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Magis looks to build bridges with our art and we'd like to see this blog do that as well.

Week 7 - Assembly Required

The watchword for the night may be "flexibility."   Trains slowed by flooding,  parents meeting at school, various other circumstances created a need to be flexible.
It was a good sensiblity to have as we went into assembling pieces for our presentation of material about Sarra Copia Sulam. Tonight we were forced to create a kind of focus that slid through the factors that could derail process: space crunch, time crunch really made us focus on what we have.
Always easy to get caught up in thoughts about what we don't have, but we needed to begin to assemble the piece what what was available.
The limits teach us and challenge us.
As we put together pieces of what we already have from our work with the materials about Sarra Copia Sulam, led masterfully by Lab Director Alex Randrup, the through line of energy begins to get sketched out.  In the short physical training we had today I focused on through line of energy from one action to the next, and limited my selection of exercises to focus on things we would need as we assemble the piece.
I'm most interested in hearing from the actors about how the limits of tonight challenged you and what you found valuable in the challenge.
Remember to check the comments icon below to see the responses.

Week 6 Outlets

Hey everyone,
Tell us what your connections, currents and outlets were

Week 5- Training wheels off... learning to ride

Week 5

We completed the core sequence, and the physical training sequence.  As we move forward, we will be taking off the training wheels more and more.  Here's John's post about the week... add your comments and questions as well.  The conversation goes on!

We began work today with Margi doing Alexander Technique. I always enjoy this part of training because I can always feel a considerable difference in how my body feels after the work is done. Particularly with the realigning of my spine. Although it can be taxing it always makes me feel energized. Tonight we did a variety of exercises that dealt with using core strength to facilitate the moves and still be able to breath freely and without straining extra muscles not involved with moving the specific parts of the body. A great deal of them dealt with keeping our legs straight while moving them suspended in the air. It was a bit of a struggle for me because I have had difficulty putting too much weight on my tail bone, but I was able to do them with relative success and the workout made me break a sweat. Margi said that in time we would be able to do all the exercises in a half an hour's time.

George got us into our physical and imaginative space by doing some exercises with rhythm and free form movement. We did Blue Wave, Red Wave and Big X energies as well. I had particular trouble with these tonight. I didn't feel any sort of through line with my energy. I feel like I don't know what its ultimate goal is because I can't quite feel the energy coming from any of the forms, except for Blue Wave because that deals with allowing energy to flow up from the Earth out the top of my spine. It's still early in training though, and Gabe said it's good to allow myself to give into not knowing right now. Discouragement will get me nowhere. And if I never find out the deeper significance or function for it in theatrical application then I will not despair either. Acting is about picking and choosing, and Magis has already given me a great deal to use.

We ended class with work on a variety of Ceba's letters and even one of Sarra's. We were all given one line from a letter and from it we constructed our own psychological gesture from it to use in an exercise later in which we walked into the middle of the company and delivered our line to a fellow actor, they would then take the impulse as they saw fit and reacted accordingly by responding with their own line, and this was passed from actor to actor. I find psychological gestures very intriguing and helpful. Although I never really use them in a practical sense in my own work. I feel that they take up too much time to discover to be truly helpful. That's something I have come to learn a great deal of while at Magis. Patience, and being willing to spend hours on the work and not rushing through. We live in such a fast paced environment in New York City and convenience is in such high demand here that I think I expect it in all aspects of my life. I just need to give all the work more time and practice for it be more useful for me. I have time, I just need to focus it more effectively.

Although I was feeling a bit distracted during training I felt that I did my best and didn't put myself down for being unfocused at times. We all have our days.

Good beginning John, as we go more rapidly into the physical training, each individual actor has to search more and more inside to find the kind of specificity we did in the first weeks of "basics."  Yes some days will be better than others, and all days will provide information for us to get back in the groove with less prompting from the outside.  A slow method of appropriation, but the search is intensely personal and will be adjusted every day.  Good to know that it was tough to feel a through line in the energies when we go faster: how do we each adjust to find or remind ourselves that the action for one needs to be connected to the next?  How do we find the ability to feel the "jo ha kyu" ... the way that the beginning of the next wave is already present in the culmination of the previous one? Patience is definitely key... we constantly say "notice and adjust."  We often expect ourselves to be machines, but we forget that we are organic... so our progress is also organic.