Last few days before my birthday!!

Thursday was a great day. We had Music class all day with Gianni Bruschi. We starting learning the basic steps of the Pizzicato which is the ritualistic dance in Tarantismo. After a person has been bitten by a spider, snake, or stung by a scorpion they would gather together musicians and the women of the town would dress the victim in all white. They would begin on the ground and start to dance for days and days. The family would cook for the musicians as payment. This is a very passionate tradition. Later that day we learned how to play the tamborello and some of the other percussion instruments used in the Tarantismo tradition. It was a really great day! Here's a picture of me and Brian posing with our instruments:


On Friday we started with voice class. We worked with a partner doing head and neck massages. Making sure the persons neck and head are free when they begin to hum. Then we worked with the freeness of the arms. At the end of this exercise we pulled our partner up to sitting and then let them down vertebrae by vertebrae. Next we worked with the baton doing some Pilates work, into hanging off the baton while standing, then sitting and exhaling as we go down vertebrae by vertebrae while the the baton pulls us forward. After this we worked in a circle as a group, first on consonants (breath then sound) then breathing. We each did a concert just using our breath which morphed into a group working with the E.E. Cummings text. This text has been very hard for me to memorize so I hope to make some more progress on that this weekend.

In movement yesterday we started by walking in the space. Next Claudia asked us to keep the space balanced, two people started and then we went in one at a time, then 3 ft. away from eachother to 6 ft. away to 9 ft. away then back in to barely touching moving into levels. After our Yoga we started working on elbow stands. I don't know how long it will take me to get this one. It does take a lot of strength. We did some downward dog relay races across the floor, forwards, backwards, and sideways. Then we started in downward dog and walked up the wall as far as we could go. I found this exercise very fun and helpful in finding the way my pelvis tilts when I go up in a handstand. We did this is groups using each other as a counterweight, going over and under each other. It was really fun and pretty funny. It was interesting to see who took what risks. I was a little too unstable to crawl on top of people while on the wall. I'll get there soon enough. Finally we worked on saggital and horizontal planes in Laban work. The saggital for me was much easier than the horizontal. I had more trouble figuring out what was and wasn't horizontal rather than what was or wasn't forwards, backwards, up, and down. This morphed into a group picture in both cases.