Movement session - being forensic with the body
My body thanked me greatly for the two+ hours of stretching and feeling out of our joints and muscles. I've been underperforming in the gym recently and my trainer (@floydtransform) gave me a week off to focus solely on stretching and offloading some of the accumulated stress of my muscles. I noticed that my upper back and shoulders was carrying tension.
After the session I felt like my muscles and joints were all lubed up with vaseline from the inside and I couldn't stop doing the cha-cha in the following ball/focus exercises.
Mental warm-up / focus ensemble exercises (feat. BALLS)
One of my tendencies when following the journey of the balls round the room is to continually adjust my stance in a fluid rhythmic way, like a capoeira. My body finds it naturally quite pleasurable to do this, perhaps it's the martial artist in me, or maybe I'm quite a physical actor, or just a bit bonkers.
I suspect it's the dark and gloomy influence of hyper transactional city-life but after receiving a ball from someone, or after sending it, I noticed I'm very quick to move on to the next thing/person at the slightest acknowledgement of receipt. Food for thought.
101 Text work exercise
We tried to find 101 ways to say each line of text from Alsemero's opening speech. I'm a big believer in expansive preparation so this chimed with me a lot. If you've rehearsed a line 101 different ways, as opposed to just a few, you've now got muscle memory for 101 different responses (or tools) at your disposal. And for a LIVE artform, where anything can happen, it's nice to feel like you've covered all bases. For the audition, I remember driving my flatmates mad doing a similar thing as I didn't feel fully prepared to go into the room unless my body had formed a truly expansive relationship with Alsemero's words. A great movement teacher of mine (Lucien MacDougall) would say 'once you understand the periphery, then you can understand the centre.' What Ricky was saying about touching every possibility of each line before finding our way to the right way reminded me of this.
It's the weekend now and I'm in Dorset away with family; I look forward to walking on the fleet, shouting my lines in 101 different ways to the wind and the waves. At least my flatmates can get some rest (for now).
Mylo McDonald (Alsemero)
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