Day One - for real

Holy Crap – I am exhausted and totally feel like that Farside cartoon where the dude’s brain is full. So – restless sleep last night– which is not unusual at this point – really – I described the few days leading up to today as wave upon wave of anxiety attacks. Just too much to think about and most of it unknown. How will my body hold up? Where am I living? Who will my roommates be? How will I sort out a whole new set of daily routines? So – yea – basically like being a first year college student again – only now with a more finely honed sense of adult worry.

So – by 5:00 am I am WIDE awake – after finally passing out some time after 11:30 when the hoot owl jazz trio stopped their be-boppin and scatin’. So I lie in bed till 6:00 – get up, stretch – which I will proceed to do like five times today – shower – and wander over to the dinning hall. By 7:00 it is basically me and the early riser dancers. I come back to my apartment, change, and wander over to the theatre – like at least a half an hour early. Fortuitously I got to chat with Anne Bogart for a short bit – mainly about what it is like to be in charge of stuff and how nice it is to just be a student again. More stretching before Viewpoints.

Broken into two groups of 30 – we started with Viewpoints while the other group started with Suzuki (it flip-flops every day). I fully expected us to be running around and jumping and stuff, but Anne led us through the hour and a half familiarizing ourselves with each other’s names and a bit about each person. My tidbit about my name is my title proved to be a powerful mnemonic. But by the end of the class we all knew each other,  which was quite nice.

On to Suzuki – the thing that has kept me awake and freaking out for like a year. Will Bond taught today and gracefully eased us into it. Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, but we got some nice bite sized chunks today. Slow and quick plié movement – sometimes with text, sometimes with out. By the end of doing this for a few minutes I reconfirmed how amazingly unflexible I am, and basically reduced my legs to jelly. Honestly all those damn jump ropes and bike rides seems to have abandoned me at this point. Then it was on to the stomping. In the Viewpoints class it was gratifying to hear a number of folks – folks much younger than I – fret over the physical stuff. I had no idea how my body would respond – will it hurt my knee? Back? Feet? Weirdly I kinda liked the stomping – particularly when we did it for ages and then collapsed to the floor, rose slowly and recited the bit of Three Sisters we had all memorized. Such a fantastic sound.

The afternoon we were broken into three smaller groups. My group had Composition, while the other two were in Dramaturgy and Movement. We started by writing down four first person thoughts on Three Sisters. Shared a few and then went into a discussion of ideograms, pictograms, and ideographs. Leon gave a nice presentation on this. Made me wish I had brought my Eisenstein books with me. From there the instructions were to sketch two ideograms to be staged – one representing happy and the other loss. I have to give a shout out to Tim Miller here for those lessons on picking something direct and physical. Working in a group of four some movements were more complex than others, and given the time constraint to work in that makes it tough with a group. But not impossible.

Then, once staged, we discussed montage – again – I longed for my Eisenstein – and Meyerhold as well. Leon gave a nice presentation on this also. So – now the goal was to take the 8 pieces and arrange them into a montage with five distinct settings. We shaped and arranged and finally had them all together when we were given another set of instructions – one group member is now the director and now we need to add all the text we wrote at the beginning to create one seamless piece – all memorized – in 30 minutes – go!

I love that the rules kept shifting – we would head off in one direction only to find we now had to go another way. The final results were really lovely. The inventive use of space, some of the silent moments, some explosive moments all made for great variety. It was interesting, however, that most of the pieces started with joyful or more lively pieces but all sort of drifted toward loneliness, isolation, or separation. Must be something about Chekov that moves in that direction.

Lastly we were broken up into groups of four and given an assignment to create a 10-minute site-specific piece (with a huge list of elements to include) by next Monday. I was grouped with Zoe, Emma, and Miranda. Miranda is a Skidmore student, so she took us on a lovely tour around campus to look at some interesting spaces. Next step tomorrow is to chat a bit about the text and start shaping the piece. A long and busy day. One more series of stretches and then bed.