Dell Arte: Recap

Week Five:

This caps our first five week term on the Physical Actor.

This week was working with animals, which reminded me alot of the atude work at ISU.  The theme for the week was "animal picnic". Go.

Well...

It was a struggle bus.  Our bodies felt like death by the end of the week.  Why? Because on top of all of the acrobatic and physical work we do during the day, we spent three hours at night moving our bodies in inhuman ways.  There were so many muscles you felt that you did not know existed.  So, it was a great difficulty moving forward through the exhaustion and pain on Thursday to put this animal picnic together by Friday afternoon.

Friday's critique was that we weren't the animals.  And we weren't on a picnic.  The existing question is how can I be an animal?   And it's funny because it's a contradiction in itself because we of course are human so we physically can not be a hippo, for example.  And yet, here we are working toward the impossible, because just maybe, it might not be.

We were reassigned animal picnic.  New groups. Scrap it all. Explore again.

In review:

I don't know how five weeks have passed by so fast.  They started extremely slow and before I knew it, we were halfway through November. During week four, I had a mind fuck (pardon my language).  I went to write week four blog and my mind blanked.  I felt I had nothing new to say and that nothing was sticking and I was learning nothing.  So I beat myself up mentally and kept asking myself, what am I doing here? I can't even learn and I have nothing to say.  I have no purpose being here.

I normally push things down, bottle them up and cap it all in.  However, it comes to a point when one person notices a slight difference in me and they ask "are you ok?"  And I burst.   This happened this week.  It was rough and it sucks.  I am lucky I have made such deep and personal connections with the people I work with.  I opened up, cried, and let it go through me, out, and into the world.  It was a great relief.  On a personal level, I want to learn how to cry when I feel like crying.  Rather than holding it in.

You can not go through this program alone.  It is impossible and the sooner you allow yourself to feel these deep things, and let go, the sooner you can get to the work.  And that is where I am at.