Beginning of the End (of the Semester)

I just realized I hadn't put my pictures up from the last time we played soccer. Here are some highlights:

Doug, John, Ilse, and William had a surprise visitor. Hi Eliza!!

William, Meredith, Jenna, and Ilse enjoy some water before game play:

This is the face of a man ready to play soccer. Oh Jesse you fierce soccer player you:

Typical Taylor Italianism -- Talking on the phone during the break:

Tristan, Jenna, and Bob get ready for the game:

We're hardcore!

Me, Caroline, and Meredith before the game:

Taylor made me play goalie, so I spent my time writing a note to my husband in the dust -- 'Hey Jesse, I love you so please quit trying to score against me!' -- he was on the other team at the time:

I know it has been a long time since my last post. We have been repeating and adding a lot of different things in class so I thought I would just give you the highlights.

We are currently working on our solo projects which we will perform at the Aurora in Arezzo city center on November 23rd. My project is based on ritual (we covered a lot of different aspects of southern Italian rituals and presented our own versions of rituals in Music class with Gianni Bruschi this semester). I did not present this particular ritual in class. As most of you know, November 27th it will be one year since my father's passing. This ritual is for him. In the Jewish and Pagan traditions you are supposed to grieve over the loss of a parent for 1 year and then conduct a closure ritual. Though I know that this will not be the end of my grieving process for my father, I do this in honor of him, his life, and our relationship. I will go into more detail about this piece as the days pass. I worked with Claudia today on one portion, my movement piece with a chair while singing. I will be exploring this more over the next few days before my meeting with Mike on Friday.

We have really moved forward in Movement class. We worked on human juggling and back rolls off another person (like a back flip around the partner's arm). We have also been working more with Feldenkrais and restrictions -- once the restriction has been taken away, how does this affect your movement? Very interesting results!!

In Voice class we have been working with the text we chose and our partner. My partner is Caroline (I call her Shakespeareamazing) and I am using the Porter's monologue from Macbeth. Our last assignment was to find 6 different statues in which 3 of them we were each ladies and 3 we were each warriors. Caroline and I had a wonderful time coming up with our statues and the transition between them by using play and improvisation. While we do this piece we speak our text, sometimes at the same time, but it is always interesting where the stops and starts of the movement versus the text happen. 

In Acting with Marcello we have begun working with colors. This has been a frustrating exercise because we are supposed to present the color so that the audience can understand it, but colors are so subjective it is difficult to know what will be right or wrong. Today we also did the veils exercise (also difficult): you go to sleep in your bed at home, when you wake up you are surrounded by veils, you find your way through these veils to suddenly come upon the ocean at the end. How do you portray this for an audience without being too descriptive? It is difficult but interesting how each person goes about it. We added color to this (you are a color) and then we got in groups of 3 and 4 to make scenes out of colors. Bob, Meredith, Taylor, and I made a scene where a tree (Taylor as Brown) is struck by lightening (Meredith as White) at night (Me as Royal Blue) and catches on fire (Bob as Red). 

An Even Rainier Day

Me and Persephone Len having a nice conversation after class today:


It has been raining all week so far. This has been hard for me because I really depend on sunlight. I'm a pretty sleepy person when it rains all the time and sadness can really catch up to me.

Today was interesting but harder for my ADD self because it was a lot of sitting and talking. We started with Principia Comica I with Scott McGehee and Michael Grady. This is the study of comedy. What's funny? This class is aimed to help us form our thesis project through finding our own point of view or angle on life. We will be sharing things we find comic in life through Aphorisms, jokes, journaling, and our facebook page where we will share viral videos as well as other observations. We also broke up into groups and did some lazzi. Bob, Meredith, and I picked (without knowing what we were picking) a lazzi where someone had to use the other's limb in order to trick the third person. We made it a grave robbing scene... niccccce!

The film lecture series today was about the History of Comedia dell'Arte. Scott explains the historical implications and backdrop of the uprising of Commedia dell'Arte. Very interesting!!

We had our first music lesson with Gianni Bruschi today. We will study the southern Italian tradition of music, the Tarantella. Today we explained with words and pictures what music meant to us and how we found music. My story revolved around a picture of a foot print in the sand and then three other pictures that represented different points in my life. Here is my story:

'Mary walked into the living room and found her daughter sitting on the ground in front of the television. She was certainly amazed that her daughter was transfixed, mesmerized by the opera on PBS. I was 3 years old.

My father was the musician of the family. He had been raised in a poor family on a cotton farm in Opelika on the border of Alabama and Georgia. He told me stories of a time when there was no television, just their favorite radio programs. A time of deep seeded racism, hate, and poverty... But allso a time of music; Jimmy Rogers and the Blues. He played guitar with Paw Paw on the front "po'ch" as they say in Alabama. Songs that had been handed down between friends and families. Songs with stories, history, and worth.

I'm not sure when Daddy started writing music but it is the first music I had ever known. From the time I was just a baby sitting on his lap to the day in November when he passed away, music was his legacy, his gift to us.

Momma says she doesn't remember a time I wasn't singing. She insisted we join a church and Daddy agreed to the Presbyterian Church on Calvin St. because his friend was the minister and he was known to be incredibly liberal as well. I joined the Youth Choir and made my first best friend Jamie. Her parents were the Youth Choir directors and we did plays together. Their support and love really paved my way in music and theatre. We sang together from Elementary School to High School. My life from this point began to become sections that eventually informed my decisions in life and music. There was a time when I became a person that I never knew I would be: All-State Choir, Pom Pon Squad, Cheerleader, Theatre, pageants. But because of all of this, I was awarded a very prestigious scholarship to College if I majored in Music. That is when I started taking lessons with Janice Yoes who said to me, "You are a Coloratura Soprano". I had found my niche. Daddy said the last thing the world needed was another big woman standing on stage screamin'. However, he was very supportive and proud of all of my accomplishments in Opera.

There is always a point in time where you pull away from your parents. You need this to start making your own way in life, your own decisions. Then you come back and my bond with my parents became stronger than it had been since I was a small child. Daddy still didn't understand a lot of my taste in music. "Rap is not music. If you want to say it is a form of poetry I will slightly buy that, but I think it is a bunch of bullshit", he would say. I didn't pick up a guitar until it was much too late for Daddy to ever teach me anything because of the crippling arthritis that had taken over his joints. So, I listened to his records and stories about his life as a rockabilly star in the south. Opening for Johnny Cash was one of my favorite stories. "What did you talk to him about Daddy?" "Oh just about how hard it is to make it in the music business." Daddy used to get up in the middle of the night and tell momma the muse had come, then he would go and write music. I guess that is how it has always been for me, though my muse has always been my father. I can only hope to make as big of a footprint in the sand as he did in his lifetime. That is why music is in my soul.'