DAI Day 2

We started the day with Daily Practice led by Joe Krienke who is the Associate School Director and some graduate students. This takes place in the Watershed which is a room kinda devoted to acrobatics. There is thick red mat setting on springs and also regular floor mats that we stretched and ran around on before Practice started. Then the graduate students made an entrance with some kind of aerobic dance routine and got us all up on our feet skipping and jumping around the room. It was crazy and awesome and fun! We went from walking to running to skipping to a polar bear crawl to "crawling the wall" (where you are crawling and stretch your legs out as far as you can while keeping your pelvis low) to crawling back up to running again. We did several cycles of that. We also walked around the space while "seeing seeing." Then we did floor work, stretching and learning about our skeletons. This work was incredibly engaging and energizing. I look forward to the rest of our Daily Practices. By the way, we did all this in under an hour!

Day two's classes were led by Joan Schirle, the Founding Artistic Director. She has been at Dell'Arte since the 70's. She taught us about the 3 circles in the morning class. The first is disengaged, how people normally are-- their natural slouching selves. The second is where all Shakespeare's characters live. It is engaged, listening, and ready. It is a survival position. The third circle the second circle ramped up a notch. It is aggressive and forward and can be overbearing and exhausting. We will work to be in second circle ALL THE TIME. I quickly learned that it takes a great deal of effort to be in second circle continuously. It's really quite exhausting. In the afternoon class we worked some more with the three circles and started talking about and playing with archetypes. We drew archetypes from a deck of cards and embodied them while walking around the room. Our assignment for tomorrow is to discover what our archetype(s) is/are.

In the evening, we met again at 7:30 to watch a film. It was Rivers and Tides, a film about the work of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist whose works are destroyed or consumed or gifted to nature. His work, like the work of the theatre, is transient. He usually works in nature with nature as his medium. The first work of the film was a flowing line made of icicles that he made in Nova Scotia. While making this sculpture, he said, "Good art keeps you warm."All the work he did in the film is really quite incredible, and we had some good discussion on working with time, learning from failure, contextualization, and living in the world afterwards. He is definitely worth a Google. (I think he has some pieces at the Des Moines Art Center in the sculpture garden as well.)

After the film I went home and collapsed. This work is as exhausting as it is exhilarating, and I can't wait to see what we do next.

All the best,

B. Brockshus