more about classes.

As always, things here are a lot of fun.

Acting class has moved on to Observations. We observe people around the city and collect as many details about them and the way they behave as possible, and recreate them. This process generally turns into group stake-outs in public places, which makes me feel like a creeper, but it's a lot of fun. People are really strange. You see things and think "Gosh. People are really weird." We're moving on to observations of each other-impersonations of others in the class. Which is going to be hilarious. And then we're doing personal etudes. Etudes of ourselves in certain circumstances... As always, our teachers are awesome. We seem to prefer having just Sasha there- occasionally, he switches into the character you've been attempting, in order to demonstrate aspects that you might have missed and the change is absolutely instantaneous and mind-blowing.

Our ballet teacher, Larissa (former Bolshoi prima ballerina), seems to find me particularly frustrating. I've developed an incredibly natural alignment due to yoga. My shoulders are over my hips, my hips are over my knees, my knees are over my ankles. Of course, in ballet, your knees are meant to turn out to a ridiculous degree and your ankle to point your foot to the point of popping. My knees don't do that. My ankle protests. In any, case in the last class I think I figured out what she's looking for and how to do it or at least how to fake it. So we'll see how next class goes... but I can port de bras like nobody's business, thanks to yoga abs.

Movement also likes unnatural alignments... lots of rotating knees. A little frustrating because my yoga teacher mind tells me that that's NOT what a body's supposed to do. But they seem to know what they're doing so here we go. I'm learning to balance on my shoulder (yes, singular-"shoulder") and put my legs up in the air. We're learning to jump into the air and be weightless... lingering in the air for as long as possible. Super awesome. And lots of stretching and army crawling and jumping and partner work and pain and walking back bends and if you can think of a crazy way of walking around, we've done it. But Vlad seems to prefer our class over the other class because we have a greater will to work, which is extremely gratifying.

Russian language. I want to learn it, but this class is not helping. We're learning some sort of survival Russian... "Ask me what vocabulary words you want to learn." If I wanted to know vocabulary works, I would use my dictionary. We're not learning composition or syntax. And I appreciate that it's next to impossible to teach grammar over the course of three months, but I wish that they'd at least try... I want to learn Russian the normal way. But I can read text now, due to learning the Cyrillic alphabet, so that's helpful. May not know what the words mean, but I know what they sound like. So that's something.

Lots of History classes- Theatre History, Stage Design History, Material Culture History (the step before costume design-learning about chairs and such). All interesting, some more interesting than others.

Stage Combat. He appreciates the fact that I know the basics of fighting (does this say something about me?) but I've got a long way to go. Lots of reflex games. I figured out a few of them. How do you figure out reflex games, you ask? Stare at a person's collarbone. The starting point of arm movement hinges there. You can tell which arm is going to move when the collarbone moves. So that's been fun. Ab punching and light sparring and attempting to trip each other. The guy is hilarious in a very gruff sort of way. Watching him demonstrate moves is insane.