Day Three

They've been great days in the studio, and yesterday and today I didn't even come home tired. I think that now that we have the cast working and are over the initial anxiety of starting something from nothing, there is a clearer sense of what to do and more energy generated in the doing. Every day we have a clearer sense of what needs to happen in our process and in the piece.

There's no question that we're teaching our performers a ton of stuff, some technical, some more broad. We practiced giving weight and falling this morning, for example, and the cast loved it. Next I did some work on stage pictures and tried to get them improvising more productively. It was an interesting moment: after fifteen minutes it felt like we hit a wall, and I was tempted to drop it and try something else. But, we talked, tried, again, reframed and re-understood what was going wrong, broke the exercises down into smaller pieces, and by lunchtime we had a great moment of synthesis where lots of things came together in a somewhat beautiful improvisation.

Right now we're using mornings for skills and improvisation and director led stuff, and afternoons as a time for the cast to work on various tasks and present us with offers. We saw some nice ideas on the topic of routines today, though they aren't pushing as hard as we would like. Yet. Now that they are accustomed to the format, I think we can start pushing them harder. There's no question that it is difficult work, but with this sense of momentum we have now, and with all we're learning and exploring every day, I think we have a real shot at producing some quality work.

Also, I have the weekend off! We decided to cancel our contact class this weekend, due to low interest and our desire for a vacation. I'm hoping to get to one of the islands, and hang with some of the foreigners like myself. There are so many parts to this city; I would like to see at least a few more.

I skipped day two in the studio. Despite all the richness of each day there, I think in retrospect I'll see it as a story of mastering certain elements of my role in helping to create a successful piece.

Yesterday I played my first game of Mahjong. It's like a four person gin rummy with a dash of cribbage (in the sense that there are some weird rules), played over dominoes. The players were me, Hofan's brother Homei, her grandfather, and his nurse/helper Lada, who also cooks and cleans the house. She's somewhat incredible--one of those part of the family nannies who becomes pretty darn essential once she's in the house. Hofan's grandfather is losing his memory at 87, but still manages a good game of mahjong, and can talk to me a little in English as well. It was nice to bond with them over the tiles. Homei is playing in a bar tonight--his drums plus a guitarist--but Hofan and I can't make such a late night in the middle of the week.

I'm off to read more in Hartshorne. I think I'm developing as an active reader of mathematics. I was reading about Riemann -Roch for surfaces, and I asked, as I probably should have earlier, if the theorem generalized to higher dimensional varieties. Sure enough, there is all was in Appendix A (which I've finished thanks to the long commutes), and all of the motivation and terms introduced (like Chern classes, which I've been seeing everywhere without knowing what they were really about) made perfect sense to me since I had asked the question myself first. I think I'm making real strides (and though there's a long way to go to actually solve a problem, it's been a while since I felt real mathematical momentum built up), and if I can keep the kind of discipline I'm exercising now when I get back to Seattle, things will be looking good.