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