Day 2
Timer on…
 
Today I had a lot of exercising going on: walking the dogs in the morning; rehearsal with a physical structure at the top and my actions for my character; push-ups/sit-ups/yoga in between every paper I graded (8); walking the dogs before dinner; kickboxing while waiting for dinner to cook; a ballet sequence while waiting for the water in the bath to heat up; yoga; and walking the dogs before bed.
 
A lot of “novelty” occurred today.  I tried to keep it “fun”, but I wanted to make sure that I got a lot of “work” in today.  Ballet, strangely, hurt the most.  I think there are muscles in my arabesque and attitude that I haven’t used in a while.  Oh well. 
 
Walking the dogs is always good because they are so happy to be outside and our new neighborhood has a lot for them to explore.  It has been really humid, lately, so it wasn’t too enjoyable in the afternoon, but there’s a nice street near the house that has a lot of shade. 
 
In rehearsal we have a physical structure that we do that is part Grotowski, part Lecoq, part NACL work, part improv class.  We do a game called amoeba where the ensemble starts from stillness and slowly works up to walking glacially, to walking slowly, to walking normal, to walking fast, to jogging, to running, to “crazy” (whatever that means)…normally you would continue the game and reverse the speed and end up back into “stillness”, but at this point we start a Grotowski exercise which is a hybrid plastiques river, which means that we explore actions that we have created in our repertoire of movement or in our repertoire of our character.  I have several movements that I have created for the character Yvette that I’m playing and I explore within those: her walk, her stance, her action of “giving”, her introduction action, and her dance to communicate that there is danger and that her people need to escape.  After we have explored individually, for a time, we figure out as an ensemble that we want to move back to the amoeba game, and we go back to “crazy”, to running, to jogging, to walking fast, to walking normal, to walking slow, to walking glacially, to stillness.  After stillness we begin the improv game of “flocking” where one person takes the leadership and everyone else follows them.  We find an “ending”, at some point, and then we sing a song in our repertoire.  Today was interesting because we didn’t start a song and then one group member offered up some alien sound and then we just started an improvisational sound/song game.  Everyone went along with it, so…it worked, I guess.  This whole process lasts about a half hour and is very fun/exhausting.  We then read/ran through what we have of the script.  I performed my two actions within the script, but we’re not really sure how they will fit with the rest of the cast, so…I’m excited for them to arrive, so I can start exploring…
 
Everything else I did today was to continue the process of doing something everyday for a physical discipline/tapas.  I get bored while grading and my neck begins to hurt, so doing push-ups, etc. is really just a way to break up the monotony and to release the tension. 
 
Yoga was nice today.  I finished up a series and utilized the two sequences I’ve done over the past two years.  I feel stronger, and I hope this will all culminate into something that will be reflective, transformative, and healthy…
 
Timer out…

68 Days until wedding workout/brain gym
 
Day 1
Timer on…well, I’m embarking on an effort towards a process of tapas (yoga discipline) for the next 68 Days.  I sort of began this two weeks ago, but I didn’t do the disciplined effort of reflecting and writing things down.  Publish or perish, as they say, but…my empirical efforts always seem to be focused on the experience and not the reflection of that experience, which, truly, makes me a hypocrite because I’m always telling my students that the most important thing in their own process towards their discipline is reflection.  Bloom’s Taxonomy also backs me up on this: the highest form in Bloom’s Taxonomy is “Create”, the idea that you design, assemble, construct, conjecture, develop, formulate, author, and/or investigate your work, i.e.: ‘reflection’.
 
Now, for this 68 Day journey I’m not making any rules except that I have to WRITE/REFLECT!  I want this to be a fun journey that exercises my brain and my body.  Brain Gym activities always need to have the idea of infinity, rote rehearsal, elaborative rehearsal, confidence, and novelty/fun.  I have really over the past two years created “brain gyms” that explore the idea of infinity (my connection to my father in my “mourning sequence”), the same poses for 69 Days and 38 Days in my “mourning sequence” and my “love sequence” were obvious practitioners of “rote rehearsal”/ “elaborative rehearsal” (because I wrote about it every day), those journeys definitely built confidence in ideas that were overwhelming me…so…the last journey I need to do, in my opinion, is the “novelty/fun” idea. 
 
For the past two weeks I’ve been doing a yoga sequence that generally lasts two hours, where I perform a different pose from many sequences I’ve done over the years (including the mourning/love sequence).  This was fun because I was playing with rituals that I had created over the past two years, honoring the memory of that “rote rehearsal”, in addition to creating new moments with other sequences I really love.
 
Yesterday, it was really hot in the house, so I decided to do the Bikram series.
 
Today, I decided it might be a good time to start re-exploring my Voice work with the Catherine Fitzmaurice poses.  This took about two hours, and I felt really “out-of-shape” in the breathing technique.  It took several poses to finally “get-back-into-the-groove”.  I (also) find that I really need to work on my ability to just be present with breathing.  That takes time for me, as well.  What I have always loved about this work is the fact that it doesn’t live in the “knees-up-lie-on-your-back-and-we’re-going-to-breathe/make-noise-world”.  It is a sequence, like yoga (which I love), that involves the deconstruction of the way one has always breathed, utilizing the ideas of Wilhelm Reich.  It’s hard, but, I don’t feel claustrophobic in the work, as I do in many other voice techniques.  I have to teach voice and diction next semester and I will be re-visiting all of the techniques I have trained in over the next 68 Days, but I won’t “force” myself to make a schedule.  I might go for a jog, I might do yoga, I might do kick boxing, I might go for a hike, I might do voice work, but I’m not going to force anything.  I will just have the rule that I have to do something, and I have to write. 
 
On a final note, I want to say re-teaching/de-constructing breath is “hard” and I would never have thought that before embarking on the Fitzmaurice work.  I have (always) had decent breath support (I’m a trained opera singer), but re-teaching it to be something that doesn’t demand a lot of work, is hard.  I like it, but…I feel out-of-shape.  I feel better after today’s practice, but…I will really need to keep this up, if I want to get-back-into-shape.
 
Timer out…