Think of all the space above you.

Claudia said that (the title of this entry) the other day and I liked it. "When you feel trapped, just think of all the space above you." I've been trying to think of the space above me. Oddly enough, it works.

Commedia again all day today. It was pretty grey outside today and I think the grey-ness leaked into our classroom. We are all anxiously anticipating spring break. We did this exercise where we had to move through space like an octopus; expanding when we had room, and sucking in when we needed to. We weren't allowed to touch other bodies (so basically, the "anti-contact improv exercise") but we had to move around the other bodies as if we had giant bubbles around us that felt their impact. Then, we had to add elements of the character we are working on for our "giant ship project" (I think I'm just going to call it that from now on) and continue to move through space - expanding and contracting - continuing relationships with different people and moving through space differently to define those relationships.
After this we did a diamond exercise. Four people stand in a diamond position with equal spacing in between each other. The person at the head of the diamond is the leader and everybody else follows. The leadership position changes when the leader turns. (Hard to explain..hope this is sort of making sense). The leader can move through space however they want; fast, slow, sideways, up, down and the three other people MUST obey. However, there isn't a need to look at the leader - you just have to move based off what you feel the leader doing. It was interesting to see what happened when two diamonds collided, or when one person got "lost" away from the diamond.
The rest of the day, we worked on the "giant ship project". The commedia work we are doing is interesting - we aren't learning the "classic characters", rather we are taking characteristics from each and making them our own. For example, one of the girls here is playing an older woman so she is taking characteristics from Pantalone and wearing a Pantalone mask, but the character itself is not fully Pantalone. I know that Commedia that is done today is made modern, but we never physically embodied the true characters; we just learned their characteristics through talking about them. I think all of us here are in agreement that it would have been nice to learn the classic mask physically, and then take what we want and make them our own, but we are trusting Michele with the process. He seems to know what he is doing...
We got really far today, though, on the structure we are building. And we added some bits today that are perfect clowning bits - really funny. We have two weeks away from Commedia now - one week is spring break and then the week we get back we have other classes instead, so the next two weeks we are on our own to try to polish what we have so far.
The end result of this "giant project" is hopefully (*crosses fingers*) going to be a show that we present to the rest of the students here, and the faculty.

A day and a half more of classes and then NORWAY. I cannot believe it. This means that my time here is halfway done. Insane how time flies. I still cannot believe it's March.

Got a package today from my momma with chocolate (always a good thing) Peanut Butter (they live on nutella here....I love it, but I miss my crunchy peanut butter!) and four bags of whole grain gold fish crackers - oddly enough the main food I miss from the states. ! ! ! ! ! ! Thank you momma!

I'll leave you with this.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html
I discovered it a while ago, but I recently re-found it and it's pretty brilliant. Elizbeth Gilbert (the woman) is the author of this book (Eat.Pray.Love) - a big reason of why I got the travel bug I got. It's about 20 minutes long, so watch it when you have time...but whatever you do please watch it. It's pretty stellar - and she's just as good of a speaker as she is a writer. Inspiration, always.

peace, love, and goldfish crackers.