I'm Slacking Again

Nuts! I keep meaning to update this, and I get too busy on other things, and a week has gone by before I know it.

But the class has been going well? Certainly still having a blast with it. One big thing that has come out of it so far is the ability to be unselfconscious, at least in front of friends. We can almost get through everything without getting the giggles.

We start these days with a moment on the floor, flat on our backs. This is a relaxation excersize, where we tighten different parts of the body, then let it relax. What we're doing is training ourselves to relax at will, so we can get past nervousness when grabs us. It gets me very relaxed, so much so that I'm the one that drifts off to sleep occasionally.

Then deep breathing. Fill the body with breath, all the way to the toes. And then the nonsense sounds: "la-lee, la-lo, la-lay", "gaca, gaca, caga, caga", and my favourite: "ZUH!" After that, it's tongue twister time. Still frustrating as heck.

We do the machine thing every week, where somebody jumps in to start, doing some kind of strange machine thing that they dreamed up, and everyone else gets into it, doing a connected part and making machine noises and stuff.

An interesting exercise that we did last week, was meeting people. We started by marching around the room, like we had somewhere to go, and needed to get there. And Dan would set it up: "the next person you meet is someone you haven't seen in a year", "...someone you don't much like", "...someone who screwed you over at work", "...someone you just saw in an Internet porn video", and like that. What a hoot!

This week, we did a participatory thing, where someone would start doing a physical activity and the rest would join in with related activities. We worked on a house (I was painting), hung out in a pool hall (I tended the bar), went to a dance (I was in the band), and one I started, worked in a restaurant. I was cleaning off tables and putting on table clothes. What was neat about this is that after the first person started, the rest had to guess what was going on before starting a related activity. And the danger is guessing wrong, which is why, while I was setting up tables, Mike was bussing them, Byron was cooking, and Caroline was sweeping up, that Chris was washing cars.

We also did something odd (well, everything we did was odd...) where we stood in a circle, and one of us left the room Dan picked a leader, who then picked an activity that the rest of us copied. The person who left was allowed back in and had to pick who the leader was. The activity had to change often, and had to be seamless enough so the picker couldn't guess.

Last thing in the night was choosing numbers between 8 and 88, writing them down and giving them to Dan. We did this twice cuz we're a small group. Then one by one, we pick a number without showing the rest, and that's the age we have to act while waiting for a bus. Dan talked through the scene, describing the approaching bus, and it's various stops and starts. Then as the actor was about to board the bus, the action stopped and the rest had to guess the age. Kinda neat.

Which led to our homework: Go somewhere where there are lots of people, and observe them as you walk behind them. The pass them, and look back and see if what age you guessed them to be from behind, matched with what you saw from the front. I've been doing that in the Plus 15 at lunch the last couple of days. Fascinating.

There are probably more things we did in the last two or three weeks that I've forgotten. Too much fun.

Breathe Deep, and Enunciate!

Forgot to mention the homework from last week. When we split into two groups and my group did the ball game, the other group brushed their teeth. So that was our homework - observe ourselves brushing our teeth. What do we do first, how do we hold the brush, which hand do we squeeze the tube with, how do we handle the taps, and one burning question that seemed to come up: what do we do with the left hand while we're brushing? First couple of times it was weird, cuz I kinda got the giggles. It was amazing how self-conscious I got just standing alone in my bathroom, brushing my teeth.

After talking about that for awhile, we jumped into a breathing exercise. I think the idea here is to pull in as much air as possible, so there'll always be enough for whatever you're doing. I couldn't do much more than usual, I think because I did something like that during my radio days and so already am able to inhale to the necessary depth.

Once we got the breathing down, we started using it to make noises, playing with sounds, particularly voiced and unvoiced consonants: "fa-va, va-fa" and "ga-ca, ca-ga". We also felt up our sinuses as we made weird humming noises. This showed where the resonances in our heads were that make up the timbre of our voices. It was interesting to find what caused the most vibration where, while making strange humming noises and messing with the position of our jaws and the shape of our closed mouths. Interesting enough, even, to not notice how totally silly we looked. I could imagine someone walking by and looking in the window, thinking that we were part of some wierd cult practicing strange rites. We're in a church after all.

Then we went on to tongue twisters. Dan had a couple of pages of them, and we chose a few, said them together three times, then practiced for awhile on our own. This was bad enough just trying to be able to repeat them several times, but hearing everyone else doing it just messed me up more. And Dan sat there doing them rapid-fire, and it was hard to ignore all that. Once we thought we were up to it, one of use would volunteer to say it three times as quick as possible. Try it with "black bug's blood" or "big B-52 bombers".

One more exercise before saying goodnight: we sat in a circle around a small table. Dan handed out pencils and paper, and we turned our backs on the table. Then he arranged several objects on it. We got fifteen seconds to have a look, then we had to turn our backs and write down as many as we could remember. The idea was not only to practice observing and remembering, but also to become aware of how you remember things. I impressed myself by coming up with eleven out of thirteen objects. I seem to remember by grouping things, where if I can remember one object in the group, I can pull up the rest.

And that defined our homework: to practice with observing a scene, closing our eyes and seeing how much we can remember of it. And continuing observing ourselves brushing our teeth.