Though no longer "away," I'm going to keep posting (albeit, less often) to cover my continued activities.
This semester I'm doing a Spring Project, as a dance Independent Study, which will be a short show on April 27th. As part of the course, I have to write up synopses of my journal entries from time to time. Here is the first synopsis:
Historical Context
[Based on my notes from last semester’s contextual studies class and Bim Mason’s book, Street Theatre and other outdoor performance.]
Circus has its beginnings in a variety of sources, some older than civilization. The shaman in prehistoric tribes was one who could summon supernatural forces to heal, judge, or foretell. He was also responsible for organizing rituals and entertaining. Shamans would perform sleights of hand, manipulations, or even acrobatic feats as evidence of their powers. For instance, “surgeries” might be performed by creating the illusion of reaching into a person’s stomach and pulling out figures representing evil spirits. It is also likely that the shamans themselves believed in their own conjurings. Medicine shows and magic healers can still be found throughout India and Asia.
Illusion, manipulation, and other seemingly magic acts were an important early influence on circus as entertainment – as a kind of real magic. Another, which came about especially in ancient Rome and Greece, was the martial arts display, influencing the role of circus as a display of skill and strength. The Colosseum, Circus Maximus, and other gladiatorial and chariot racing arenas were the most popular entertainments of the time. More recently, the earliest instance of the traditional circus industry was created by Philip Astley, an English veteran of the Seven Years’ war who founded “Astley’s Amphitheatre” to demonstrate equestrian skills. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was meant to recreate and embellish conflicts between American Indians and settlers, but entertaining in its displays of martial skill and violence.
With the rise and dominance of the Catholic church throughout the middle ages, other cultures and religions were repressed, and performers of the pagan circus and sideshow arts were forced to travel. What was, long before, serious ritual was transmuted into curiosities and entertainment, sometimes for royal courts and but most often for the public. Such styles of performance gained an air of outsiderness, because the performers were constantly on the move.
Perhaps another topic worth exploring is where the popular entertainments diverged from the “high arts,” since they have such common origins. This has, in my opinion, led to an association of certain performance disciplines with mindless “entertainment,” and others with “art,” when in most cases any type of performance can serve as either. A paper we read in playwriting addresses the origins of the art hierarchy, but doesn’t explore within the performing arts much. Another topic – what separates entertainers from artists, if not the crafts they use?
The history reveals much about what distinguishes circus and sideshow, and what role they may play in society. There is an appeal to something that is on the outside. The big top is built outside of town, the travelling carnival camps by the railroad. Most circus can be seen not in theatres but in the street. There is something so appealing about that, and that sense of magic and ancient ritual mustn’t be lost.
Themes
I would like this show to play on the idea of inversion. This is drawn mostly from the Carnival aspects of circus history. The Carnival was the time before Lent when all rich foods were consumed, taking different forms in different cultures (e.g., Mardi Gras). In medieval England, it would involve the placement of fools and clowns in clergy positions, as the event represented the opposite of the fasting and sacrifice of Lent. (I should look into this with more detail).
The circus is in many ways a world of inversions. Aerialists invert the normal rules of gravity, supported by the ceiling instead of the floor. Acrobats spend more time upside down than upside up. Mime is largely about replacing objects with people. Juggling is a constant switching between dancer and setting, often where everyday objects are stripped of their usual purposes and given life and personality. Classical juggling defamiliarizes the everyday object, taking a hat or cigar box (for example) away from its normal purpose and presenting it as only its characteristic motion.
The way circus and dance affect the audience is also fundamentally different from textual theatre. In a play, there is always a suspension of disbelief. This is especially true of minimalist theatre or physical theatre – the spectator must unconsciously look past the fact that she’s in a theatre watching a show and accept the setting, characters, and events presented. In circus or dance, it is the reality of what is happening that engages the audience, not the replacement of reality. I would go so far as to call this a suspension of belief: a challenge to the spectator to process and accept the events before them. Of course, these two sides are not exclusive. I hope to present, with this show, the circus as an inverted theatre.
The rise of contemporary circus is, in a way, another inversion – a reshuffling of the arts hierarchy.
Saturday, 2 March 2013
Wednesday, 9 January 2013
Circomedia First Years' Christmas Show
The first year students at Circomedia hold a Christmas show each year, as their first performance at St. Paul's church. This comprises final presentations of each specialization, carefully selected to ensure everyone has a chance to perform and put together in a simple cabaret style. Two abstract movement pieces are also included, at the beginning and end of the show, utilizing mixed random and planned choreography from the material of our Creative Movement class. The result is a kind of sampling of what is developed in three months, and a preview of where talents can grow in the coming year.
Most of the day we spent warming up and practicing our own routines. Each of us was in at most 2-3 routines in the show, so there wasn't much to worry about. We had a quick tech run to check the light/sound cues, then a dress run, then went out for some Jamaican food before the show started.
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| Warming up on the stage. |
This is a group of students with performance background, each with particular pre-show traditions. Some joined me in tongue twisters, which I did despite having no lines in the show, others seemed to fidget obsessively with their props. A couple guys were eager to try some makeup, having an excuse to do so. There was a great deal of cuddling on the dressing room floor, taking pictures and videos in costume. Following the TOOP/Todd tradition at the UR, we all linked hands and passed a pulse around the circle while breathing together and saying positive things, before bringing hands in for a (silent) group cheer. It was nice to see a piece of home come through, and though few of us were ever on stage at the same time we all got a sense of this being a group show.
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| Backstage, some juggling and rola bola. |
And so the show began. Each student brought three months' work out for a casual audience. All three of the E&M class's pieces, each with three performers, were selected to be in the show. Each was distinct and professional, devised with the very open instruction to use 'nonconventional and noncontinuous juggling,' and to use only balls, clubs, and/or rings. This meant we could use any numbers of objects, any combinations of them, any music, any style of costume – skill was the only limit.
The couple other pieces I saw from the wings took on a new quality when lights, audience, and additional rehearsal were added. Something about warming up in a professional space brings about a proper concentration and fresh energy to each performer. Though I'd seen all the acts before in Friday performances, during the show itself each seemed new. My group's piece ran much more cleanly than it had the Friday before, probably because we'd practiced it to death the previous day. All went well, and the audience seemed to follow closely, until the last trick – a five-ring separate to the three of us, where Aiden and I each caught two and Dan caught one on his foot. We took three tries, each time only dropping one of the five, and could hear the audience longing for it each time. I looked to the others, realizing that this was possibly the last juggling trick I would perform at this school. Despite the sacred "rule of threes," we took one extra try and landed the trick, to applause greater than I heard the rest of the night. After the show, I'm told, several audience members approached Rod and Seb and complimented them on the quality of the juggling in the show.
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
Last performances here
Here are the E&M presentations from last week. The first is my group's non-continuous routine, for the class assignment described on the video page:
The second is a routine we put together to perform at the Leeds Juggling Convention last Saturday. It didn't run nearly as smoothly there, but seemed to get a good response from the audience. The goal was to combine acrobalance with club passing and manipulation, and for the most part this worked out. Rehearsals were before class started (so, 8-8:45 AM) every day and during lunch breaks, but it was well worth it:
Oh, and we called our group "The Thieving Magpies."
Then at 2AM that night we performed with Slamboree again, at the Beavertown night club, but this time it was on a slippery stage with barely enough space to stand, let alone juggle. I did base some acro on the floor in front of the stage. I'm considering burning those clothes after they were pressed into that floor...
Sadly, these are the last presentations I will have at Circomedia. I will post soon about the Christmas Show, and try to get some of the videos of it.
The second is a routine we put together to perform at the Leeds Juggling Convention last Saturday. It didn't run nearly as smoothly there, but seemed to get a good response from the audience. The goal was to combine acrobalance with club passing and manipulation, and for the most part this worked out. Rehearsals were before class started (so, 8-8:45 AM) every day and during lunch breaks, but it was well worth it:
Oh, and we called our group "The Thieving Magpies."
Then at 2AM that night we performed with Slamboree again, at the Beavertown night club, but this time it was on a slippery stage with barely enough space to stand, let alone juggle. I did base some acro on the floor in front of the stage. I'm considering burning those clothes after they were pressed into that floor...
Sadly, these are the last presentations I will have at Circomedia. I will post soon about the Christmas Show, and try to get some of the videos of it.
Saturday, 1 December 2012
Three shows in two nights, two out of three.
[side note: Half-term break and preparing for the physics GRE delayed editing and publishing on this, hence its lateness]
The week of Halloween, I got my first sample of physical theatre in three shows at St. Paul's church, Circomedia's space for performances and other classes. Halloween night was a double-feature of Tom Wainwright's Buttercup and Superbolt Theatre's Centralia, and the following night was Articulate Elbow's Mother F. It seems the term physical theatre fits anything that is driven more by movement than by speech. It is a crossover between dance and theatre, breaking down the traditional script/character/prop, and is flexible enough to include Commedia dell'Arte, mime, slapstick, clowning, performance art, burlesque, grotesque, and improv. Pieces, such as the ones discussed here, tend to be devised rather than scripted, and often play with the relations of performers to characters, audience, set, space, and props in ways not generally used in drama.
Buttercup
Buttercup was about a forty-minute long one-man show, comprising two monologues with an audience interaction in the middle. Tom takes the role of Buttercup, an overweight woman of less-than-average intelligence or morals, distinguished by a habit of stamping her foot and waving a hand behind her rear, suggesting a cow. Buttercup is a disgusting, dystopic vision of a person in total decline yet content. She never brushes her teeth with the logic that "nobody will ever kiss me anyway," and spends all her time eating junk and watching television reality shows.
Each character was defined by an object, animal or some other caricature, sometimes even casually referring to themselves as such. Two judges on a cooking show were a potato and a fish, for example. At times they referred to themselves as such. A star from "The Only Way is Essex" took on a kind of Popeye physicality, contrasting with his timid and wide-eyed partner. This technique allowed Tom to define mannerisms unique to each character while implying more about their character than the lines could deliver. The Popeye character, for instance, was playing excessively macho in order to compensate his affections toward his male friend.
Most of the local pop culture references were over my head, but I enjoyed it no less. The first story was of Buttercup taking part in Jamie Oliver's experiment of teaching people to make spaghetti and meatballs, so as to motivate them towards healthier eating. She becomes so good at cooking over time that she opens her own restaurant, and then competes on an 'iron chef'-like program called Masterchef. She also discovered that she was pregnant at the time, by noting that she grew "bigger and bigger" until she had "to take a poo, and out came baby!" In a surreal and grotesque twist, Buttercup cooks her stillborn child as her dish in the competition,to the judges' approval and her triumph.
This first monologue bit was smoothly followed by a bit of audience interaction, in character, in which the audience was invited to ask questions about her life or for personal advice or about global matters. The first question, of course, was if Tom thought there was anything wrong with cooking infants. I don't remember the response. Another asked who would win the American election, which Tom confidently answered would be Eddie Murphy.
The second half's story followed along the first's, and was of another of Buttercup's forays into television. This time, after her restaurant burns down and she moves in with other family, she's asked to take part in a version of "The Only Way is Essex" for her own town (Lancashire), a show which I understand to be a bit like the Jersey Shore. The storyline becomes a bit more realistic, but no less funny than the first, with Buttercup falling in love with one of the other stars only to have him taken away by his jealous co-star, an overly-macho man who's secretly in love with him.
The show was an unique experience of theatre. In my experience, narrative monologues are some of the most difficult to deliver, since they don't give an immediate scenario for the actor to be in. The usual approach to telling them is to tell the story while living in it – to ignore the fact you're telling a story and act as though you're living it. The audience interaction of this show, from asking to borrow lipstick at the beginning to the bit in the middle, served to break this illusion and make it clear that when Buttercup was speaking, she was actually telling the story to us. The show was her telling this story, and
Mother F
Mother F defines itself as a "raucous and touching tale about mothers, told through physical theatre, ridiculous choreography, ghostly projections and hilarious songs.." Unfortunately, about the best I can of Mother F is that it at least seemed like the performers involved were enjoying themselves. The style of humor was cheesy and weak, seeming to scream "hey, look! We're entertaining you!" with an ill-defined storyline broken up by painfully bad standup bits. The performers took the roles of two sisters rummaging through their mother's old things in the attic, and each object conjured up a memory. The use of props to create flashbacks is a solid technique that was effectively done, if a bit unclear in revealing the family's background. It was clear that the mother had at one point been a burlesque dancer, and that the older sister had left for New York after college, and that the younger sister was pregnant as a teenager, but these points were more factual than real. The scene of the sisters talking about the pregnancy and departure was touching, but otherwise I had no sympathy for the characters. The backgrounds were presented out of order, and there was no progression of experiences that could bring any kind of bond between the sisters and their mother.
I skipped the talkback session, but am told that the performers explained their style as drawing from vaudeville and cabaret, styles of disjoint and blatant humor that was certainly present in this show. Perhaps this would have done better with a different theme – not motherhood and mothers, a subject most audiences will have strong feelings about. Mothers were cheekily presented as, maybe, they may feel sometimes – machines that tidy toys and change diapers – but with no deeper sense of the profound relation between mothers and their children. In addition, the show often dismissed fathers in the hackneyed 'dopey hubby' stereotype, with no real role in their childrens' lives. "Mommy takes care of me, but Daddy is so funny!" As someone raised with two brothers by a widowed father, I took some offense to this.
Overall, if the cast had taken less time to try to make the audience laugh and more time giving them something to connect with, Mother F could have been a light-hearted take on the role mothers have in our lives. Though there were some heartfelt moments, these were swiftly drowned by shtick.
Centralia
Unlike with Buttercup or Mother F, the three remain the same characters throughout the show while recreating different scenes of their home life and telling the story of the Centralia mine fire. They discuss their daily ritual of taking gas measurements and soil samples, and how they transport them around town by balloons and ziplines. They tell the almost-tragic story of a boy who was nearly killed by falling in a chasm, and survived because his shoes protected his feet, which prompts a quick dance number on the importance of protective footwear.
While most of the show was an ironically lighthearted comedy about a tragic story, there was a nervousness to the characters that flickered up now and then, like they were held at gunpoint and told to be happy. It seemed that the characters were a little too eager to prove how much they loved living in Centralia, despite its emptiness and dangers, because admitting a single fault would crack their illusion of how wonderful a place it is. The ending of the show did just that. When one character tells the audience that he's requesting a work permit and visa to come live in Bristol, the realness of the show breaks down. The three start moving in a slow motion struggle, with lights darkened or flashing, miming melodramatic interactions. The abstract bit builds to a peak, when a papier-mâché balloon flies across the stage on fishing line, illuminated by a single flashlight, as recordings of former Centralia residents play. The finish is beautifully dark and abstract, a final acknowledgement that the source of their comedy has been a tragedy.
As a final note: the American accents were pretty good. It took some time for me to catch that they weren't American actors, though they clearly weren't from Pennsylvania – the men sounded more midwestern, and the woman sounded Jewish New Yorker.
The week of Halloween, I got my first sample of physical theatre in three shows at St. Paul's church, Circomedia's space for performances and other classes. Halloween night was a double-feature of Tom Wainwright's Buttercup and Superbolt Theatre's Centralia, and the following night was Articulate Elbow's Mother F. It seems the term physical theatre fits anything that is driven more by movement than by speech. It is a crossover between dance and theatre, breaking down the traditional script/character/prop, and is flexible enough to include Commedia dell'Arte, mime, slapstick, clowning, performance art, burlesque, grotesque, and improv. Pieces, such as the ones discussed here, tend to be devised rather than scripted, and often play with the relations of performers to characters, audience, set, space, and props in ways not generally used in drama.
Buttercup
 |
| Image courtesy of Total Theatre Reviews |
Buttercup was about a forty-minute long one-man show, comprising two monologues with an audience interaction in the middle. Tom takes the role of Buttercup, an overweight woman of less-than-average intelligence or morals, distinguished by a habit of stamping her foot and waving a hand behind her rear, suggesting a cow. Buttercup is a disgusting, dystopic vision of a person in total decline yet content. She never brushes her teeth with the logic that "nobody will ever kiss me anyway," and spends all her time eating junk and watching television reality shows.
Each character was defined by an object, animal or some other caricature, sometimes even casually referring to themselves as such. Two judges on a cooking show were a potato and a fish, for example. At times they referred to themselves as such. A star from "The Only Way is Essex" took on a kind of Popeye physicality, contrasting with his timid and wide-eyed partner. This technique allowed Tom to define mannerisms unique to each character while implying more about their character than the lines could deliver. The Popeye character, for instance, was playing excessively macho in order to compensate his affections toward his male friend.
Most of the local pop culture references were over my head, but I enjoyed it no less. The first story was of Buttercup taking part in Jamie Oliver's experiment of teaching people to make spaghetti and meatballs, so as to motivate them towards healthier eating. She becomes so good at cooking over time that she opens her own restaurant, and then competes on an 'iron chef'-like program called Masterchef. She also discovered that she was pregnant at the time, by noting that she grew "bigger and bigger" until she had "to take a poo, and out came baby!" In a surreal and grotesque twist, Buttercup cooks her stillborn child as her dish in the competition,to the judges' approval and her triumph.
This first monologue bit was smoothly followed by a bit of audience interaction, in character, in which the audience was invited to ask questions about her life or for personal advice or about global matters. The first question, of course, was if Tom thought there was anything wrong with cooking infants. I don't remember the response. Another asked who would win the American election, which Tom confidently answered would be Eddie Murphy.
The second half's story followed along the first's, and was of another of Buttercup's forays into television. This time, after her restaurant burns down and she moves in with other family, she's asked to take part in a version of "The Only Way is Essex" for her own town (Lancashire), a show which I understand to be a bit like the Jersey Shore. The storyline becomes a bit more realistic, but no less funny than the first, with Buttercup falling in love with one of the other stars only to have him taken away by his jealous co-star, an overly-macho man who's secretly in love with him.
The show was an unique experience of theatre. In my experience, narrative monologues are some of the most difficult to deliver, since they don't give an immediate scenario for the actor to be in. The usual approach to telling them is to tell the story while living in it – to ignore the fact you're telling a story and act as though you're living it. The audience interaction of this show, from asking to borrow lipstick at the beginning to the bit in the middle, served to break this illusion and make it clear that when Buttercup was speaking, she was actually telling the story to us. The show was her telling this story, and
- For a review, check out Total Theatre Review.
Mother F
 |
| Image courtesy of The Royal Exchange. |
Mother F defines itself as a "raucous and touching tale about mothers, told through physical theatre, ridiculous choreography, ghostly projections and hilarious songs.." Unfortunately, about the best I can of Mother F is that it at least seemed like the performers involved were enjoying themselves. The style of humor was cheesy and weak, seeming to scream "hey, look! We're entertaining you!" with an ill-defined storyline broken up by painfully bad standup bits. The performers took the roles of two sisters rummaging through their mother's old things in the attic, and each object conjured up a memory. The use of props to create flashbacks is a solid technique that was effectively done, if a bit unclear in revealing the family's background. It was clear that the mother had at one point been a burlesque dancer, and that the older sister had left for New York after college, and that the younger sister was pregnant as a teenager, but these points were more factual than real. The scene of the sisters talking about the pregnancy and departure was touching, but otherwise I had no sympathy for the characters. The backgrounds were presented out of order, and there was no progression of experiences that could bring any kind of bond between the sisters and their mother.
I skipped the talkback session, but am told that the performers explained their style as drawing from vaudeville and cabaret, styles of disjoint and blatant humor that was certainly present in this show. Perhaps this would have done better with a different theme – not motherhood and mothers, a subject most audiences will have strong feelings about. Mothers were cheekily presented as, maybe, they may feel sometimes – machines that tidy toys and change diapers – but with no deeper sense of the profound relation between mothers and their children. In addition, the show often dismissed fathers in the hackneyed 'dopey hubby' stereotype, with no real role in their childrens' lives. "Mommy takes care of me, but Daddy is so funny!" As someone raised with two brothers by a widowed father, I took some offense to this.
Overall, if the cast had taken less time to try to make the audience laugh and more time giving them something to connect with, Mother F could have been a light-hearted take on the role mothers have in our lives. Though there were some heartfelt moments, these were swiftly drowned by shtick.
- A positive review: The Royal Exchange.
Centralia
 |
| Image courtesy of Total Theatre Review |
Unlike with Buttercup or Mother F, the three remain the same characters throughout the show while recreating different scenes of their home life and telling the story of the Centralia mine fire. They discuss their daily ritual of taking gas measurements and soil samples, and how they transport them around town by balloons and ziplines. They tell the almost-tragic story of a boy who was nearly killed by falling in a chasm, and survived because his shoes protected his feet, which prompts a quick dance number on the importance of protective footwear.
While most of the show was an ironically lighthearted comedy about a tragic story, there was a nervousness to the characters that flickered up now and then, like they were held at gunpoint and told to be happy. It seemed that the characters were a little too eager to prove how much they loved living in Centralia, despite its emptiness and dangers, because admitting a single fault would crack their illusion of how wonderful a place it is. The ending of the show did just that. When one character tells the audience that he's requesting a work permit and visa to come live in Bristol, the realness of the show breaks down. The three start moving in a slow motion struggle, with lights darkened or flashing, miming melodramatic interactions. The abstract bit builds to a peak, when a papier-mâché balloon flies across the stage on fishing line, illuminated by a single flashlight, as recordings of former Centralia residents play. The finish is beautifully dark and abstract, a final acknowledgement that the source of their comedy has been a tragedy.
As a final note: the American accents were pretty good. It took some time for me to catch that they weren't American actors, though they clearly weren't from Pennsylvania – the men sounded more midwestern, and the woman sounded Jewish New Yorker.
Wednesday, 14 November 2012
Half-term break
On a two-hour train ride from Paddington to Bristol Temple-Meads with no Internet connection, clearly the thing to do is update the old web-log. This train ride concludes my visit to London for half-term break, to do the standard tourist things with my dad. It has been a relaxing and reparative four days, especially since the London city air ironically seems to have done a great service to my growing cough over the last couple weeks. It is also nice to be see some family again, and not have to cook.
The week began with my journey to Canterbury to retake the Physics GRE. Somehow, I managed to make almost every conceivable mistake in getting there and back, I can only hope that this offsets any stupid mistakes on the exam itself. Three trains – Bristol to Paddington, King's Cross to Ashford International, Ashford to Canterbury West – with a tube ride in the middle and a taxi at the end got me to the hostel nearly an hour later than I meant to be there. I also tried to save 5 pounds or so by finding the hostel on foot, and failed, which introduced further delay. Fortunately, the staff were perfectly welcoming and helpful. I then managed to get lost trying to find the test center the next day, only to find it had been moved to another location, and arrived just in time to find out they had no record of me. It seems my confirmation from ETS that they would "take care of everything on [their] end" was false, and it wasn't until I had shown the less-than-pleasant administrator there my email correspondence with ETS that he would let me sit the test.
Oh, also, I didn't have a chance to get #2 pencils before leaving Bristol, so I had to use souvenir pencils from the Ashford station with union jacks on them. Classy.
After finally completing the exam, I was promptly lost in the beautiful, historic city of Canterbury, in the rain, with no umbrella. A couple hours of wandering later, I found the train station and bought the wrong ticket to get to London, costing me a few extra pounds on board to actually make it. To top it off, I had forgotten the name of my dad's hotel and had to find a way to check my email to look it up again – I managed this only by using a display iPhone at a vodaphone store at Paddington. All was fine when, at last, I made it to my dad's hotel and found him.
Over the week, we visited Bristol (sadly, no one was around to introduce), the London Eye (to my acrophobic father's nervousness), the Churchill War Rooms, the British Museum's Shakespeare exhibit, Covent Garden, and a West End show. The highlight was certainly seeing Twelfth Night at the Apollo theatre, produced by the Globe theatre. We managed to pick up the tickets last-minute from a store across from the British Museum, for a pretty good price. When we got to our seats the actors were finalizing their makeup and costumes on stage, showing how male actors were dressing as the Countess, Viola, etc., as musicians onstage played traditional Victorian instruments – in what I understand to be the first time they'd been used in a show on Shaftsbury Ave in centuries. We were also more than pleasantly surprised to find that Stephen Fry, of whom my dad and I are big fans, was playing Malvolio. He did not disappoint in his cross-gartered yellow stockings.
Though I had hoped to find a physical theatre or contemporary circus show to take my dad, a couple of street performers at Covent Garden at least gave a sense of it. The street performance style, as one of the performers commented, is honest and pure. The routines themselves were incredibly simple, as far as tricks were concerned – one did an escape act from a bunch of chains, another did a slack rope walk while juggling knives – but each filled easily 15 - 20 minutes of time just building up to it. I hope to get a chance to read Bim's book on street performance. It's unfortunate that I won't be around in the spring, when there is a big street performance intensive, culminating in presentations in Bath. It is something I have a little amateur experience with, but there is a science to it – conjuring a crowd and keeping its attention, pushing volunteers' comfort limits, improvising with – that takes experience and practice to learn.
Now, as my train pulls into Temple Meads Station, I can close by saying that it has been an enjoyable break. I've gotten to see some of the sights and some of the performance England is famous for, and much of the countryside from train windows, and the Physics GRE is, at last, behind me. I look forward to resuming training without that worry anymore.
The week began with my journey to Canterbury to retake the Physics GRE. Somehow, I managed to make almost every conceivable mistake in getting there and back, I can only hope that this offsets any stupid mistakes on the exam itself. Three trains – Bristol to Paddington, King's Cross to Ashford International, Ashford to Canterbury West – with a tube ride in the middle and a taxi at the end got me to the hostel nearly an hour later than I meant to be there. I also tried to save 5 pounds or so by finding the hostel on foot, and failed, which introduced further delay. Fortunately, the staff were perfectly welcoming and helpful. I then managed to get lost trying to find the test center the next day, only to find it had been moved to another location, and arrived just in time to find out they had no record of me. It seems my confirmation from ETS that they would "take care of everything on [their] end" was false, and it wasn't until I had shown the less-than-pleasant administrator there my email correspondence with ETS that he would let me sit the test.
Oh, also, I didn't have a chance to get #2 pencils before leaving Bristol, so I had to use souvenir pencils from the Ashford station with union jacks on them. Classy.
After finally completing the exam, I was promptly lost in the beautiful, historic city of Canterbury, in the rain, with no umbrella. A couple hours of wandering later, I found the train station and bought the wrong ticket to get to London, costing me a few extra pounds on board to actually make it. To top it off, I had forgotten the name of my dad's hotel and had to find a way to check my email to look it up again – I managed this only by using a display iPhone at a vodaphone store at Paddington. All was fine when, at last, I made it to my dad's hotel and found him.
Over the week, we visited Bristol (sadly, no one was around to introduce), the London Eye (to my acrophobic father's nervousness), the Churchill War Rooms, the British Museum's Shakespeare exhibit, Covent Garden, and a West End show. The highlight was certainly seeing Twelfth Night at the Apollo theatre, produced by the Globe theatre. We managed to pick up the tickets last-minute from a store across from the British Museum, for a pretty good price. When we got to our seats the actors were finalizing their makeup and costumes on stage, showing how male actors were dressing as the Countess, Viola, etc., as musicians onstage played traditional Victorian instruments – in what I understand to be the first time they'd been used in a show on Shaftsbury Ave in centuries. We were also more than pleasantly surprised to find that Stephen Fry, of whom my dad and I are big fans, was playing Malvolio. He did not disappoint in his cross-gartered yellow stockings.
Though I had hoped to find a physical theatre or contemporary circus show to take my dad, a couple of street performers at Covent Garden at least gave a sense of it. The street performance style, as one of the performers commented, is honest and pure. The routines themselves were incredibly simple, as far as tricks were concerned – one did an escape act from a bunch of chains, another did a slack rope walk while juggling knives – but each filled easily 15 - 20 minutes of time just building up to it. I hope to get a chance to read Bim's book on street performance. It's unfortunate that I won't be around in the spring, when there is a big street performance intensive, culminating in presentations in Bath. It is something I have a little amateur experience with, but there is a science to it – conjuring a crowd and keeping its attention, pushing volunteers' comfort limits, improvising with – that takes experience and practice to learn.
Now, as my train pulls into Temple Meads Station, I can close by saying that it has been an enjoyable break. I've gotten to see some of the sights and some of the performance England is famous for, and much of the countryside from train windows, and the Physics GRE is, at last, behind me. I look forward to resuming training without that worry anymore.
Monday, 5 November 2012
E&M Presentation: The Thieving Magpie
It was a long week leading up to this. The 34 of us each had to write a routine to the same song, and a challenging song to write to. This means that each class and practice consisted of nonstop repetitions of the Thieving Magpie, featured in this video. In addition, we each had to pick one non-juggling object to study and manipulate.
Some feedback suggests that I was 'taking the piss' out of the assignment. Perhaps I was, if unintentionally... Truth be told, considering I had two weeks with a brand new prop, I think it turned out pretty well.
The result is this – my blanket manipulation!
Tuesday, 30 October 2012
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