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There is so so much to write! I’m struggling with whether to write about the stuff that happened or the stuff that I’m thinking about it. The stuff that I’m thinking about is more interesting to write down, but I don’t think it will make any sense without context. So…this is what I did today, which is typical.

This morning at 10am we convened for our morning training, this one led by Milena, one of the main ensemble. For a little over an hour, we contorted our spines in every possible direction, position, tempo. I have now traveled across a room with my spine fixed in any position you can imagine, as well as undulating in every direction. Good back workout.

Then it was time for Work Hours (getting the farm ready to recieve an audience, preparing the set and other technical work, and doing maintenance chores around the farm.) First I drove into town with Todd to pick up some cardboard and newspaper that we’ll be using for the giant bird puppet we’re going to build. Then we went back to 551 (the student residence, about a mile up the road from Double Edge) and completely reorganized the room-sized pantry, which is full of food belonging to the six chorus members and the five company members and apprentices who live here, so that there’s a clear shelf for public food and everybody has their particular personal spot in the pantry. We scrubbed and swept. Then back to the farm–swept the Milk Room (which is what they call the kitchen because the whole place is a renovated cow barn and the kitchen was, in fact, the milk room) and then got assigned to the garden and the wall project.

This was the best part of the day so far. Grace, a visiting former intern, has been training with us for a few days and was tasked with the project of planting morning glory vines all along the base of a low cement wall that surrounds a raised area (the giant septic system) that will be part of the set for the performance. My job was to wander around in the pine grove finding sticks to drive into the dirt along the wall so the vines could climb them (which I’m told they should do in the scant four weeks before the performance–miraculous!) So I got an armload of sticks, returned to Grace, and we spent two hours stripping branches of pine needles, digging holes with our bare hands into moist dirt, and arranging the branches in strategic and artful ways so the the wall will shortly be completely covered with climbing vines. It was sprinkling rain the whole time, but the work kept us warm, and the conversation was good–two hours flew by, we were about to get more sticks, and suddenly it was 3:30 (time for the group meal of the day.)

We ate pita bread with falafel and homemade tahini sauce and sauteed veggies and Quinoa, courtesy of Gina and Scott, the two chefs for the day. It was delicious.

After clean-up, we had music. We reviewed the Bulgarian folk song in the two-part harmony that we had already learned, and then learned the first verse of another one bulgarian folk song. Then Scott, the music leader, took all the saxophone players (all 5 of them!) outside to work on the song they’ve been playing, and the rest of us jammed with some basic hand-drum rhythms for the next 45 minutes, climaxing with all of us playing together with the wind instruments, and it sounded awesome.

Then a 30-minute break, and then training. For the last three nights (last two for me, since I wasn’t here two nights ago) the company has been rehearsing separately, and the chorus has been training in the Pavilion, Double Edge’s secondary space. It’s interesting to train separately from the company. Suddenly everybody in the room is more or less an equal (collectively, we range from experience with this work from a month to just under a year) and it’s the first time training “alone” for most of us. This experience last night was a struggle; the experience tonight was utterly fantastic, blow-your-mind-out, click-into-place fun. For me, at least.

The experience has inspired me to take another crack at describing what, exactly, the evening trainings consist of. It’s difficult because they’re different every time. You can sum it up, perhaps, as a large group long-lasting physical improvisation, or maybe as a game that you’re all making up together constantly.

As it approaches time for training to begin, people filter into the space silently. (Talking at all is discouraged in the training space.) They stretch, meditate, look at images, do what they need to do to warm up and get into the right place physically and mentally for the work ahead.

Once everybody is present and more or less ready to start (which is an amorphous state that is to be sensed gradually by the participants) one or two people start moving. The movement is often repetitive at first. It usually starts gradually, though it doesn’t have to. As soon as the first proposal is made (jumping up and down on one foot, say, or undulating the spine, or reaching with the arms or with the legs, or going off-balance in extreme slow motion, or doing one-armed pushups or spinning in circles or skipping or any of a million movement possibilities that don’t have easy descriptions) the group joins in. Usually they mimic at first, then start exploring the proposed movement with variations of their own. A guideline for how to do this is to find your limits. Jump higher than you thought you could, reach farther, balance on one foot while crouching lower than you have before, running until you’re out of breath and then a lot more, etc. Quickly, everyone in the room is dripping with sweat.

Gradually, the group splinters. Perhaps there are two or three or four or more clusters of people doing different things. People find each other and begin improvising physically with a shared proposal. Once they find a balance, a purpose, a pattern, a method of traveling, whatever, then the focus of a particular group can shift outward into the room, and toward the other groups or individuals working. That’s when the part that I think of as actual theatre improvisation starts to happen.

Now, I’m describing all this as a linear progression, but keep in mind that in practice, this happens in fits and starts. People go back to the beginning, people jump ahead, not everyone is working in the same stage all the time.

So the groups notice each other. Relationships happen. Sometimes characters happen. When we’re training in the main studio upstairs from the Milk Room (known simply as the Space) this is when the big circusy objects come into play–giant rolling wooden spools that we walk on, aerial silks suspended from the ceiling, a net suspended from the ceiling, stilts, a big hard ball to balance on and walk on, a giant teeter totter–costumes and props come out then too, musical instruments, whatever has been informing the characters that each performer has been working on developing. The group makes a story together. Repetitive movements happen much less now, though people are still training, still pushing and finding resistance–in their bodies, in their movements, in each other. Once the real improvisation starts, the pattern tends to be that stories form, change, vanish, are formed again, some great or half-assed climax is perceptible, things start to fall a little flat and then the director calls the end of the rehearsal. People lie down on the floor for a bit, stretch, write in their journals about what just happened. Sometimes the director will say a few words about the training (usually this is the first speaking of the evening); sometimes everyone is simply wordlessly dismissed.

The whole shebang takes anywhere from 2-5 hours. The amount of time it will take is not set in advance; it finishes when it finishes. Sometimes that means we’re done at 9:30pm; sometimes it means we’re done at 1am.

There is so much that I still haven’t described, but that will have to do as a jumping-off point for making sense out of what I’m writing.

The chorus-alone trainings seem to last on the shorter end of the spectrum; we were heading out by 9:30 tonight, which is why I was so determined to seize the moment to write a proper blog post or two.

After yesterday’s training, two people had spoken up. Kieran, a lovely Irish man who has done an internship here as well as the most recent training intensive, requested that we start the next chorus-only training with some more focused, individually led proposals, since he felt a bit lost and as he put it “didn’t have a training to go back to.” (The repetitive, developed movements at the beginning are a good way to recover the sort of creative freedom that the work inspires if you find yourself flagging in the middle–more on that later.) But he was looking for a methodology, something concrete to focus on and expand into (more on the concrete later, too.) And Grace also spoke up with a revelation that she had had; that while it is different with just peers in the room, it’s worthwhile to spend more energy and commitment on following each other–we all get so independent in a room without the senior company members that we forget to behave like an ensemble.

So tonight. Training began. Somebody started a funny little knee-roll, and I picked it up and tried some new things with it, and then found myself leading, which is a lovely way to hurl yourself into the work–if people are following your movements, then you are responsible for them, and that seems to inspire more sincere effort (in my own case, anyway. I should be working like that all the time, when I’m following and when I’m leading, but in many ways following is harder. More on THAT later too. I hope I’m not promising more than I can deliver here.) So I led for a while, then found myself in a duet with Tadi (Tadea Klein, the 17-year-old daughter of Stacy Klien, the founder of Double Edge. This is Tadi’s 2nd intensive, and she’s fun to work with; doubtless one of the youngest participants in the theatre’s history.) And while Tadi and I led each other around, the rest of the group started working in a different direction.

We rejoined at some point later. People were doing this sort of sweeping arm-movement to the heavens, then undulating down, over and over. Suddenly I realized that for this training, what I was doing with myself was giving it all to God. Over and over, just sweeping myself up and flinging me skyward, giving, giving, giving, praising God. Now, I’m not a particularly religious person, but in that moment, past the point already of physical exhaustion and into the sort of flying beyond-tired space that the endorphins and the reaching create, I really did feel like I was baring myself, laying it all out before the rather indifferent deity who made me, but all the same feeling like it was the most important work I could do, just offering myself to God, over and over again. I almost cried from joy, it felt so pure and so honest and so like my life, over and over. Here I am, God. See me? Feel me? All I am, all I do, I send up as a gift to you. It was an enormous relief.

I got so wrapped up in this communion that I almost didn’t notice the group’s movement morphing. Now the gesture was down, toward the ground. And suddenly I was scooping myself up and flinging me at the Devil, and it felt sly and earthy and sexy and like it was a different part of myself, but still an offering gesture, still a here, take this, this earthy quirky imperfection, all that I am, I am not too good to give to you too, Devil. And then the gesture changed, and we were flinging ourselves at each other, taking all of ourselves and sending it next door, and that was the most fun of all.

Later we split up again. At some point I ended up in a group with Kieran, Grace, and Gina (who has interned and done a bit more work with the theatre, Canadian, hilarious and irreverent), moving slowwwly, reaching with our arms and stretching our feet out before us, and right as I was thinking that, physically, this training wasn’t really all that demanding, gosh I wasn’t even breathing heavy, I noticed the many drops of sweat falling from my hair and hitting the floor in rapid succession.

That’s the beauty of this work. The harder you work, the easier it seems, and it is bewildering when we are so sore in the mornings. There is a transcendent point that you hit in which everything is effortless, light, you are highly aware of all the other bodies and objects in the space, you are fearless. Hesitation and second-guessing of impulse are, if not banished, severely reduced.

Later many of us picked up our drums and we started a nice little procession. The light was fading but we marched outside and trained on the large raised rectangle of grass outside, the septic system with a ground on top. Outdoors defeated our rhythm–there were mosquitos, we tried to use songs we didn’t have down all that well, too many distractions, we got into our heads and lost the momentum, but we did manage to create a reasonably good ending and call the end of training.

The company was still in rehearsals and we knew they would be for a while. Rather than hang out for a few hours and wait for a ride home, I decided to take the 20-minute walk before it was pitch black outside, and so I lit out alone.

The night is so freaking gorgeous here. It rained a little earlier today and the air feels wet and clean. There are two kinds of chirpy somethings–one is crickets, and I have no idea about the other, that makes a more constant, lower-pitched chirping. There are fireflies everywhere! So I walk through bucolic pastureland, one car passing every five minutes or so, and the smells are strong of earth and plant and cow, and it’s warm out, and there’s a creek that I walk by that makes a beautiful quiet musical gurgling, and it’s just heaven. Heaven.

So it was a good day. And these are just the facts–there are a million thoughts swirling around in my head that have to do with them, and stories to tell. I’m going to save them for another post though. I might even put two up tonight–we’ll see how far I get with this second one. From drought to deluge, eh? But who knows when I’ll have an evening off again, so here I am.

Love from Ashfield, Mass.!

Alissa