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.

Welcome Natalie!

Second night of acting lessons, and Natalie joined us. She's kind of at a disadvantage, as the rest of us know each other, but we didn't get too weird on her, I think. Dan made her go through the exercise we did last week, and she rather handily got through it. Turns out she's already done some more advanced classes (scene studies, I think one of them was called) so she's not nearly so new at it as the rest of us.

Different exercises tonight, concentrating on our powers of observation and recreating in detail situations from our experience. We worked in two groups mostly. The first was to imagine a sporting event and simply go through the motions of being there. This one was hard, as I had no idea what was supposed to be happening. I tried to see what a ball game looked like, drawing on the one or two I had attended. With the idea that I was to "see" what was going on, I wasn't too dynamic, but I wasn't going to look to the side to see what the other two were doing. It was hard, because I had to come up with the action on my own, and there really isn't much going on at a ball game between hits.

After that, we sat and did a visualization exercise, where Dan described in great detail going to a hockey game at the Saddledome. Again, it was difficult for me as I've never been to one, and he was describing things inside the building that I've never experienced. Hard to fill in the blanks.

Then it was sit with eyes closed, and just listen and try to list all the sounds we could hear over a couple of minutes. We were in a pretty quiet part of town, but the building is old and noisy, and the occasional traffic noise was loud, as was the murmur from the rehersals going on downstairs. There was a surprisingly large number of sounds to hear.

Another exercise was to have a meal. We split up into two teams, and had to come up with an entree, side dish, beverage and dessert. This came easier, firstly because it was within my experience, and second because I was finally getting into what we were intended to do. Not a lot easier, though. I found myself still extremely self-conscious about it.

I ate the spaghetti, got some on my shirt (cuz I always do with spaghetti), ate the garlic toast, drank the wine, and managed the spumoni ice cream for desert. And we must have done not bad, because the other team got it. They did burgers and fries, and we figured it out too.

Then on the floor in a circle, which was a challenge for some knees (not Natalie, though - the curse of youth - someone else's, that is). Someone started in the middle (me) and was handed an object behind my back, and I had to figure out what it was. I had to use my non-dominant hand; that would be the left one for me. Then I closed my eyes, everyone else passed a tennis ball around the circle until I said stop, and the person with the ball at that point had to go into the circle to figure out the next object.

Minor excitement at this point: sliding out of the centre of the circle after taking a turn, I found a small nail protruding out of the floor. It could have been a staple, too. But it almost pierced my hand and tore my pants. Dan improvised a hammer out of a chair to pound it all the way into the floor (yeah, it was kinda awkward). We finished sitting in chairs instead of on the floor, in case there were any more nails sticking out.

Last exercise was to sit in a circle with someone in the middle. That person closed her eyes, we passed the ball until she said stop. The person in the middle picked a letter, and the person with the ball had to come up with six items beginning with that letter. He had to do this while the ball was passed around the circle again, and had to do it before it went around twice. Nobody got it. Caroline and I each managed five items once. The idea here was to ignore the passing of the ball and the deadline it implied, and just concentrate on the task we were given.

I found it a very challenging night, but a lot of fun. I'm not sure if it's easier doing this stuff with people you know; the biggest challenge is just to let go of the self-consciousness, and I think by the end of the night I was actually succeeding.

Tapping a Different Resource

Or maybe it's the same resource, but I'm exploring using it in a different way. In any case, it's something new and different, and I'm stretching in a different direction. And so far, it's fun!

So, to back up a bit: New Year's Eve, we're hanging out at a friend's place, and the topic comes up about what we can do together as a group, that would be different and new, and maybe a little outside our comfort zone. And our hostess pulls out a pamphlet from Quest Theatre. They run a theatre school, and offer classes for adults.

After a couple of weeks of thinking it over, five of us have signed up, and our first class was last night. It's held in the old Wesley United Church, which is now the Calgary Opera Centre. Our instructor is Daniel Libman, and we spent much of the evening revealing our backgrounds as far as acting, and other performing talents.

For all of us, it amounted to a few stints in highschool productions. My own notable performances were as the star quarterback/boyfriend back in grade 11, I think, which given my physique at the time, got more laughs than the lead characters.

The other performance was in a production about a scarecrow who is brought to life, a dramatic variation on the Pinocchio story, I suppose. I ran the fireplace. It was a cardboard thing with a red floodlight in the bottom, and given the sophistication of the lighting system in your typical school theatre, there was no way to tie it into the rest of the stage lighting, so my role was to crouch behind this cardboard construction with two ends of electrical cords, and plug and unplug in sync with the rest of the lighting. This was probably the best performance of my career so far.

Anyway, after revealing our meagre experiences, and our surprisingly considerable artistic talents, we did our first exercise. We divided into two groups, and took turns standing on the "stage" facing the other group, who was our audience. What we did was simply stare at each other for a few minutes in uncomfortable silence, observing things about each other. Then we were to count the ceiling tiles, and go sit down.

The purpose was to observe what it is like to stand in front of an audience and be watched, and to observe how it feels physically. It is not a comfortable place to be. I felt my breathing become shallow, with a tension in the chest, tightness in the shoulders and jaw, and a tendency to stand unnaturally straight. What was happening was we were experiencing the complete lack of control over what the audience is thinking. Counting the tiles gave us something to engage in, and something that we could control, as trivial as it was. Letting go of that control, and experiencing that while engaging in something we could control was the lesson.

And behind all of this we had a soundtrack. The Calgary Opera chorus was in rehearsal downstairs for their upcoming production of Dead Man Walking, and at full bore, they can really rattle the windows.

Missed the Last Day

Been dragging my backside all day, and when I got home from work, I promptly fell asleep on the couch. By the time I regained consciousness, it was too late to go. So that's it for this term.

Might be trying something new in the coming weeks, so stay tuned...

Finishing Off in the New Year

Finally got back to this. It's been almost a month since I've been to dance class. And even longer since I wrote anything in this blog. I missed a lesson in December just because I was a little overwhelmed with other stuff. And I missed last week as I had committed to helping with a group of friends for charity. So tonight was a little shakey.

We started with some warm up stuff that I was able to stay with. It's interesting that I measure my progress by how well I can follow along. It becomes tricky when you miss a class, because suddenly the rest of the class starts doing things you've never seen before.

We started with the Shimmy, and ran through it a couple of times. It's become rather well imbedded in my brain, as I've been doing it since last spring. I still have some trouble doing some of the tap florishes that differentiate it from the soft shoe version.

So then we did it in canon (I think that's the term), kind of like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" around the campfire. Three groups of us, the first starts, the second starts a couple of bars later, and the third a couple of bars after that. First time through was a mess. I was in the second group and I think we beat the first group to the finish. But we ran through it a couple of more times and we ended up pulling it off pretty well.

Then the Stroll. Tanis found a slow, bluesy version of The A-Train for us to dance to, and the first part does drag at that tempo. But as we get into the later parts where we break up the circle and get in lines, it's nice to have a chance for the brain to actually move fast enough to keep the feet moving more or less the way you want them to.

On one of the weeks I missed, Tanis introduced a routine that I've managed to pick up more or less. It starts facing the wrong way, and you simply step backwards and turn to face the right way (toward that imaginary audience). And then it jumps into the third part of the shimmy, a move I found comfortingly familiar since I didn't have a clue what I was doing the first time I saw it. Out of that, it goes into those twisting-on-the-heel moves that I suddenly can't remember the name of - sugar somethings or candy whatzits, or something like that. Three of those left, then a strange step-ball-change that I kept screwing up, then the other way and screw it up again.

After all that we're suddenly into the double time step, again something I know - *whew*. But the break is where I fall down. I can't remember the damn thing. I asked someone how it went, but we were suddenly jumping back into it from the start. After that break, we do this shuffle ball change that is weirdly timed in that you have to kind of drop half a beat in the middle. It's awkward, but sounds great when we nail it. And then another break at the end, and I cannot remember a single thing about that right now.

After that, we did the C-Jam Blues routine, and I totally forgot most of it. I think all of us did. After a couple of repeats it started to come back for some. But not a great moment; we were all pretty choppy on that one. I think that was another night I missed.

At the end, the instructor that subbed for Tanis back in November came in and ran through the routine she had put together. She's teaching the Intro class, and it's pretty small, so she's got us joining them next week on that. It's to a pretty rocking version of Pennies From Heaven.

Why are we joining the Intro class? Well, next week is the last class of the term, and it's Observation Week. Which means there may be outsiders - friends and family - there to watch what we've learned. So since the Intro class is so small, our class is joining them for moral support.

Meanwhile our class will likely be doing the Shimmy, the Stroll and for sure the one with pieces of the Shimmy and the double time step. I'm a little nervous about it, but what the heck. I survived the last Observation Week in the spring, and there it was in front of level 3 jazz and African dancers. I find I can sort of fake it for some of the stuff, and if the crowd is big enough, I can get lost in it too. Anyway, it's fun, and like any other kind of musical instruction, dance is all about performance, so here I go!

Been a While

Don't know why I haven't been able to keep this one up to date. It's been over a month since I've updated it.

I missed last week due to other committments, and we had guest instructor. She actually teaches the intro class that's there after us, and came a little early tonight. She lead everyone through a routine they came up with last weekend to a bouncy version of Pennies From Heaven. And in the middle was about 16 bars of pure improvisation. I was almost able to follow it up to that point. That was a lot of fun.

We ran through the time step again, and I think I'm finally getting the hang of it. I feel clompy and awkward, but I'm making the right moves and sounds, mostly. There's a single, double and triple time step, and I actually find the triple easier than the double, although at speed I think I end up doing a single. The difference is that the triple is a shuffle-step, where the double is a phalap, and I find phalaps harder than shuffles. Again, at speed, these things just become a step. It'll come.

What I struggle with is the break. It's not hard, but it has to be jumped into pronto and I seem to be off balance most of the time going into it. Then it jumps back into the time step. It's kind of cool when it works - single time step, break, double time step, break, triple time step, break.

Then there was the traveling time step. I managed to pick that up pretty well after a couple of repetitions, but by now of course, I've totally forgotten it. The break for it was hard to get, and I think it was because it was mostly a rigid beat. The steps in it we've done lots, but with the beat, it slowed some stuff down, so that it was almost a balance issue. (Well, just about everything in tap is a balance issue for me.)

We did the C-Jam Blues thing, a few times all the way through, just to keep it in our heads. We didn't get to the stroll this time, though.

One interesting thing Tanis showed us was a couple of what she called trick steps. One was where we'd jump up and back, and while we do that we smack our toes against the floor as we were rising (theoretically, that is) then land on our toes and drop our heels right away.

The other was wings. Again jumping up, then with both feet at the same time, doing a sideways shuffle and landing on the toes and dropping the heels. It was impossible to do either of these, even with the bar.

Lots of other stuff we got to, I can't remember. It was a good fun night, and I'm glad I went.