4/20/11: Group Training - Hiking Mt Tam

Today I decided to skip my solo training practice in order to take a three-hour hike up Mt. Tamalpais with one of my best friends who is visiting from New Orleans. We hiked, talked, and admired the beauty of the world together. And also played in the trees like monkeys. That counts as training, right?

04/06/11: Group Training - Grotowski Workcenter

Today there were about nine participants in the training, plus Mario and 11 people from the Open Program.

Again, the training consisted of about three hours of singing Afro-Caribbean and African-American songs plus a final question and answer period. On two occasions members of the Open Program spoke text from the writings of Allen Ginsberg, and at the end of the night, the group sang one of the songs from their piece “Electric Party Songs,” accompanied by two people playing guitars.

Overall the three days of training were challenging and rewarding and I look forward to integrating this embodied knowledge into my solo training practice.

04/05/11: Group Training - Grotowski Workcenter

Today there were about 12 people in the group, plus Mario and six members of the Open Program.

Again, the training consisted of three hours of singing and about thirty minutes of question/answer. In addition to the Afro-Caribbean songs, we also sang several songs from the tradition of the African-American Spirituals of the Southern United States.

We were able to learn songs slightly faster today with the added voices of the members of the Open Program. The standards for accuracy were set even higher than yesterday and we moved quickly from one song to another.

Mario worked with me for a few minutes on a song that invoked the loa Yemaya. His instruction was quite insightful. I record here what I remember of the adjustments he gave me so that I don’t forget.

• Sing as though you are speaking. It’s a communication.
• Forget everything you’ve ever learned in voice lessons.
• The vibrations you’re creating in your voice are added on top rather than emerging from the action. You are trying to produce a result rather than undergoing a process.
• As you’re singing, see other people. And see them seeing you. Use that connection.
• Relax and soften your upper body and arms so that you can embrace the song as though it were a lover.

In the question/answer period, Mario answered a question about how he arrives at his adjustments by saying that it is important for a teacher or director to be able to differentiate between intuition about a performer and projections about what that person should be like. I asked him how he could tell the difference between the two. His answer had several parts, which I’ll try to recreate here:

• You can’t, ultimately, it’s always a risk.
• Practice.
• Know that you’ll be wrong sometimes.
• Trust the performer enough to handle your possibly-wrong advice.
• Remember that the other person is a different universe, like at the edge of old maps where it said: “hic sunt leones” or “here there be lions.”

04/04/11: Group Training - Grotowski Workcenter

This week I have the pleasure of participating in three days of training with Mario Biagini of the Grotowski Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy.

Today there were approximately 16 of us in the group, plus Mario and one of the students from the Open Program.

The training consisted of three hours of singing traditional vibratory songs of the Afro-Caribbean tradition and about thirty minutes of question/answer.

The work was challenging and involved very little verbal instruction. Even Mario’s answers to questions respected the experiential, cumulative, personal nature of the work; he cannot and thus will not attempt to explain it all in words. I appreciate the emphasis on non-discursive knowledge-production as well as the sheer difficulty of the songs themselves.

03/30/11: Intertext - Spring Training Plan

For the Spring, I plan to continue several elements of my Winter training practice that were working well:

• Weekly sessions (video-recorded and blogged)
• Overall structure (Contemplative Practice, Warm-up and Open Training)
• Working with a physical point of focus
• Working with songs

In addition, I’m adding several new elements to the work:

1) Warm-up Sequence Formalization: In hopes of an increased sense of regularity and rigor, my warm-up will now be a specific series of actions (or modes of action) accompanied by a music playlist. This is the order of actions and their approximate length:
---> Free movement (9 minutes)
---> Balanced stillness in tree pose (7 minutes)
---> 50 Jumping Jacks (3 minutes)
---> Body Scan (1 minute)
---> Slow motion Cross of Space (6 minutes)

2) Material Development Time: Rather than writing a “Tiny Imaginary Play” at the end of each session, I’m adding another segment in which I’ll work on specific material for a performance piece. Unlike the free-form, non-goal-oriented space of Open Training, I'll have a provisional plan for how to use this time each week, but also remain open to what arises in the studio.

3) Additional Training: I plan to seek out group training opportunities over the course of the spring. In the interest of consolidation, I’ll record some details of those sessions in this blog as well.

02/27/11: Group Training with Dandelion DanceTheater

Today I attended an open training session with Dandelion DanceTheater at CELLSpace in San Francisco. The training consisted of:

• 50 minutes – Ballet
• Short Break
• 50 minutes – Balkan Singing

There were 8 – 10 people there over the two hours, half of whom were company members and the other half were either friends of the company or folks like me, who had learned of the open training session online. Both trainings were geared towards those without experience in the specific performance modes, but the leaders encouraged and expected a high level of focus and achievement. After so much time working in the studio alone, it was a pleasure to train with other people.