Three Hun Dread

The last of these I did was "

One Hun Dread

." Why -- oh why -- would I skip the poor, hypothetical "Two Hun Dread"? Why, instead of attempting to memorialize my two-hundredth entry, did I write about coulrophobia (see

1/28/08

)? Well, Dear Reader, 200 simply isn't a terribly interesting milestone for me, especially after 100. It would be too much like clockwork and, besides,

300

is a really impressive number,

absurdly chiseled abs

or no. After all, threes are funny, and the over-riding (and often over-ridden) theme of this here 'blog is something called

The Third Life

(TM). So happy Three-Hun-Dread, Odin's Aviary! If I were a wizard of web video, I would compose and post a montage episode a la

Three's Company

('twould feature things like my earliest entries with their charming naivete, the entries that got me in hot water with a director, and a misty-eyed moment from the recent birth of

Loki's Apiary

). Alas, I am not, so instead I'll stick to my usual thing and write at excessive length on a variety of subjects conjoined with a barely cohesive argument.

Me, I'm a pretty big fan of anniversaries. They're usually charted by increments of time, but I feel that anniversaries are essentially an honoring of cycles, and so feel justified in marking them by a number of occurrence as well as by specific dates. What, then, is the cycle I'm celebrating here, apart from the mechanical fact of this being my 300th entry? It seems to me that this 'blog is a cycle of examination more than anything else. I'm grateful for every opportunity I can take advantage of to make a little more sense out of myself and my work, and the Aviary has been an incredible (and [it seemed at its inception] somewhat unlikely) tool in helping me to focus my consideration of my work, as well as to present that consideration for public review and accountability. The Aviary averages a very modest 30 page loads a day, but the key there is that

I never can be sure who's reading

. Think of that what you may, it leads me inexorably to the conclusion that honesty is the only policy reliable enough on which to base what I share here. I try not to think of it as therapy, but must confess that it serves similar purposes.

It's better than that, though, because all of you are reading and -- occasionally -- contributing. It's a dialogue, albeit one dominated by my topics and moderation, and this is key to the sustainability of the 'blog thus far. I have to admit that I function much better with an audience. Even the idea of an audience improves my performance. So thank you, Dear Reader. Even if you've never commented here, you have motivated me beyond any journaling experience prior to this moment. And this one. And this one.

There's no substitute for real-world experience and communication, of course, and I've had quite the dose of both in the past week. My days were spent

teaching high school

, my nights in

auditions and rehearsals

, and my weekend contained a

wedding

and a

reunion

. (Small wonder then that I have anniversaries on the brain.) I would think occasionally during this time of this here 'blog entry, aware it was coming up, worrying at first it might land in the midst of my North Pocono journaling, then wondering what on earth I had to say about the Aviary and life in general now-a-days. I came up with nothing conclusive, which is in keeping with my usual approach here. My experiences over the week, however, have had some culminating effects on me. It's been a little like living on a television show; it's been that episodic. This week has very little of the promise of such unique experiences, which is just fine. It gives me time to reflect. It also gives me time to prepare my constitution as best I can for Saturday . . . my bachelor party. (After which there may be a little break from 'blogging, the which may involve much laying about and nursing inescapable injuries to my physique and psyche.)

Weddings can be seen as first anniversaries or, at least, the promise of anniversaries to come. At the wedding I attended on Saturday, the father-daughter dance was especially beautiful. I noticed, as they danced, a recent father sitting with his daughter on his lap and I wondered if he had in mind what I did. We don't dance with great regularity now-a-days. This makes the father-daughter dance a little archaic but, then again, it also increases the likelihood that it is indeed the last time a father will dance with his daughter. Ceremonies like this are sort of our opportunity to lay out our intentions to the world and say, "Okay: Sock it to me." They're deliberate, and so can be perceived as a little stale or obligatory, but I actually find most of them to be quite bold and as a result necessary. We never know which promises are made to last, which dances will be our last, and so it is quite important to occasionally stand in the face of chance and conduct a simple ritual. It says, "This is what I will do, this is who I am." And at anniversaries, we get to relive that moment, whether it worked out for us or not.

It's part of my philosophy that our smallest actions have far-reaching effects (see

9/10/08

), both in terms of time and space (geeks: relax; not implying they're mutually exclusive parameters). What, then, of our more grand actions, our lives lived out through continuous practice and commitment and recommitment? I'd start by suggesting that what we perceive to be our "grand actions" are probably, mostly, woefully inconsequential in comparison to how important they seem to us. My 300th entry, just as an example. But regardless of how our perceptions of our actions compare to their actual grand-scheme import, I believe they benefit from continuation. I believe in commitment as being something valuable in and of itself, if for no other reason than the fact that it keeps the story moving and, thereby, keeps it unpredictable. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? What note will it end on? The difficulty in perceiving the results of our long-term actions accurately lies very much in our involvement. This is a forest? Is not. It's just ... um ... a lot of trees ... a surrounding of trees ...

This part of my philosophy is one of the things about me that keeps me coming back (keep on comin' back) to theatre. In theatre work, the process is long and developmental, and collaborative. You get to see the ping-ponging energy of ideas passed in real time, in a real space with (relatively) real people. Even into the run of performances, the actions keep developing, keep changing, keep contributing something new to the dialogue-at-large. Everything we do has the potential to work this way, I think. It's just that theatre work affords me the best opportunities that I've found thus far for doing it well. And hey: If you want to

really

witness first-hand the repercussions of sustained work, go teach high school theatre. Seriously. Talk about changes. Changes are all anyone's about at that age range, though they hardly notice it, for all the changing taking place (see above: forest/trees). Last week's work afforded me so very many opportunities to reflect on my own high school experiences that I came out of it with an unanticipated sense of clarity. Who knew teaching gym classes was a route to clarity? I'm savoring said clarity for as long as it may last. Oh look: it's a forest!

I had yet another unexpected return to high school last night, when I met Friend Kara for dinner. She was in town visiting her dad, and managed to make a little time to reunite in person, our Facebook(R) reunion a thing accomplished weeks ago. Kara was my very first, really real girlfriend, and we were both deeply involved with the theatre program at good ol'

James W. Robinson Secondary

(What the...?! When did they get that Georgetown-looking clock installed out front?). On the heels of my first high school immersion since attending, Kara and I caught up and reviewed our notes. There was surprisingly little talk of theatre, actually, possibly because Kara has in recent years moved on to other long-term activities. We focused instead on the delights of adult perspective on youthful dramatics, and on acknowledging that for all that additional perspective, we don't feel all that different from who we were when we met. These people we've been, they live on, and get added to. Like a good collaboration, the process of understanding oneself has a lot to do with finding agreement and building upon it. "Yes, and..."

It's good to have the opportunity to look back on the building, and forward to more of it. Wheresoever it may lead.

North Pocono High: Day 5

It is done. Our five-day residency at

North Pocono High School

under the auspices of the

NEIU

wrapped today, and I must admit that it has been even more of a learning experience for me than I had anticipated. It's a good policy the NEIU has, of ensuring at least an initial five days' work for new rostered artists. It was coincidence that

ETC

had an association with

Geri Featherby

, and she snatched us up for these free (for the school, that is) introductory days. It may have a made things easier on us, ultimately, to be supported and endorsed by a teacher who knew so well what kind of work we had created, and what we could offer the school. I still feel that we learned an incredibly useful lesson or two about curriculum-building and teaching within a high school setting. Going in, I felt fairly prepared, backed up by years of experience teaching workshops to all manner of groups. Now I know how wrong I had been, and how much I've not only learned, but have yet to learn.

Wherever possible, we wanted to make today about pulling together the various experiences of the week into unified, practical application. The approach we took in the Shakespeare class was to put a lot of control into the students' hands. We began warming up before the period began, and spent very little time with it in the actual class period, in order to maximize class time for scene work. We divided them into their groups for their assigned scenes for

Taming of the Shrew

, then split them in two halves for Heather and I to work amongst. For approximately half an hour we moved from group to group, offering suggestions for the work they would present to their peers at the end of the period, emphasizing the lessons in specificity, improvisation and character-building that we taught throughout the week. I had three groups, and had to move rapidly between them. If it hadn't been so busy, it would have been frustrating, to have so little time. However, we saw progress, and at the end every group performed a part of a scene to good improvement. I watched and enjoyed, bitter-sweet with the desire to continue working with them, excited to think of

Zuppa del Giorno

's approaching foray into Shakespeare's world. At the end, we thanked them, and they thanked us back, all like fellow collaborators. I hope to see them again before too long.

The gym classes, of course, didn't have the same daily consistency of our other courses, so there was very little emotional context to our work for those two periods. We learned some good lessons on how to wrangle massive groups for acrobalance yesterday, and applied them to good effect. Both yesterday and today I used squat-thrusts for the initial warm-up, and noticed that these worked well if you didn't warn the students what they'd be doing. I asked them to squat, then go into a plank (or push-up position), then squat again and stand. Then I just did the same thing all together with a four count, and everyone quickly got the idea with a minimum of commentary. It helps with such exercises to be a little competitive with the teenagers. (Helps, that is, until the next morning.) Aptly enough, both classes were disrupted in one way or another. The first lost their seniors for a group picture, nearly halving our group size. Something of a relief, frankly, for at least my voice. At the end of the second class, a fire drill went off. Still, we got good training squeezed in there. Even if we didn't get to know our students much in these classes, we did become pretty friendly with the teachers, and that was very rewarding. I really feel there was a progress in which they were skeptical of us to begin with -- having very little information as to what to expect from us -- and ultimately came to be satisfied with what we had to teach and how effectively we did it. We discussed teaching techniques for such bizarre circumstances as only a P.E. class can offer, and a couple of the teachers even volunteered that they'd love to get a group to see

The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet

.

Exactly how to culminate our work in the acting class, our last class of the whole experience, was a subject of much discussion betwixt Heather and I. Ultimately, we agreed that it would be good to structure it as much as possible, but to hand the actual creation of a scene or scenes over to the students. We began them with another game, then worked on group counting up to 20 (in which they succeeded). Then we did some "Yes, and..." storytelling in a circle, in which each person contributes a line to a developing story. This ended up being a little superfluous to what they created, but it was our idea that they could use whatever story was told there for source material for their assignment. The assignment was to, within assigned groups ("assigned" because even by the end of the week clear divisions were visible in the class social dynamic), create a scene with a beginning, middle and end, incorporating one rhythm of three, one pratfall and specific first and last lines of spoken dialogue that would be the same for all groups. The topper was that they had only one minute to discuss this scene -- enough to sketch an outline, not enough to avoid improvisation. We did a couple of rounds of this. It was effective insofar as it got the students working together with a minimum of fuss and put an emphasis on improvisation as an acting tool. I still wanted to take them a little farther out of their safety zones, somehow, but have to concede that for many of them this is an ambitious goal for five days' work. I smiled a lot in their presentations, thinking of how much they had to offer to this work, how real they are when they are (however momentarily) focused on the problem at hand more so than their own insecurity. At the class' close, we thanked one another, and a couple of the students who had peeped maybe twice during the whole week went out of their way to say goodbye. I respect my teachers so much more today than I had before this experience.

I don't know what the future holds for the relationship between Zuppa del Giorno and the NEIU. It had been our hope that this partnership would allow us to enhance our presence in a community at large, and compensate us to a degree that made a full-time commitment to that outreach sustainable. However, the NEIU paid us for this initial contract as though Heather and I were a single artist, under the heading "Zuppa del Giorno." The pay is still decent (which just goes to show what a generous organization they are), but won't quite justify my continuous participation when weighed against the time spent away from employment in New York. So, unless we can reach a different understanding, Heather may be in large part taking over the practice of this particular branch of Zuppa del Giorno. I hope not, though. I hope not, because through this experience I can see the tremendous potential for taking our work to another environment and integrating it and ourselves. I hope not because this week has been tremendous for all involved, I believe, and I also believe it will only get better with more experiences. Most of all, it's simply wonderful to participate in discovery.

North Pocono High: Day 4

This has been an incredibly physical day for us. I'd say it stands close to our rehearsal process for

Legal Snarls

for sheer continual physical work. (Though not even close to

Silent Lives

, for which we each became demi-gods of falling down, and from great heights.) In Shakespeare we worked on character archetypes, in P.E. we moved ahead into actual acrobalance instruction, which we continued into the acting class. Most exhausting, really, was the second gym class, for which we have somewhere from sixty to seventy students, the same class we had third period Monday. I could use a good, soothing cup of tea with lemon and honey. Fortunately, my only obligation tonight is dinner with

Friend John Beck

. I'll be sore in the morning, but not for lack of rest and placid recreation.

It was a fitful night of sleep for me, I confess. We were tackling a lot of new stuff today, and I suppose I was still riding out my left-over anxiety from yesterday's interruption. Heather and I allowed ourselves a slow internal warm-up in the process of getting coffee, getting there and getting into a constructive mental space. By the time our first class started filtering in, though, we had found ourselves again, and the class went great. Our sponsor there, Geri Featherby, happened to be there to observe, and wasn't disappointed by the physical characterizations we managed to coax out of that room full of teenagers. It's a lot of fun to explain to high schoolers that, yes, it's perfectly valid to

try

different things, to add their own interpretations to an ongoing cultural conversation. As we explained to them commedia tropes like the dottoring Dottore, full of hot air, and the greedy Pantalone's money-pouch placement (directly over his codpiece), they saw how free they were to interpret a character. Eventually we had a sort of runway demonstration of their contemporary takes on the archetypes. It was very funny, very original, very gratifying.

The P. E. classes were ones we had a lot of uncertainty about. How can we teach safe acrobalance to so many? You may recall that

Friend Patrick

and I had a similar class size at the

KC/ACTF of 2007

, but that was all college-age theatre enthusiasts. Here were we dealing not only with a mixed group of high-school ages, but ones who had neither heard of our work, nor had any immediate context for what we relatively strange persons were about to subject them. In acrobalance, there are inescapable challenges regarding trust. It seemed we had unintentionally set a similar challenge for ourselves and our students simply in proposing to teach them this skill. It went . . . great. Really. It did! My voice may be a little gravelly (read: extra sexy) for a week or more, but the students were attentive and interested and -- and this is really the best part -- daring. We just taught them an angel, the most core move of the style of acrobalance I learned, but that's plenty scary enough. And everyone had a go for at least one turn of basing, flying or spotting (potentially the most important position). Some tried more than one role. We had them in groups of four, created by first having them make a pair and then match themselves to another pair, which I strongly recommend. It saved time, and got people interacting as members of a team more immediately.

As I said above, the day ended with

still more acro!

This time with our theatre kids. We taught them a thigh stand (just to mix it up a bit), and I was reminded of how effective this work can be with ensemble-building. There are all different types in this class, and I suspect all different motivations for being there. In working on thigh stand, we did it all together, one pair at a time, with everyone else spotting in a tight circle. It was a great feeling. The pair was insulated by their peers, and in this way we managed to get some people to participate who might otherwise have quickly bowed out. I would have preferred that everyone try either flying or basing (a couple opted only to spot) but we had a majority anyway, and some tried both positions. At the end, there was a very good feeling of accomplishment in the class, which is something we've been struggling for most of the week with them.

Rest. Meatloaf (the food; not the music). Tiger Balm (TM). Tomorrow we close the show.

North Pocono High: Day 3

Today was, in many ways, unexpected. We ended up teaching two-and-a-half classes today, because just as we were ready to start the second period, the school went into a lock-down. I was confused by this; I'd never heard the term before. For those of you who haven't spent a lot of time around a high school in recent history, a lock-down is a sort of policy enacted in the interests of the students' safety in a time of crisis, or investigation. On notice, everyone goes into their respective classrooms and lock the doors. Well, one of these got timed for today in such a way that we missed out on teaching second-period Phys. Ed. class. To be fair, the announcement apparently informed people that they could continue teaching (it seemed it was simply for a drug check; they brought in drug-sniffing dogs), but they don't get all the announcements in the gymnasium and so we spent over an hour sitting, silent, instead. It's a good practice, given what can happen in a school these days. I was completely unaware of it prior to today.

Before all that, though, we had a great Shakespeare class in the auditorium. Our emphasis today was on the improvisation tenet, "When in doubt, breathe out," and we worked with the students on diaphragmatic breathing, enunciation and diction, and projection. I've been using horse stance to encourage the students to have a strong base for their breath, and they kind of hate it, but in a good, collective groan kind of way. It's working; they're really learning to relax the parts of their bodies they're not using, to ground themselves and deliver powerful voice from the diaphragm. After breathing drills and vocal warm-ups, we ran them through a diction drill, using:

"To sit in solemn silence

on a dull, dark dock,

in a pestilential prison

with a life-long lock,

awaiting the sensation

of a short, sharp shock

from a cheap and chippy chopper

on a big black block."

Then we practiced as a group throwing our voices to the back corner of the auditorium and delivering dialogue with power, before taking individuals up on stage with a line from their scene work and working them through clarity and intention in delivery. Heather and I would take turns coaching the student on stage and standing at the rear of the space, checking for clarity and projection. It was continued good work from this early group. Sadly, time got away from us again and we didn't get to everyone, but we made sure the rest of the class paid attention and practiced good audience habits. Hopefully some of what we do will stick, and they'll continue a practice. Tomorrow we plan to explore the use of character archetypes in Shakespeare (which I'm very much looking forward to), and we'll be back in the auditorium Friday to pull it all together.

Our one gym class was abbreviated to just barely a half an hour, so we kept the freshmen and sophomores in their street clothes and sped them through stretching and the most basic partner balances. Everyone was fairly hyperactive after the excitement/anxiety of the lock-down, but we managed to come together by the end of the half-period, and circle push-ups are always good for a bonding experience. We've ended every class thus far with this conditioning exercise. The way it works is that you have everyone in a circle (a rather large circle in our case) and put them in the "up" position of a push-up. When you tell them they only have to do one push-up, they relax a bit. When you tell them we're doing them one-at-a-time, and everyone must stay in the "up" position until we're through, they groan, but don't quite grasp just how hard they'll be working by the end. As it progresses, the energy builds, people moan and groan, but they're enduring together, so that by the end you can give them a choice: to keep it up, or join you in a set of ten or twenty push-ups more. Maybe this seems like torture to you, Gentle Reader? I can only say that, if you're there, you feel the camaraderie afterwards.

In our last class of the day, we revisited improvisation and set some new challenges for the students. We began with more team-building games -- group counting again, and blob tag. After a quick review of the improvisation principles, we set the students to two games: What Are You Doing? and Sit, Stand, Lie. In doing these, we asked them to remember to respond with a "Yes, and" attitude, and all that good stuff. WAYD is good for getting students to react impulsively, and rely on one another for their actions, and SSL reminds the participants that they need to pay close attention to one another if they hope to build a story together. The interesting thing about game play in this context is trying to keep the emphasis more on teamwork, less on competition. The games tend to teach themselves in this regard; they work better when people are working together. However, more inexperienced improvisers need encouragement to leave their safety zones, to trust their scene partners more and more . . . and still more. It was difficult to invite this observation in such a short time, but that's just the nature of a school day. If we get one thing across in our remaining days in this class, I'd like it to be a priority for fostering trust, for creating ensemble. Tomorrow we'll tackle this by way of acrobalance work. The physical can often be a quicker teacher than the conceptual.

North Pocono High: Day 2

Remember when I posted about the infamous "sophomore slump" that inevitably occurs with a second night's performance? (See

8/15/07

.) Of course you do! Well: It's more of a guideline than a rule, actually. Today we had a great day of teaching, in our every class. It would be foolish to try and attribute the success to any one general factor. Suffice it to say that whatever else may have contributed, we knew better what we were about today, and so did the rest of the school, and that seemed to grease the wheels just enough to allow everyone to relax and enjoy more.

In Shakespeare we latched on to the improvisation tenet, "When you get stuck, do something physical." Using it as a kind of theme for the day's (read: 43 minutes') work, we warmed them up quickly, played a quick game, and then ran them through three variations on developing strong physical characterization. Typically, we spend at least three workshops of 2-3 hours each on this part, but we wanted to at least point out the tools for them to return to if they are so motivated in future work. We had them walk the room on a grid, taking away the burden of decision-making a bit, then guided them into different postures using body-center specifics, animal forms and appetites to help them discover interesting shapes, pacing and rhythm. They took to it beautifully. My only regret was that we ran right up against the bell, leaving no time to review and process in stillness. We had also hoped to review their texts with them for physical cues and clues to their characters today. We've decided to attack some vocal work (in the large auditorium) tomorrow, and then integrate both days' work into the text Thursday, instead.

Physical Education was much the same for our first period as it had been yesterday, and today was another day for taking our time to lay a groundwork of physical awareness. Neither period had the immense numbers of Monday's third-period class. In the second period, however, we had our first freshman/sophomore group. They did very well indeed. In fact, it was easier to hold their attentions, by and large. It's clear to me that when we see them again on Friday, we'll need to take it slow, make sure everyone is both supported and challenged. Tomorrow is our big challenge in P.E., however, as we'll only see those two classes the one day. With period three today, we demonstrated some of our acrobalance to give them an idea of what we were training them for. It was well-received, and I think we'll start both classes with that tomorrow. And maybe, just maybe, we'll get to partner-stretching sooner so we can go farther with it and offer them some of the insight the classes who have us twice this week will receive.

Finally, the acting class. We had a much better day today. Our strategy for incorporating more game play certainly helped, but I think also the students had simply come to trust us a bit better over the twenty-four hours between. We began with a very quick warm-up, then played "Grandma's Footsteps" (otherwise known as "Red Light/Green Light"). That got them alert, and we brought them in for group counting up, wherein one person counts one number at a time, listening for their turn, trying to get up to a certain number. This was a nice way of reincorporating them as a team while maintaining a sense of play. From there we moved into some of our standard exercises for learning about rhythm, comic threes and stops, or doing one thing at a time. Still in a circle, we did spit-takes, trying to find a distinct beat in each moment (drink - process - spit) and then a rhythm as we continued around the circle. After that, we did the dollar-bill exercise, wherein the students are asked to cross the room on their way to somewhere, discover a dollar bill on the ground, and make off with it. We spent some time on this, and they accepted adjustments very well I thought, neither fighting them nor cowering from repetition. We ended working on staged trips, and trying to make them spontaneous and an event. They did very well and seemed to enjoy the technique work. Tomorrow we see about working that into the improvisation groundwork.

I'm exhausted and, frankly, expect to be every evening this week. We're having some callbacks for background players for

The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet

tonight from 7:00 to 10:00., for which I need to be both acute and participatory. I'ma go nap now . . .