This week is taking on a much different flavor than the first two, and I probably won’t have much time to post for the rest of my time here (all four days of it. Jeez, it’s gone by fast!) But I wanted to get at least one more good one in before I get home.

This morning’s training was really interesting. It was pouring rain, and we didn’t go running for the second day in a row, and oddly I’m really missing it. Instead, we started right into training in the space, and it was a technical and object-oriented training.

I can’t remember now (and I’m too lazy to check) what I wrote about the day that I cried all through the morning training. But part of my frustration and exhaustion was the fact that Matthew kept insisting I climb the silks (spanish web, tissu, that fabric that hangs from the ceiling that aerialists use) over and over again, higher than I was doing; but I felt out of energy, and I had hit a point where I literally could not lift myself off the ground at all any more, despite having successfully climbed it plenty of times before. To be on the brink of frustration and then to have someone keep demanding you do something that you don’t want to do, that hurts to do, and that you feel you can’t do is…well, it’s the sort of thing that makes me want to cry. Which I did, then.

Anyway, ever since then Matthew has been pushing me back at those damn silks, over and over again, as my personal challenge. He saw me hit a wall, and the training here is all about confronting your limitations, and so he sends me back, over and over. And I work on them until I run out of energy or courage and then escape and do some other training until I am pulled back to the silks. It is simultaneously infuriorating and gratitude-inspiring; this is provocation I have not yet learned to do for myself, to push myself to keep doing something that is increasingly painful. But I hadn’t yet learned to deal with this limitation by this morning.

In the space there is also a net hanging from the ceiling, suspended at three different points. I’d been eyeing it for days since they hung it, without having the opportunity or the guts to climb up into it, though several other folks had and I’d seen how it worked. This morning I had a lot of energy and the net was available and I clambered into it with assistance from a fellow student, had a good time in there for a while (it’s really pretty fun) and came down. I had explored it to my satisfaction for the time being.

But shortly afterward in the training, Matthew paired me up with another intensive student, Kevin, the other student who was using the silks in his solo piece. He told us to work on the silks and the net, to be together but switching off, and to stick with these objects. He also forbade anyone to help me get into the net, and my first time getting into it alone was an arduous chore (though Jeremy, another woman in the company, did show me how first.)

So we worked like that for the rest of the training, Kevin and I, and it was alternately brutal and wonderful, and sometimes both. After we figured out that you could go straight from the silks to the net and vice versa, Matthew came up to us and said “Great! Now you can go from one to the other, you don’t need to touch the ground any more.” Kevin and I laughed in an appalled kind of way, but Matthew was serious, and for a full half hour we worked and traveled and related without touching the ground once.

I can’t write any kind of description that would make you understand how difficult this training was for me. There were moments when I thought I might cry again; but I had a good partner in Kevin, and he kept me sane just by returning my gaze when I was ready to freak out. But my arms were burning, and I was working a good deal higher above the ground than I usually do, but the swinging out on the silks from the net was actually really glorious, and the sudden ability to do more with the things that have been stumping me for over a week now was closer to freedom than I had been. My back is covered with rope burns from the net and I wear them as badges of pride. I haven’t overcome those bastards, but I made headway, and it felt good.

Today there was our final Tae Kwon Do class (sad…I had gotten to really look forward to it) and postering in town for our final student presentation that happens on Sunday. Then a second talk with Stacey, the founder of Double Edge, in which she elaborated on some of her ideas about theatre from the first time we chatted with her. There was a long digression into making theatre for an audience or not, and how the actors need always to be completely alive onstage as we are in training, to be always improvising, even inside the form of the finished play, so that no one in the audience goes to sleep. To stimulate, to awaken, to excite–these are the things that Stacey wants to do with her theatre.

Tonight, we started training as usual, but after a few minutes it became a work session, shaping the pieces that we are beginning to make that we’ll be showing in a few days. It was long and we ended late, and I’m beginning to get the sense that our time off is going away. We already know that we don’t get a day off this week; by the time I get on a plane to go home, I will have worked in this pace for eight days straight. Oddly, that doesn’t seem daunting at all. I have a ton of energy today still, even though it’s nearly two in the morning still. I better go drink some warm milk and try to sleep.

Love to you all! I owe a bunch of you emails that you certainly won’t see until sometime next week. Thank you for stickin’ around and keeping me sane. Till next time,
Alissa