2nd Day FourStaying Over

CLASSES:
Movement: More on the 'slapping' etude, we added the actual slap. Slightly different than a stage combat slap, but many of the basics are the same. We add the concept of tormos, the feeling of braking, so that we can stop if anything goes awry. This is especially important, as our wind puts the hand out of view, something you don't do in combat.

Then we did some more neutral mask work. I'm exhausted from work, and a mild bug or allergies, and I seemed to jump into a nice engaged neutral space and out quite rapidly. A strange sensation. One of the cool things is I was aware of most of the times I was out of the zone. The feedback was good, in and of itself, but I learned for myself that much of the awareness is something I learned last year. One thing I did not pick up on myself. We threw a stone. It was absolutely neutral for me, but not for observers. I spent hours and hours on the beach as a kid throwing rocks. Good sized ones quite often. I remember one time throwing rocks with a pitcher who had a good high school fast ball. He couldn't throw a rock nearly as far as I could. The point being I naturally whip a rock pretty hard when I throw. An interesting conundrum. What would seem more neutral to others would be what I would consider a soft toss from my side of my skin.

Combat: Unarmed combat review. Like our previous days this quarter, Heidi was instructing. Next class Geof will be back. After the review we did a short sequence. A pushes, B pushes back. A gives B a casual backhand. B give A a huge backhand. A turns in the reaction, then tries to elbow B who blocks it and gives A a contact lat punch (looks like a punch to the side of the ribs). The A gives a left jab followed by a right jab. B right crosses to A, who goes to their knees. Then B gives A a sweeping kick, and A goes down on their back. B stands over A's leg, to gloat or prepare for another nasty punch. A nails B with a contact groin kick (right foot to the right buttock). Everyone did really good. I worked with Don, and we got a lot of gasps. It's great when your classmates who know the exercise do that. It may be wishful thinking but I think we got as many or more gasps than most. Even after we changed roles and everyone demonstrated again.

Voice and Speech: Jack is still working on his show in Portland, and we had Elissa who also teaches at Cornish sub for him. We reviewed IPA, and found there are different takes. She works the Skinner approach, though modified to go to the same place of being understood instead of proscribing some bizarre dialect coined American Standard. Our IPA alphabet is block, and she uses a more cursive version for the symbols, and ours are actually more detailed. We did different exercises, some of which I liked, and others I did not. I think it was mostly from being pretty worn out thanks to Movement and Combat. Working with vocal and physical characters for sounds, usually for a vowel sound.

We did something similar for consonants, then got into a big circle and did our sounds and the gestures we'd worked out for them. Kind of silly, but it got the symbols refreshed pretty quickly. The vowels, will of course be more of a challenge.

OBSERVATIONS/CLICKS:
For the first time I'm having a little trouble balancing with the day job. Luckily this is transient. I'm what is called a merge manager for the moment. A dreaded task developers get tasked with. We do our programming stuff for a group of projects. Well when we are done the new code has to be integrated into the central depository for the next release, which entails all the projects which are put together for a new version. We have to pick up new changes others put in the depository, and frequently have to manually edit to be sure changes from both sources to the same file are melded seamlessly. In theory. The source control tools have broken down because of some additional merges to and from our group of projects. I don't expect the nightmare is over yet, but it will be soon...

We are doing exciting things in class with analyzing Shakespeare and Audition particularly and I really want to spend the time on the homework so I can not only do it right, but get in into my process. Make it organic.