in some strange, almost cross-dimensional sense. “Yes, Spock—it would appear they promote the practice of yoga on this planet, too…” I hope it won’t take too long to get my practice up to snuff, and I think that the yoga will compliment the running nicely. I may even go to Pilates. But let’s not push it just yet.

But as I said, so many paragraphs ago: meetings. Wednesday I sat down with classmates Ariana, Poppy, and Loukia and discussed plans on developing work we’d started to touch on and generate during last term (a concept that is Ariana’s, so details will be scant here). Ariana is looking to have us present the piece in both London and in a couple towns in Germany this August, which means I won’t be flying home in July as originally planned. (The topic of when I’m actually going back to the states is a pretty hot one right now, but we’ll get to that in another entry.) The work that we’re doing with Ariana is new to me (here’s a hint: it’s largely NOT text based), is pretty exciting because of the newness, and I really like the concept she’s shooting for. Even the challenge of working in this manner is pretty freeing all on its own, and that’s been great so far. I look forward to more of the same over the coming months.

That evening I also caught The Lady From Shanghi at the BFI, and am once again convinced that I need a wardrobe akin to the women of Noir cinema. And a gun. Yeah, that would be good…

Thursday I met with Nick Wood, head of our course, alongside my fellow Space (in) Between cohort Mauro, to feedback on the success of the sessions, and in an effort to get The Space incorporated into next year’s first term offerings. The school is currently reviewing, revising, and re-writing the course as it stands, so there may be room to squeeze it in. Or there may not be. Either way, it was a good meeting, and it was nice to see that the head of the course would take the time out of his very busy week to discuss our findings and the possibility of adding this program to the schedule. We’ll see what comes of it.

Friday consisted of back-to-back meetings of my Stage Three Practice group, and my RMO group. In the first meeting, Chad, Maria, Hedva, Lisa and I basically discussed what attracted us to the project we’re going to be working on, and what our personal goals were as artists concerning our work for the piece. Then we generated a list of movies, plays, anything really that we knew about that dealt with a meal or consumption.

The second meeting with my RMO group was to discuss the upcoming "Great Orchidaceous Travesty," where THE BAND, our research experiment of beat-like quality, will be making its debut to an organized audience. I say “organized audience” because we always perform in public, gleaming our audience members from passers by, or unsuspecting produce shoppers, but this will be the first time we play in a venue where people will actually be watching us as part of an evening of bizarre cabaret acts. I am, admittedly, nervous. We’ve never really “performed” like this before, and will be short one group member, who’ll be replaced by another classmate who’s never seen our work and hasn’t rehearsed with us yet. It will all turn out one way or the other, I suppose. And if something does go terribly wrong, we’ll have a chance to redeem ourselves, as we perform again for a second time a fortnight later on the final night of the "Travesty." Anyway we’ll be wearing hats, so that’ll be good.

And speaking of hats, on Friday I also visited the Victoria and Albert Museum with my friend Caitlin to peruse a hat exhibit that is currently going on there. It was great, and if you’re in London reading this, please try to check it out before it goes away on June 1st.

Friday night I also caught the first half of a student production of Hamlet. I say “first half” because I left during intermission and held up in the theatre bar for the rest of the show. I may just be burnt out on the play (it is my favorite, and I even carry a miniature copy of it around in my purse—God Bless the Globe gift shop), so that may have been why I felt the need to leave. That being said, I have only ever walked out on two pieces of theatre, and this was the second. I actually have a lot of opinions on certain choices (mostly directorial) made during the time between 1.1 and the middle of 3.2 (they cut right after "Give me some light: away!"), but I’ll keep them to myself. I will say, though, keep an eye out for one George Taylor. He played Polonius and was by far the best thing up there in my opinion, and was the one actor that made me think, “Maybe I should stay...just until after the arras scene.”

The rest of the weekend was quite literally spent wholly confined to my dorm room, while I cleaned, read, and continued to sleep for a good long while, when not watching downloaded American television on iTunes. And touching on that briefly: some of you may have noted an absence in any blog entry relating to the finale of Battlestar Galactica. I have had so many random post-finale discussions, that to delve into one here just seems wasteful. Be that as it may, I will say I enjoyed it, though could have done without the coda, and that I also sobbed through the last thirty minutes or so. And no: I am not ashamed.

Rest in peace, Galactica.

This week I am meeting my RMO group to discuss how our dry run of our research presentation went, and prep a little for our final presentation. I have two meetings with the Ariana group scheduled, THE BAND will perform, and I’ll be catching the first part of Romeo Castellucci’s trilogy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno at the Barbican. I also have a couple days of transcription work at Central, typing out some research presentation or other for £££.

That was a long entry and is probably just an indicator of what the next few weeks will bring: massive fullness. But this I vow: I’ll keep finding time for naps somehow.

"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...

"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.