october begins.

My apologies.

I haven’t written in several days; I’m not sure how long it’s been as I’m writing this. Trying to write my entries in Word before transferring them to the Internet because we’re only given one gigabyte of Internet each month. Which is pretty annoying, because who knows how much a gigabyte of Internet is??

Classes are insane. Absolutely and certifiably insane. I’m already much stronger, seem to have lost weight (...?), want to kill myself some days, am close to constantly hungry, and in love with Moscow Art Theatre School. I don’t think this could possibly be better.

We’ve almost had every class so far: Acting, Ballet, Voice, Movement, Stage Design, Stage Design History, Russian Language, Theatre History, Stage Combat, Costume Design. And Fordham is giving me credit for 4 of the 10 classes that I take from 9 in the morning until 6 at night.

Hooray for credit transfer.

My roommate is very sweet: her name is Arianna, and we’re twins. Essentially, we’re twins. We live exactly the same way, listen to much of the same music (which you wouldn’t think would be as important as it is-it’s very important), are both a little messy, find many of the same things hilarious... It’s been fun.

And the rest of the group has turned out to be wonderful, exciting people. Last night we all went out dancing (etc), came back and made eggs and cereal (I think all most of us eat is eggs), and Griffin stuck his hand on one of the stove burners trying to convince us that it wasn’t hot. Greg is a little bit sick, and Katie and Arianna have had the sniffles. All of our teachers repeatedly tell us not to get sick; the placebo effect does not seem to be strong enough.

Acting is progressing fabulously. We’ve gone through two rounds of object etudes. You pick an object, give it a life and a personality, and create an event for it. Example: I was a mousetrap. I’m sitting on the floor, legs forward, nose to knees, hands to feet. I creak back, look around for a mouse. I’m a sneaky, sneaky mousetrap. I catch a mouse. I laugh maniacally. And then my conscience kicks in and I feel bad about killing the mouse. But you take your time, let the character develop.

And then we did two rounds of animal etudes. It’s the same concept: creating an event, letting the character develop. But the focus of this exercise is to make the animal as realistic as possible, to put it in real circumstances, to become as close to it as possible and put something of yourself into it. I chose a wolf.

We’re doing people next, based on observations of people around us or people we know.

Movement is hilarious. Vlad is our instructor, and he’s a huge fan of my acting group (15 of the entire class of 31). We’ve become much stronger and are willing to work. We do a lot of jumping. It’s very funny.

Yesterday we went to a Honey Fair outside of Moscow. Booths and booths of honey tastings and I couldn’t tell the difference between any of the booths, because they all seemed to have the same flowers making the honey, but I could only read the Russian-I don’t know what the Russian means yet. But I bought a tub of honey with three others; it cost us about 4 dollars each for a HUGE tub of honey. Sugary goodness.

And today we’re going on a two hour bus tour of Moscow. Two hours in a bus, driving around Moscow. Awesommme.

Okay, I’m done here. Hope the States is having fun.

M