Halloween, London Style...

No pumpkin carving party for me this year. :( Truly a sad thing. However, we still managed to spice up this not-so-popular-in-England holiday! We had a Halloween partaaaay this past Friday night and it was a good time. We decorated the joint and dressed ourselves up as well - hotness was the name of the game! ;) Here's a pic of Me, Gemma & Helen:



This past week we were back with Brian, our acting teacher from the first week. It was so nice to be back with him - he's lovely. We worked this week on not thinking. Yes, not thinking. Going with instinct and believing in the power of your gut reactions. It was freeing, in a way, and terrifying in another. I think we all did really well with the challenges set before us and I was so proud of our group of 11 brave souls! It's not easy to put it all out there. This is a unique opportunity that we have here - one in which we can really focus on ourselves and truly figure out who we are. What an amazing thing.

We also tackled purple this week with Marcio. If you followed my yellow-ness last week, you will understand. To be honest, yellow kind of pissed me off. I came away from that class sort of angry and annoyed - most of my group did. I don't know why. Maybe it was that yellow is exhausting and we were over it by that point, I'm not quite sure. But purple. Well, purple ruled. It IS my dad's fave color, maybe that had something to do with it. It was sensual, calming, and ritualistic. In general...cool. Who knew?

I also took my theatrical education into my own hands. I decided to have a day in London on my own. I headed to my favorite place in London, the National Theatre, in hopes of finagling my way into one of the sold out matinees. It worked. They had one seat left for the new David Hare adaptation of Brecht's The Life of Galileo. It starred Simon Russell Beale in a 3-hour and 15-minute production with 2 - 15-minute intermissions. Long? Yes, but every second was passion-filled and intense. I am so happy I went. I had a day of movie moments. Walking across the Charing Cross and Waterloo Bridges, I just soaked in this city. Looking out over the Thames, I realized for the first time, I ACTUALLY live here. ME! I live in London now and I can go to the NT any time I want! That is incredible to me and I don't think it will ever get old. Dr. Samuel Johnson once said, "When you are tired of London you are tired of life." I have to agree whole-heartedly. *sigh* (Thanks to Gilmore Girls for that quote.) :)

Being Yellow...

I cannot believe that 3 weeks of school have come and gone. It's been a whirlwind! This week we spent with Sara, the third of our three acting tutors. It was a week of being taken out of our comfort zones and learning what makes us tick. She has this uncanny knack of reading people perfectly. Sara challenged me to just stand still while performing on stage. As you may guess - one of the hardest things for me to do. She also had us each choose an individual that is like a surrogate parent to us and she added them into our improv. I chose Ben, my former boss at YTN, and she definitely got me to cry...again. Oy. But it was good, it really was; a necessary exercise in my book. We also played tug of war. Real tug of war, rope and all. First, just to win, then, we added a scene, of sorts, to it - a dynamic between two people. After the tug, she eliminated the rope and illustrated the need for tension in a scene, emotional and spatial. So effective! It made such sense. Go figure.

Friday's movement class was an interesting one, to say the least. We began exploring colors. Yes, colors. And Friday's was yellow. Man is yellow tiring! I know that it seems all very "drama school in the movies." It was. I found it a bit on the difficult side to connect to that kind of work, but I still put my whole heart and body into it. I actually thought the result was positive. That's what you have to do here. Every day needs 150% of YOU! I told myself at the beginning of this journey that if I didn't put all that I could into it, I would regret it and never forgive myself. So, here I am.

I was thinking this weekend about how I am so blessed to be working with these tutors and what an international spectrum of knowledge we are getting. There is my acting teacher, Brian from South Africa, who started the first inter-racial theatre company in South Africa in the 70's and worked with Athol Fugard a ton (PS - His wife was the original Miss. Helen in The Road to Mecca with Fugard himself!!! How cool is that?!?), Sara from New Zealand, Zois, our Contextual Studies and MA Tutorial Guru, from Greece, Marcio, one of my movement teachers, from Brazil, and one of our voice tutors, Christina, from Germany. It's simply mind-boggling!

All of this stellar school stuff (don't ya just love alliteration?) could never be mentioned without the other side of it all - my new family; the other people on my course. We have all bonded so well in the past month and I could not have asked for a better bunch of people to share this with. They have picked me up when I've been so far down, they have laughed with me, they have listened to me. I love them all dearly. We have started a Sunday night dinner tradition at our house that has grown to a party of 10. Last night, a friend of mine, Rebecca, a friend that I worked at the Royal Opera House with in '99, joined us and it was a real treat. Here's the picture below (Clockwise from the girl in the yellow shirt: Gemma, Bex, German David, Helen, Italian David, Russ, Mark, Rachel, Adam & Jenni). Gems, each and every one of them...

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
- Anais Nin

3 Hours of King Lear...In Russian

2 weeks down and more crying. That's right, more crying. It's incredible what looking into yourself every day for 9 hours of class will do to a person. It's better than therapy, I will tell you that much! This week we focused on neutrality, bringing you to a character, and the importance of observation with our fab head of year, Rhys.

The highlight of the week was an emotional one. We had to, first, write in our notebooks for a half an hour on an event that has influenced our lives and has had and will have an effect on our present and future. We then shared our stories with one other person in the class and became the listener for another. After all was shared, we had to present the story that we heard to the group as if it were our own. In first person. We all felt such a responsibility to the story and to the person. You, pretty much, had another person's heart in your hands. Everyone did such a beautiful job of relaying their story to the class and we all listened with due respect. It's amazing to hear your own story told by someone else. Surreal. We all realized how much import this exercise had and how we could not embellish and/or "act" out someone else's true-life story. Rhys brought it all back full circle by telling us that the same rules could be applied to text and character work. Don't exaggerate, be true to the stories that need to be told, be honest with yourself and the character will follow suit. So cool.

We also had to see 3 productions this week, on top of writing our first essay for our MA Tutorials class on two differences between Stanislavski's 'System' and Strasberg's 'Method.' You are all thrilled, I know. On Wed. night we saw the BA Acting, 3rd Year's production of A Flea in Her Ear, Thurs. we saw the BA Contemporary Theatre, 3rd Year's production of All the Things That Anne Can Be, and on Fri., the real kicker, a 3-hour production of King Lear at the beautiful Barbican Theatre... COMPLETELY IN RUSSIAN!!! Uh huh, Russian. There were surtitles on a screen at the top of the stage. It was insane. This theatre company,the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg, is regarded as one of the top ensemble theatre companies in the world. All I will say is that it hurt my brain. Ouch.

In all, loads of theatre, crying, and drama. As it should be, I suppose. One more exciting thing - I am going to teach a tap class for my fellow MA students on a Saturday's! I had been talking about tap and so many people expressed interest in learning or getting back into it. So, Rhys is finding me a space and off I will go! As many of you know, my feet aren't happy unless they are doing some tapping, so I am really looking forward to it. A tappa, tappa, tappa!

I'll be back with another installment soon. Hope you are all well and know that you are missed...

Fire Breathing and the First Week of School...

Well, this has certainly been an adventure already! My voice is slowly crawling back and I'm losing the cough thanks to the socialized medicine and an inhaler. I was diagnosed with asthmatic bronchitis. Joy of joys. However, I am healing...Drama, as always.

The High Holidays were strange. Rosh Hashanah was nice; I went to services and was taken by the Rabbi to his house for lunch on Sat. and to another couple's place on Sun. - it was so sweet of those families to take me in. Once again, my faith in the world-wide Jewish community was revived. Yom Kippur pretty much came and went without any fanfare for me. It felt really strange not to be in shul and not to fast. But I thought that fasting on my first day of drama school probably wouldn't be the brightest of ideas.

This first week of school was a bear. My schedule is rigorous to say the least. 9am-6:30pm every day except for Thursday which is 11:30am-4:30pm (not too bad). There is an insane amount of reading and preparing of presented work already. It's a kick in the pants, but a really cool one. It feels so great to be back in school, having lectures, taking notes, debating, sharing...I love it and am thrilled that I am older and better equipped to handle it. I mean, there is so much to do - 4 hours of singing a week, 2 hours of contextual studies, 2 hours of our MA Tutorials (writing essays, and hearing lectures that lead us to our MA final projects and dissertations), 4 hours of movement, 4 hours of voice (different from singing), and the topper...20 hours of acting!!!

I have met the most wonderful people. Everyone on my course is a gem and we have created a really safe and creative space to work in. I have cried almost every day in acting class, we all have (it's nice to know the old drama school cliché still holds true). And we went to a big blowout party last night to celebrate a friend's b-day. I am getting too old to stay out until 5:15am, let me tell you. It's been stellar, to say the least. It's more than I could have ever hoped for or expected, it really is. I looked around the room on my first day and I couldn't help but smile. I am finally here. Doing it. Working hard for something that I care more about than anything. What a dream.

PS - We hosted a BBQ/party last weekend and in the wee hours, our neighbors (also E15 students) taught us how to breath fire. So cool and so bizarre. I love my life. Check me out:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=1231472868