Sick day

So today I'm not feeling too good, which provides the perfect excuse to stay home from school and write a blog post! Quite frankly, I'd rather be at school, but when my body forcefully orders me to lie down and watch movies for a day I figure I'd better listen.

So... what's been happening? This week was the last week of having improv classes: there's only 3 weeks left in the school year (what???????), so we're gearing up for our final projects. These include:

-An acrobatics presentation, both of a set routine (T-balance forward side roll step half-turn forward roll upward jump two linked cartwheels handstand forward roll full turn jump backward roll straddle backward roll to push-up position shoot through to lie neckspring forward roll jump half turn straddle up to handstand forward roll tuck jump... collapse), and of a free routine, which is fifteen acrobatics moves and fifteen moves of our choice: I'm going to do contact juggling for my fifteen free moves, and Jill is tentatively planning to do a clown version of my routine with a watermelon. It's amazing how much I've learned in acrobatics this year: it's as if all the gaps in my acrobatics knowledge have been filled! So exciting.

-A presentation of the 20 Movements, which are twenty mime-type movements that we've learned throughout the year: they're kind of like the 10 Commandments of LISPA, except there's 20 of them and they're more like the 20 Exhausting Exercises That Ask Unanswerable Questions. We have to string them together in whatever order we choose and present them alone in front of the whole class and all the teachers. Apparently we'll be focusing mainly on these in class from now on.

-A space lab project on "Passions": we choose one passion (love, hate, fear, lust, grief, etc.: I chose fear), and create a "portable structure" based on it, which means a structure that "doesn't like to be put down" and that is dynamic when picked up and carried around. "....huh?" is a perfectly acceptable reaction to this one, I'm not sure I get it either.

-A group observation, where in groups of 5-8 we observe real life places based around a theme and create a piece of theater based on our observeations. This is as specific as the assignment gets, which is terrifying of course. My group started with food as our theme, and yesterday we went to observe at the Billingsgate Fish Market at 7am. It was really amazing, lots of dead fish, live shell-fish and eels, styrofoam, wellies, and wet floors. We met a loquatious veteran fish trader named Roger who told us all about fish, cooking them, entertaining young ladies, the War, etc. etc. etc., and who offered to let us come work with his team for a night! We're actually going to take him up on it, so I'll hopefully be posting about my fishy night sometime next week.

Whew! And on top of that there's work, and travelling to plan. Oh, I haven't mentioned this yet: I'm going on an epic young-adult European tour this summer! The itinerary involves meeting Becky in Rome, thence to Venice, Salzburg, Munich to see Hilde, on through the south of France to Barcelona (by myself!), then on to Athens and from there to Crete to do a theater piece for one of my classmate's wedding, then back to Athens to see it for real, and back home to London. It's going to be quite the adventure, I really can't wait!

So that's life at the moment! Or rather, I'm looking forward to all this in the near future, but for now I'm going to make a cup of tea and watch The Full Monty on youtube. :)

Fun busking story!

So today I went out busking again, after buying a wig and spray-painting it green, along with my old tattered jazz shoes, so my entire outfit was green. I made about 40 pounds, a buck thirty, and a Euro, but more interestingly I got propositioned by a fellow street-performer. He's a Romanian dancer named Silvio (yes, Silvio), who wears a red military-type coat and sunglasses and does popping and locking to techno music. He came up to me when he first got there and suggested that I add wings to my costume (which was a good suggestion, and I'm considering it), and pretty much straight off asked me out to coffee. I agreed, since he seemed like a nice enough guy, but warned him that I had a boyfriend, so if that was his motive he was out of luck. He then asked me if I ever cheated on my boyfriend, and said, "But you could have two boyfriends!" After our sets, we went over to the coffee bar near the Eye, and he bought me a Snickers, then proceeded to tell me that he doesn't like Romania because there's too many gypsies who do bad things and he doesn't want to be associated with them, that he thinks that the economic downturn was caused by fraud devices in ATM's, and that he's just broken up with his girlfriend because he thought she was cheating on him with his roommate. He then informed me that I was sexy, but not beautiful ("I like sexy girls better than beautiful girls"), and asked me to come back to his house to make a "video". Of course I declined, and left soon thereafter.

........what?????

First Embankment busking

So today I went busking next to the London Eye for the first time. I've done this before in Boston and Munich, but I haven't been out for several years now. In case you don't know, I do contact juggling, which involves creating an optical illusion with a clear acrylic ball that seems to make the ball float: tourists love it. Today I went out in a green dress with make-up, and I think I'm going to invest in a green wig as well: the bigger/crazier your costume, the more money you make.
I'm planning to go as often as possible to make money for travel this summer, especially after my experience today. It takes about an hour to bike there, a 15 mile round trip, so the commute isn't too bad. And on a rather dreary Wednesday afternoon during a Tube strike I made about 50 pounds in three and a half hours (plus an American nickel, a coin from the Czech Republic, and a handful of Euro). The set-up down there is perfect for street performing: it's a wide boulevard next to the Thames, with tourists a-plenty drawn to the London Eye and no hostility from the cops. It even has trees to stand under, which is very important for what I do (if I stand in the sun, the ball can burn me). And the competition is certainly not overwhelming or hostile: today there were a couple guys in silly costumes talking to the tourists, some iguanas riding bikes, and an all-blue guitar player, all of whom were very chill. There are plenty of tourists to go around.
So I think I'll go back tomorrow, since we don't have school yet again (stupid Tube strike!). Crazy stories to come, I'm sure! :)

Summer!

It's finally summer! After months of cold and rain and general dreariness we are now blessed with green things everywhere, birds a'chirping, weather in the 70's, days that are actually sunny (interspersed with more dreariness, of course), and the near constant jangling of our neighborhood ice cream truck, which plays Yankee Doodle Dandy, strangely enough.

School has been moving ahead at a frighteningly rapid pace: we've moved on to character work now, which feels like an appropriate culmination for the year. The first week of this term was spent exploring a character based on a person we observed (in my case, a co-worker), and mine turned out to be a rather dumb loud-mouthed girl named Diamond (I wish you all could meet her, she's a kick in the pants!). This week we're working on another character, preferably one very different from the first, and my second character is turning out to be a neurotic librarian named Roxanne. Apparently our next assignment will be the "quick change," ie: 3 actors, 6 characters. Should be extremely exciting and frustrating, I'll be sure you tell you all how it goes. In addition to all this, we also have the final projects looming over us. The first one is The Twenty Movements, which is a series of technical movements that we've been learning throughout the year (eg: swimming, climbing a wall, rowing a boat, hitting things with sticks...): we perform them individually, and it's up to us to structure them how we like. The second one is a group piece, where we choose a theme or place, go out and observe, and create a piece of theater (which is as specific as the guidelines were). So there's lots to do and think about, and it's only going to get busier: yay!

As for the last month, I had the great joy of having my other half here with me, which is also my excuse for not updating in so long. The break was really really nice: it was wonderful to forget about school and do things like eat out in restaurants, see movies, go biking, and travel... to Poland! We went to Krakow to visit my friend Lauren for five days in the middle of the break, and it was quite the experience. I'd never before been to a place so recently and heavily involved in war, and the atmosphere of oppression and loss was kind of overwhelming. Just an example of the awareness of the past: in the town center, there was a beautiful old church with a tall tower from which a bugler would play a tune every hour. He always stopped abruptly at the same point in the song, apparently to commemorate a bugler who was shot by an enemy archer while playing. We also went to Auschwitz and Birkenau, which was something I'm very glad to have done, and not sure I could ever do again. On the lighter side, we got to eat a ridiculous number of pierogies, see a random brass band dedicating a trolley, ride a ferris wheel at night, visit a salt mine, and lots of other wonderful things (http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2024163&id=4101276&l=91ced377ce for pictures). Overall, it was a really nice trip, and it was good to get away from London.

And back to London... it seems that we won't be moving after all. The hassles of finding a new house, paying a deposit, notifying everyone of our change of address, changing our utilities and internet services, and moving all our furniture seem to outweigh the difficulties we face here. And those difficulties sure make for some good stories, for instance, part of our fence burned down a couple days ago! Our new neighbors decided that it would be a great idea to burn everything in their backyard, which ended up including our fence. The damage:


It was quite the adventure that afternoon: Ana, the neighbor and I were out there with buckets of water, spraying down the fire out the bathroom window with the showerhead, and then the fire fighters came and ran a hose through our hall... so amazing.

And that brings us up to date, I think! More to come in the following weeks...