Jeg vil fortelle deg noe

Ciao!

hmm to speak Italiano, Norsk, or English? ;)

Adjusting back to Italy from Norway has been harder than I anticipated. Still miss that place - - but I know that I will be back there in the future so I'm trying to stay on the bright side. Also, regardless of my feelings for the two respective countries...I am in ITALY. Which is still FREAKING COOL. Not to mention, the weather in Tuscany has been absolutely gorgeous; sunny and in the 40's/50's all week. Can't get much better than that. :) I've been on several runs this week through the vineyards - our class schedule has been lighter than usual so we've had lots of time to be outside. We've been eating lunch out in the sun, too. Spring in Tuscany is beautiful..

I was thankful for movement class on Monday because it allowed me to take all my "nostalgic Norway thoughts" out of my head and release them into my body. This instantly reminded me of where I'm at and immediately I was able to transfer my sadness into positive and constructive energy - which at the end of the day is a lot healthier for me and probably those around me too. :)
In voice all week we have continued playing with the speeches from "The Tempest". Tuesday we had to say them to a wall; really imagining the speech coming to life on the wall. I began focusing more on "painting the images" and because of this I slowed down and found more variety within the speech. We then did the speeches standing in space and going down to the floor, rolling, and then standing up again (with different tempos and rhythms) while speaking the text. This, too, was really interesting because my body and my voice were informing eachother and working off one another. On Wednesday, Kevin moved our voice class to this park close to the Villa. YAY! Class outside, in the sun! There is a big amphitheatre in the park that we used as our "stage" but we were free to use the space around it too. In groups of four we began speaking the three speeches that we know from "The Tempest" one after the other, using the space around us. There was a river that I ended up kicking/throwing water out of, people were rolling down hills, running, jumping over things, throwing grass - Sam actually ran around the entire park saying the speeches - SO much fun. We all felt like little kids - and it was great in terms of just being able to play with the speeches without worry or fear of "failure".

We have a guest teacher at our school right now. She is head of the theatre department at Sarah Lawrence University and she's doing an Improv workshop with the theatre and dance students! We only have two sessions with her, which is extremely sad because our first session yesterday was a blast. We began by doing simple improv games that slowly turned into scenes and then at the end we started doing Armandos. An Armando is when six people are up on stage. Let's say the audience says "Peanut Butter". One person out of the six has to do a monologue/rant about Peanut Butter - - a personal experience that they've had with it, how much they love it or hate it, their allergies to it, whatever it may be - but the monologue has to last for quite some time. The five others are listening to this, and when one of the five gets an idea, they grab another person, "wipe" the monologue-er out of the way, and begin a scene based off of one of the images that the person doing the monologue brought up. After that scene is going for a little bit, other people remaining can "wipe" those actors out and start another scene - also based off the peanut butter rant from the beginning. Scenes can come back, characters can come back - - - it's sort of hard to explain. Hopefully I am making some sense. Anyway, it was really interesting and a lot of fun. I've always been interested in improv but too intimidated to really get into it so this gave me the necessary push. I'm definitely interested in trying out more in the future - it has a bunch of rules, as anything does, but it's all about "playing with intelligence", "playing through the rules". Those two ideas are probably the basis for what I'm learning this semester.

Anyway - today was yet another beautiful day in Tuscany and another long day of classes. Tonight (actually in about 10 minutes) the MFA's are doing a presentation that they've been working on so I have to go watch that :)

PS. Kirsten and Rolf - Tore has been sending me Norwegian phrases so I am still learning :) Takk Tore.

Buona Notte <3