Being Injured

Being injured is rubbish.  I just want that categorically and emphatically stated for the record. 

To add insult to ankle injury, this week has been acro intensive week.  That means that everyone who specialises in acro (yes, me) has had around 20 hours of taught acro time in addition to our normal lessons, where we would only normally have 4.  Translated, that means a lot of sitting and watching and taking notes and making videos, when everyone else is having fun.

Don't get me wrong - my injury is not that bad.  If I had a desk job it wouldn't even be a problem.  However, when you have a whole day of classes learning to lindy hop, it's more of an issue.

So now I'm limping along the fine line of trying to be cautious and protect my ankle as much as possible in order for it to heal effectively, and trying not to be too scared to try things, to still push myself in order to squeeze every last drop of training as I can from the course.  Last night I got the balance wrong by taking part in an extra rope class, and so today I've had to miss ballet. Rubbish.

There are always positives to be gained from any situation, and in this instance it's the opportunity the problem has given me to step back from 'doing' and think about creating instead.  Rather than taking part in this Friday's presentation, where the group will showcase what we've learnt from the week, I'm helping Lisa, our very lovely acro teacher, actually devise the presentation and put it together.  Every black cloud...

And on an altogether more positive note, here's a link to the blog of the New Perspectives Step Up ensemble, with whom I spent a day teaching circus based stuff in February.  I think it's poetically written, and a nice summary of the day from the participants' point of view.

http://yourperspectives.wordpress.com/

Next blog is going to be more cheery.  I promise.

Bloody Hell

Bloody Circus school.

Bloody ankles.  Why do they have to be so flimsy anyway?

Yesterday, I dragged myself to school (I hadn't been very well over the weekend), specifically because I didn't want to miss our one tumbling lesson of the week.  I love to tumble.  Tumbling is what most people think of when you say acrobatics - back flips, headsprings and handsprings, somersaults and all that jazz.  It's high impact.  I had just started to feel a bit more like a normal human being and was having a great lesson - I'd just managed my first backward roll to handstand, which is a fairly simple move but I'd really been struggling with it and was being taught a cartwheel walkover, which is a great move, it looks really nice but is fairly easy to execute.  Until...  I'm not sure what went wrong but as I landed I seemed to crunch down on my ankle and ended up writhing on the floor in pain.  And now, well, the writhing has stopped but the pain's still there.  I can't walk very easily on it and just to add insult to injury my only way of getting to and from college every day is by bike.  Hmmmm.  Now if this was a normal job I would very happily take some time off, watch lots of Homes Under the Hammer and make myself generally comfortable on the sofa, but it's not, it's Circomedia and I want to be there.  We're doing clowning at the moment!  I can't miss clowning!

So I've got a physio appointment this afternoon.  I shall wait for the verdict.  But I am not a happy tumbler.  And I still want to do a cartwheel walkover.

Integration Week and Spring Project

Last week at Circomedia was Integration Week - and it was AMAZING!  We had workshops which gave us tools with which to create our own choreographies, working from the pedestrian to abstract, workshops in musicality of movement with the lovely Anna Helena McLean, we learnt from Bim about how to discover the theatre-ness of circus, and learnt how to generate text with Adam Peck.  I loved every second, but interestingly it really showed the differences between the students who are at Circomedia to explore creativity, and those who are here to train in the technical and skill elements of circus.  I wonder why we define ourselves as one or the other, and where the true meeting point is?

And on a different note, here's the link to the video of my Spring Project.  Obviously, as videos of live performances often can, it really lacks the atmosphere that was present on the night, but I think it's interesting as a work in progress.  I'd like to take the idea further, but know that the finished product will look very different to what it is right now.  As they say in the musical theatre world, I'm prepared to kill some babies to get there.  Lovely analogy, eh?

http://youtu.be/FOnITdfnWkA

Week of Workshops

Half term has been and gone, and what a week it's been!  It kicked off with 2 days of  Creative Circus workshops on Monday and Tuesday, for children and Young People aged 8-16 years.  

There were 29 participants over the 2 days, who all learnt elements of drama, acrobalance, manipulation, aerial silks, and brought them together in a devised task at the end of the day.

Many thanks to the lovely people at Lakeside Arts Centre for hosting the workshops, the Arts Council for their funding and the amazing Nikki Disney for her invaluable support.  We had a great time!  

Here's what some of the participants had to say:

"I felt confident because Cat and Nikki helped me and I knew everyone's name"

"It's something new and I really enjoyed it.  Brill brill brill"

"It was so fun.  I can now do a handstand!"

Watch this space for more workshop opportunities in May and July.

And on Sunday I joined forces with Ria Ashcroft to run a circus workshop for the New Perspectives training ensemble, called the Step Up Creatives.  We had such a lovely day working with brave, talented young theatre makers, and can't wait to see how they use what they learnt from the day in their final show in June.  You can read more and see lots of pictures from the day here:

https://www.facebook.com/newperspectivestheatrecompany

And finally, I have started to get a little bit technological in my old age and have joined Twitter!  You can follow me (get me, using all the lingo!) at @CatherineBoot.  However, I have no idea why this blog entry has decided it wants to centre all of the text.  Ah well!  You can't win them all!

Spring Projects

Our Spring Project performance dates are now only a week away, and I'm feeling excited, nervous, and daunted by the amount of work still to be done.

Circomedia have agreed to allow me to have a live musician/sound designer as part of my piece, namely my lovely partner Matt.  This was important to me as we want to collaborate together professionally in the future, and this seemed like a great opportunity to try out ideas.

Sound and music are integral to the piece that I've been developing, which tells the story of a woman so obsessed with newspapers that she lives vicariously through them, and struggles daily to leave the house.  There are no words in the piece, yet the soundscape that Matt and I have been designing lets the audience hear what the character hears - the whispers and babble of the newspapers talking to her.  The added layer of having this played live, along with visible newspaper scrunches into a microphone and accordion music, helps to add a layer of theatricality that lets the audience know that what is happening is only a perception of reality, not the reality itself.

Or at least, that's the idea.  Let's see what happens...

Time to Relax and Enjoy

So the most stressful week to date at Circomedia has finally been and gone.  Last Friday we presented our physical theatre and acro group pieces for this half term, and I am so glad that they're out of the way.  On February 8th we'll be presenting our Spring Projects, which is our first opportunity to make work which is entirely self-directed, and a chance to explore where we may want to go once we've left the course.  So trying to get together in groups for extra rehearsal when everyone is on different timetables has been fraught and tiring in equal measures.

In PT we've been working with Larval masks, which has been a new experience for me.  They're a funny mixture of having to use the body in very unnatural ways to produce a 'natural' looking result (obviously the masks don't move, so in order to emote, you have to show this through movements of the chest), and paring everything down to its component parts - in a mask every movement is more noticeable, so it's important to consider everything you do, right down to the flick of a finger, otherwise the mask appears to be 'talking' all the time.

Our brief for this presentation was to play an emotionally charged situation which didn't require words.  In case you can't tell, I'm the one who enters carrying the rose.

http://youtu.be/s7PBglNojsA

And in acro we've been working on tempo moves, which basically means throws and catches or anything with rhythm and movement involved.  I've also been taking part in an extra curriculur rope class on a Monday evening, which my arms aren't liking very much.  This just made last week ten times harder than it already was, hence the very large tubi-grip on my left arm.

 http://youtu.be/4tjeU5-0xQQ

So now it's time to breathe deeply, remember how much I love being here, and get stuck into my Spring Project.  I was so scared of trying to create something of my own before I arrived at Circomedia, because I felt that I didn't know how to begin, and now I just couldn't be more excited at the thought.

Feelings of Guilt

Before I came to Circomedia, I remember saying to my partner, "I'm really looking forward to training full time, because I'll come home at 6pm every night, and I won't have to beat myself up about whether I'm going to go to the gym or do a dance class.  I'll just be able to relax."  How wrong I was.  I feel guilty pretty much every moment I'm not at Circomedia.  Every evening when I leave (which is usually between 6.30-9pm), there are still students there training; every weekend is the same.  It's really hard to find the right balance, and it's difficult not to compare yourself to the other students, yet we're all so very different.

My greatest fear is that in the future I'll look back on this time and feel that I didn't make the most of this amazing opportunity.  But the reality is that there just aren't enough hours in the day to take part in the taught classes, write up notes on every session, be thoroughly prepared for each presentation and written assignment, eat well, sleep well, and do extra training in our 'free' time.  And so we all have to prioritise.

My priorities are to make the very most out of the amazing teaching that Circomedia offers, to take on feedback, to explore my own creativity, to learn how to use my body in new ways, and to keep a record of everything that happens during this time, so that I can apply all of these learnings for future practice.

I've been struggling to write this blog all weekend, because I can't seem to find the conclusion to it.  Normally when I reach the end of writing a blog, I've somehow managed to work through whatever issue it was that had been bothering me.  Not so this time.  There is no conclusion to be had.  This just isn't a nine to five kind of a job.