Tag helikos

Entries 10 Total

Building a Half Mask

Jan 24, ’13 11:18 PM

Last week we dug in, got our hands dirty and started to make our own half masks. It was a rewarding process, but it isn’t done yet. We’ll show our first performances with them tomorrow. Matteo mentioned that making these masks has an element of alchemy. The shape you form in the clay transfers from material to material, from plaster to paper, then it transforms the actor’s body and if it’s good, it will finally arrive to the audience. Even if you think it’s a really good one, you don’t know if your proposal in clay will sustain a performance until you play it.

Making a plaster cast of your face helps keep your proportions accurate.

Comedy or tragedy? I don’t know, but I think he’s a republican.

Now we’re midway though the second term at school. These weeks are all about performing in half face mask. How do you play this technically demanding form of theater while bringing intuitive ease that makes the performance interesting to see? Finding the body and voice of the mask, improvising from that place and building up a piece that is true. If you’re prepared and lucky it can generate very funny and touching work.

Jenine describes the work very well on her website:

Dramatic depth can be found in the action of simple every day things.  And it is in the action that the sentiment is revealed.  The action is seen through very strict action and reaction with your co-players.  A delicate dance of technique and sentiment – without one you don’t have the other.  Although more often than not we’ll forgive lack of technique over sentiment. As Matteo says without sentiment your mask is nothing more than paper mache and elastic.

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Throwing a Rock

Aug 10, ’12 12:37 AM

Last week I returned to the Italian consulate in San Francisco to get a student visa for my upcoming year at Helikos. I’ve been through the process before but like most people, I get edgy around that level of bureaucracy. It’s the feeling of border crossings, TSA screenings, CTBS testing. Anywhere where you are required to be interviewed by someone whose job it is to say no to you.

Here are some of the requirements of a successful visa application:

  1. completed application form
  2. one recent passport photograph
  3. original passport
  4. photocopy of passport
  5. original driver’s license
  6. photocopy of driver license
  7. original letter in Italian an accredited Italian Academic Institution
  8. proof of funds: a minimum of $900.00 per each month of stay is required.
  9. proof of adequate lodgings available for the entire stay
  10. round-trip flight reservations
It’s certainly not impossible to get it all together, really it’s a simple thing. But I still get completely nervous that they will find something missing or fibbed or wrong and bar me from ever entering Europe again. I imagine the big red stamp, written in block letters: DO NOT LET HIM IN.
All that scrutiny got me thinking of an improvisation class from the first year at the school I’ll be returning to Florence for. The exercise is simple: throw a stone. You turn to the audience and you’re alone on a pebbly beach in front of a vast ocean. You pick up a stone and toss it in the water, watch it splash and that’s all, the end. Dead simple right? It’s certainly not impossible to mime such a simple scene. What is difficult is to tell only the story of the neutral actor, the pebble and the beach. Much harder.
Take this video as an example of how seeing someone perform a seemingly a simple task—in this case throwing a stone with your non-dominate arm—reveals something very funny about human beings.
Submitting my visa application definitely feels like throwing the stone with my non-dominate arm. I performed the simple task but I also did a lot of unnecessary movement, stiff forgetfulness and the gyration of worry, before I lobbed that sheaf of papers over the desk of the consulate and said Grazie mille! when they were accepted.
Even after the application was accepted, the consular website urges me to remember: All visa applications are subject to further review. Applications do NOT guarantee issuance of visas. If an application is rejected, the applicant will be contacted and the passport will be returned along with an explanation for the rejection.
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Time Flies

Apr 22, ’12 1:26 PM

Like tossed bananas in the skies,
The thin fruit flies like common yarrow;
Then’s the time to time the time flies
Like the time flies like an arrow.                        -Edison B. Schroeder 1966

Tempus fugit

The assignment was to show up to class and be unrecognizable. I took these photos quickly during a break, so some of us are out of character and others are very much in. It has only been a week since we put our costumes away and finished the focused character work but it feels like forever ago.

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Aperitivo at Rex’s

Jan 6, ’12 7:41 AM

The whole school seemed to come out for Darryl’s birthday last night, he’s the Australian everyone is pointing at in this photo. We met at a cozy, over-mosaiced wine bar, Rex, for aperitivo and a few rounds of house-rules Uno.

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Aperitivo is the European answer to a bar offering free peanuts or popcorn with a beer. For five euro you can have a drink and as many rounds as you like of delicious tapas dinner. Sometimes its as simple as a few slices of salami and some very salty olives or it can be as generous as slices of pizza and lasagna, pesto pasta, fresh salads and an assortment mysterious spreadable tasty pastes. Rex serves something more on the salami and olives side of the spectrum but no one blamed Darryl for that.
Happy birthday Darryl, and thanks MC for the photo!

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Rigorous Fun

Nov 6, ’11 12:13 PM

I added a link to Marisol’s new blog to the right. These photos are from an entry that introduces some of the work and trouble we’ve gotten up to these first weeks. Before she came to Florence she made this great video that makes a pretty good introduction to the school too, which is well worth checking out.

We’re three weeks into classes and I’m still settling in. Right now I’m stealing my neighbor’s internet but hopefully I’ll have a better connection soon. Gene arrived a few weeks ago and together with another student from his class, we found a great apartment for 900€ just north of the Duomo. The apartment is pretty much a cozy hallway wrapped around a courtyard, but its great and the first thing to great me on my way out in the morning is the massive sunlit dome.

UPDATE:  In the time I wrote my measly post Marisol wrapped up our third week in a new post of her own.

Something clicked for me the moment that we completed our first run through of the Santo Spirito creazione.  It felt as though something very significant had fallen perfectly into place.  I felt creatively at home and utterly allied with this team of astoundingly brilliant, funny, creative individuals.  It’s a feeling of community that I’ve never felt before in my creative life.  And this is just the beginning of the journey.

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