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I woke up this morning in a slightly uncomfortable bed without having slept enough, knowing there were only two showers for the 12 of us, and suddenly it hit me full force that this time I’m not just staying for three weeks, I’m staying for over two months. I got homesick and tired and very far away from everyone I love and wondered if I were in the right place. But too late for regrets–I dragged myself out of bed, got ready inthe nick of time, and left the house with two fellow participants, who were nice enough to wait for me to walk with me down to the farm, which is good because I wasn’t sure of the way yet and I was the last one ready to go. That cheered me up some.

We began the day with a run, not a long one, and I pleased myself by not flagging too badly. I had a rough time on the steepest hill, but it seems like my own very occasional running has kept me in shape enough to keep up, which I’m happy about. Morning training was about giving & recieving pressure with a partner, and then we abruptly switched to partnering with…pieces of fabric. How do you stay as engaged with cloth as you were with a person? Most of us started yanking on the fabric, trying to produce the tension we had just had with our partners, and Matthew and Haley quickly stopped us. How do you treat the fabric like fabric? How do you partner with it, listen to it, respond to it as you would a human being? That exploration turned into something cool and fruitful and informative.

It seems always productive to interact with the physical properties of an object, but I still am not sure how to get from there to interacting with your ideas about an object. Ultimately, just having a conversation with a physical object isn’t satisfying theatre by itself–but last night, I got stuck in my head with only ideas. Today, I had a real nice time with just the physical dynamic of my fluttery white fabric. I asked Matthew this question–how do you take that quality of interacting with the physical dynamic of an object, and use that to interact with the symbolic, the idea content of the object? His answer was just to keep those ideas, stories, questions inside you when you enter the training, and–if I understand him right–relax and let them inform the training that I’m doing, without trying too hard to put it on the thing.

I’m not sure that’s a complete answer. But I’ll work on that next time. I need to decide what to bring into the space ahead of time…I’ll do that during my next personal work chunk.

Since there’s no Tae Kwon Do this time and the design teacher is out of town right now, the day felt like it had a lot of space in it, kicking around at the farm having individual work time. I used it reading a bunch of Arabian Nights tales and looking at pictures of Chagall’s. I’m curious about getting to the showmakin’ part of this endeavor, and what sort of information needs to go into it.

Music felt long. I’m on drums and my part in the song we’re learning is simple and repetitive, and I haven’t figured out how to keep it interesting for myself while the violins etc. learn their much more complicated parts.

More work time–I had a chat with Hannah and another one with Matthew, getting debriefed, catching up. Dinner. Then training.

Today was the day, Stacey announced at the beginning, where we’d be responsible for training ourselves–for doing what we needed to do for ourselves. I haven’t described training yet this time around…and I don’t feel up to it tonight, but you can go to my previous double edge entries (there’s a categories menu on the right side of the screen if you scroll down) if you want to know more about that. Basically, up until today (and remember that everyone else has been here for almost two weeks now) training was always led by a company member with students following. So this was a change. It started hard, and then it got SUPER fun, and we started interacting with each other, and stories started popping up all over the place, and I was happy and flying and reminded myself that this is the thing I came back for. Then, about 45 minutes before the three-hour session was over, I lost it. I totally lost all my momentum, felt self-conscious and afraid and painfully shy, and aborted every impulse I had, over and over again. It was a little depressing. This has happened before, and there are ways to get the juice back, but I didn’t succeed in any of them before the training ended.

Sigh. But there’s nothing to do about it but try again tomorrow. I’m ready. Despite sweating my ass off for hours and hours today, I’m feeling more energetic than I have since I arrived. I hope I can sleep tonight…

I am sore all over like a stiff old lady…

I have much to learn.

Love!
Alissa