So yeah, today was the last session of my movement class. Well sort of, we had to miss a few classes due to conflicts with Yo-el's other teaching, so at some point we should be making those up. Anyway this was the last of our scheduled classes, and I think the end of the "training" period for the apprentices before they go hard into tech (God bless them, I know how long and exhausting an outdoor tech can be, I can only imagine a show on the scale of Commonwealth is on another level).
Today was the last day of movement class, and the first day of the rest of my life as an artist being active and aware of my craft always in pursuit of the next level, whatever that may be. Today I felt better about a few things that had been challenging me, found some new things I didn't know would be as difficult as they would be, and overall have a new sense of where I need to go. For example, I felt much better about the Laban exercises than I did when we last went over them, about a week ago. The point of incorporating Laban technique into the curriculum is to create grounded movement. If you've seen a lot of professional or amateur theater, maybe you know what I'm talking about. Watching someone on stage, you can generally tell if their connected and present to the floor and the space around them, or just kind of hanging out waiting for their next cue or moving from point A to point B because the director instructed them too. I've figured out a way of doing this on stage that I feel like works for me, but I also know that I don't have the kind of groundedness that I see when I watch a production from Actors Shakespeare Project or Commonwealth Shakespeare with really bad ass classical actors fully connecting to the floor, the space, the actors around them, their intention, etc. What was I talking about? Anyway, through would Yo-el call "an active, breathing spine" Laban movement seeks to create that sense in an actor. One thing I realized in these past few weeks, my spine and I are on better terms than we had been before but still have a long way to go. Another aspect of the Laban work is creating a fully integrated and connected body, so that when you move you do so as a whole. Again, another problem area for me, and last night I blogged about how when we did this last I just didn't feel connected. Which today I did and I felt much more fluid and natural doing the waterbucket, bow and arrow, pinnochio, etc (don't worry about what those are) but also feeling the next steps I need to take in really bringing the parts of my body together as one.
So that was part one, part two was an ongoing partnering exercise we've been working on over the past few classes, a variation on the trust exercise people do at corporate retreats where someone falls and the group catches them. This is an exercise in awareness, trust and weight sharing and the class has had difficulty with it. But this morning, being in a smaller group, it was much easier to tell who was falling at any given time and promptly react and catch them, which I was able to do a few times and felt pretty good about. And I felt better and more trusting in my own falling work, after feeling like I'd nearly been dropped (and kind of was, once) or like the catchers didn't know what to do with me, this time we worked together and they did.
After that was an extension of those principles, as we worked on what's called contact improv. It's basically an improvisation between two or more people where you share contact and respond to one another's movements, at it's most basic. Again this is something I did with Tommy Derrah, but felt much rustier and more anxious about as Yo-el was really interested in the weight sharing aspect of the exercise, something I'm less comfortable with. I'm not a particularly coordinated person. I'm also a fairly large person. So if I try to move in a really crazy way, sometimes I lose my balance. If I'm trying to execute a spontaneous move, reacting to another person's input, while sharing my or their weight... yeah I might have unintentionally made contact with the floor once or twice. This is definitely a subject I want to revisit, because I feel it as an extension of the Gratowski work which I enjoy and I don't feel like I took it as far as it could have been taken in today's class.
And we ended with a beautiful flocking exercise. This time, I felt much more comfortable and tried some new things, like being more towards the back or middle of the flock and trying to be a part of that and not a direct companion to the leader like I'd been doing before. And at several points, leadership sort of organically fell to me and the group consented and went with what I was trying to do, which felt very satisfying.
From there I said goodbye, and walked away one last time. But it's not a true "farewell", I'll see the apprentices in Corilanus, and my hope is I'll be able to continue to work with and learn from Yo-el in some capacity in the future. The end of one road is the beginning of another journey, or something like that.
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