watching animals

tried watching animals on youtube to answer some questions

the most helpful was watching Gorillas... four legged ness and how it relates to my own four leggedness...
BUT not really able to learn much from videos

watched a chicadee earlier today- and thought- too hard to translate bird body to mine AND YET, I learned more from watching that bird than the videos
something transfers real body to real body that does not transfer over video- this is VERY important... re: why performance? especially at this time when so few go to live performance and everyone watches movies...

from chicadee I watched- the fast movements that feel like the fast - what feels like- nervous system twitching - that I still am not sure is healthy or not.... the immediate connection of breath to movement and sound... all one... must watch more animals...
trips to zoo this summer!!

sappy notes to an actor

my parting sappy manifesto for ...:

get the support you need to dig really deep inside yourself
it's not easy work, but the pay off is huge
unconscious living is not living
don't sabotage yourself
and if you do
be kind to yourself, cause we all do it and then spend the time it takes to figure out why you did

follow your bliss

and if you don't know what that is
then what you are doing is finding out what your bliss is
and it changes all the time
(often you will find it from having to transform yourself in order to
serve someone/something you love...)
assume it will be hard

if something scares you, then that is the right direction to go
in some form (the non-self destructive form is best...
so think before you leap, there are 72 different ways to do it, guaranteed)
pick one
and go that way with faith and extreme self care
relax, cause you will fall big
and you want to fall softly,
laugh loud, get back up
and keep going.
Find some good jokes to tell on the way... write them yourself
based on the falls (cause there will be many)
learn to pray (a version of falling) and dance alone in your room with the lights out and really good music three time a week!

HEALTHY ANIMAL- from notes to a student April 2010

-follow the path of the blood system... from one pulse you can feel to another

-capillaries feel very different than veins/arteries... so hands and blood feel very different from say- belly and blood...

-and remember ... juggling awareness... more manageable and realistic than real full simultaneous awareness that tends to feel more like... getting high or being intensely alive (if you are familiar with runners high- feels like that)

-Some of the folks in Italy (Pontedaro Grotowski center) say that it is impossible and yet i disagree- it is just really hard and takes many years of practice... and it doesn't last that long. I mention this because it is important to know that it is this hard- because if it is coming easy... likely you are missing pieces (I mean consistently easy and by conscious choice- we all have great performances where grace/awareness visits us!)

-the way i get there is by building specific pieces, one at a time INTO the scoring on my performance work, like picking up one ball, then another, then another... with the foundation specific and clear and the details all choreographed... both the external shape AND the things my mind is holding

-and I usually have one or two places where I am working this way for minutes at most- the rest is more normal acting stuff where I am scoring elements of the work into normal acting scoring

-and sometimes I have a blissful moment or two where i get more than I bargained for OUTSIDE those times where I am consciously trying to juggle way more than the normal joe...

-over the years I am getting better at holding this for longer and longer periods of time- but I am talking minutes versus seconds.. I would say that I can hold it consciously with an audience and memorized text etc... for maybe 3-5 minutes at best and it is REALLY HARD with text! really hard! and also hard with movement that is predominantly muscular (similiar challenge for actors with difficult text as for dancers with intense choreography)

-next show i am going for more! Cause when I am there (and I have done studies with other performers to prove this very thing) the audience feels it! and i want to see how far i can go with this stuff!! So build specifically and slowly with small and realistic objectives.

The info on my show at the KO Festival in Amherst MA this summer is up

www.kofest.com/Poetic%20License.htm

we had a wild day working on refining the end of this piece... we have continued this prayer process and now I am as much curious about that as anything

we all trust each other a lot and the unity at moments is profound... it allows for us to speak about hard things though, which means it isn't always easy

BUT it means that this piece- as abstract as it is- is coming from such deep stuff...

I am grateful, grateful, grateful