I Hear This Guy Can Write, or Something

Heigh Ho, the Holly

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

Thou art not so unkind

As man's ingratitude;

Thy tooth is not so keen,

Because thou art not seen,

Although thy breath be rude.

Heigh ho, sing heigh ho, unto the green holly;

most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:

Then, heigh ho, the holly!

This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky,

That dost not bite so nigh

As benefits forgot:

Though thou the waters warp,

Thy sting is not so sharp

As friend remember'd not.

Heigh ho, sing heigh ho, unto the green holly;

most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:

Then, heigh ho, the holly!

This life is most jolly.

William Shakespeare

Bonus:

That's What I Want For Christmas

I ventured out to the "American grocery store" today, with high hopes of crunchy Cheetos. What I found was an aisle/corner of cereal boxes and cake mix, Jif peanut butter and boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. It looks like I'll be staying over and spending Christmas with some course-mates, a few of whom are American, so I wanted to bring American treats. I found a Jello No-Bake Cheesecake (in honor of my sister and a sister-in-law, who love it), Chips Ahoy cookies, Raspberry Pop-Tarts (you can't find them anywhere, but you can get them in London? oy), and Crisco Shortening (gotta have another crack at that pie crust). The prices, of course, were ridiculous, so this will not become any kind of regular shopping trip. I had to laugh at seeing boxes of Jello gelatin and Jello pudding selling for the equivalent of $2.50 - $5.50, and my Pop-Tarts were probably $8 for the box. Merry Christmas to me - and it's back to beans and bangers and mash!

Winter Onederland, Part 2

Today's post was written by a fellow American ex-pat here in London, the bright, witty, book-club-lovin', man-killin' and remarkably attractive Elizabeth Gilliland. (Did I get that right?) She gives new insight into the need for couples' counseling. And snow shovels.

* * * * *

Dear London,

There comes a natural time in every relationship when a couple has to decide whether they're going to go their separate ways or buy those matching grave plots. And I'm afraid that there just isn't room in my cemetery for you. In a literal sense because you're a city, but also in a metaphorical sense because it just isn't working anymore. We both knew this was coming-- I'm an American, you're a Brit. I say "to-may-to," you say "to-mah-to" and then make me feel self-conscious about the way I pronounce my "t"s. You're full of too many annoying tourists and not nearly enough Wal-Marts or boxes of macaroni and cheese. In short, it's time to move on.

But I'm afraid one of us is having issues with letting go. And by one of us, I mean you. When a person has all her bags packed and is excited about going home to see her family, and to eat that all-important chimichanga, it is malicious to send weather conditions that will cancel her flight. Twice. And then ground her until Christmas day. This is petty behavior, London, and frankly, it's beneath you. Can't we get to that place where we're happy for each other? Where I don't cyber stalk every fresh-eyed girl who posts something in her facebook status about moving to the greatest city in the world, and where you don't send mild showers of snow to a city that is comically and completely incompetently unable to deal with it right as I'm about to leave? Because frankly, London, some of the magic was lost when I had to return from the airport and dig through the trash to find my toothpaste.

So what do you say we put this behind us, London? Let's remember the good times we had together. The strolls through Hyde Park. The Indian food. The shows, and subsequent stalking of various male celebrities. Sometimes separation helps us remember the things that we truly loved about each other, and glosses over the bad. I'll forget your tendency to leave traces of soot in my nose if you forget my propensity for eating on public transportation. And no, this has nothing to do with my exes-- flashy New York, comfortable Provo. And I swear, Phoenix and I are JUST FRIENDS; even though we will (hopefully) be spending the holidays together does not mean we are getting back together. I'm looking forward to having somewhere new in my life-- but we'll always have a special place for each other in our hearts. You even more so than you might think, since I have left some very inappropriate graffiti in some key locations around the city.

So thanks, London. For everything. Now let me leave.

Snuggle Bear... I mean, Elizabeth

* * * * *

Winter Onederland

It's snowing.

The good kind of snow is falling; the fat, puffy flakes that land intermittently with no breeze and almost-warm air between them for visibility. It's snowing at just the right time, too - on the short walk home from the train station after successfully making the trip from downtown. The streets are so slick two girls (women? early twenties, by my guess) are pulling each other up and down the road on an old-fashioned, tall-runnered sled. All it needed was a Shetland pony and some jingle bells. Fortunately, no one clears the sidewalks so there is enough fluffy powder to allow for some traction. It's lovely, truly, the kind of snowfall you actually want to be out strolling through and rarely ever see. it's the epitome of "white Christmas" snow.

I blame Charles Dickens.

My research packet for the play "A Christmas Carol" mentions boldly that Dickens is the man who saved Christmas - in reality, of course, he's only just the guy who gave us our long-standing visual perception of Christmas.

I suppose I should blame the volcano.

When Dickens was a child there was a volcanic eruption halfway around the world that disrupted weather patterns for years. One result was snow on Christmas or Christmas Eve in England four times (three?) before Chuck was 10 years old, though only twice in the next 50 years*. The correlation was set, and when in 1834 the intrepid author with financial difficulties and a large family to support churned out his little Christmas ghost story in a desperate attempt to stave off bankruptcy, he, possibly inadvertently, condensed the old 12 days' celebrations into one festive evening, cocooned in an atmosphere one historian deemed "coziness" and circumscribed by gently falling snow. The first Christmas card was sent a week after the book was published, and ever since we have been taught that the ideal holiday includes frozen precipitation and an idyllic "white Christmas".

Thanks a lot, CD - I hope you're happy.

Friends are stranded in airports and stuck in cities and train stations all over Europe thanks to the snow. London is woefully unprepared to deal with the weather, despite this being the third year running with storms and dropping temperatures over the holiday. I blame the radio stations - If they'd just stop playing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" maybe the Universe wouldn't be listening so closely, you know? I suppose it's not really Charles Dickens' fault, though I have to wonder if it would have killed him to set his story in some lovely tropical locale instead.

Overheard: "I'm so excited for the snow! It might be a white Christmas this year!"

"Just like the last two... It'll sure make it hard for people to get out and visit family if it keeps snowing, since they don't clear the roads."

"Well, OK, but at least it'll be pretty!"

Sure. My five-minute walk from the station was certainly pretty. And now that I've had it, I fervently wish that the snow will stop falling, melt, and let everyone out so they can be with friends and family on Christmas. That's my kind of winter wonderland!

In the end, I suppose blame will have to lie with the volcano. Thanks a lot, Eyjafjallajokull**. Only four (or so) more Christmases like this to go... Next time, put a cork in it, wouldja?

* These particular facts may or may not be completely accurate.

** I owe you an umlaut***.

*** And another one.

What I've Been Up To

Happy Christmas! I can't believe it's only been three months (give or take) since I moved to London - in some ways it feels like two weeks, in others like I've been here for years. I STILL have not managed to get a handle on consistent Internet service, which I cling to as my excuse for not blogging as I'd promised. It is definitely the reason I haven't posted pictures. THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE. I'm moving in a week and a half, to a place that is bigger, safer, and closer to school than the room I've got now. AND THERE WILL BE INTERNET ACCESS THAT IS RELIABLE AND SECURE. The end.

So what have I actually been doing? Well. That's a good question. I'm not doing what I thought I'd be doing, that's for sure - I'm doing what I never imagined I would, in large part because I'd never even heard of it before. Lemme esplain.

How many of you have heard the term "devised theatre"? If any of you raised your hands, you're further ahead than I was when I arrived (especially since I started a week late, after getting here two weeks early, but that's been covered). I found out fairly quickly that Central is known for its "experimental" theatre program, but it took me a while to figure out what that meant. My program (Advanced Theatre Practice) at this particular school is concerned with "devising" theatre, or basically coming up with a show from scratch. No script, no story, nothing - the theatre "makers" in my group are learning how to generate ideas and materials and collect fragments that could be developed into a piece of theatre of some kind. It's really just as vague as it sounds. My group of 30+ split into three "clusters" at the beginning of the term: Performance Practices (movement studies, basically), Scenography (staging, tech, and design) and Composition (directing and dramaturgy). We met with these smaller groups two mornings a week, and then with everyone the remaining mornings and afternoons. I've been working in my Composition Cluster (10 of us) for the last two+ months doing writing exercises to generate text, creating physicalizations of ideas and feelings, and building short performances that are then combined with others' to develop new, longer pieces.

The afternoons have been taken up with Practitioner Studies - artists from theatre companies (all experimental, generally devised - yes, people evidently pay to watch this kind of thing) have been coming in to work with us in two-week blocks to introduce us to their methods of creating and overseeing us as we generate performances. These sessions have been successful to widely varying degrees. We've worked on "immersive" theatre, where the audience becomes an involved part of the show; "site-specific" theatre, in which the performances are based on and generated from the locations; "telematic" theatre, or "theatre from a distance" which involves technology and major elements of the performance happening somewhere other than where the audience is (and which, as a session, was a major disaster - thanks to the presenter - and probably should not be counted as a real theatrical genre, even though we managed to create some very interesting work). It's been a huge mixed bag. On the whole, though, my group is pretty great and we've usually managed to find something new and learn something valuable in every unit.

The best has been my Composition Cluster. No one is teaching me anything about dramaturgy in the way I'd hoped to learn about it (what's been done, how does a dramaturg function in Europe and elsewhere, etc..) but I am learning how to create a show, how to discover new material and generate ideas and explore things in very different kinds of ways, how to structure and assemble the bits that come up. I'll have to teach myself how to be a "traditional" dramaturg, but this program is showing me how to work with other creative people. One of the best things we did in my cluster was a two-day series in which our cluster-leader (sounds a little sci-fi - she was the teacher, or lecturer, but those really aren't accurate descriptions) had to be gone and left us project instructions to follow on our own. We each got an envelope with very specific directions, and had to make decisions about what and how to follow them. The cool part was that no one seriously considered at any point leaving or totally overthrowing the instructions, and in the end we had a completely brilliant, fascinating "play" session where we improvised a group piece using everyone's sounds, text, gestures, sequences and the new ideas that came out of all the things we had made that day. SO great.

My favorite piece of work with the large group was actually the last - we had all created final presentations to be "assessed" (graded, essentially) for our cluster work, and for the last week of the term our group leader (head of our program) assigned us to split into smaller groups, come up with common themes or "enthusiasms" from our various work over the term, and devise a piece based on those ideas. Our group talked over our presentations and put together a list of common ideas and things we liked, and then developed a lovely piece in which we each had a ball of red yarn ("wool", if you're British, but it really was just regular yarn) which represented our separate journeys. We took the yarn and rolled it and tossed it and strung it all around the room - and not coincidentally, around all the other members of our course. We liked the physicalization of the idea that all the individual work we had done this term was connected to all the other people in the course, that theatre and our journeys were linking us all together in a great web. We used Perpetuum Mobile by the Penguin Café Orchestra as the soundtrack for our movement - as the music wound down we all came back to the center of our web and began tying ourselves into it, weaving and twisting the string all around the six in the group. Then we finished with lines from a poem about string theory, delighting the geeks in the room (myself included, as I'm the one who came up with string theory - via Einstein - as a source for our piece). The whole thing was joyful and playful - it could have been oppressive and scary, really, but we knew we wanted it to be happy and fun and inclusive, and it was. This is the piece that I would be most interested in continuing and expanding, and maybe we will at some point.

Over the break I'll be packing and working on various projects - we have a paper due based on what we learned this term, and I need to get set up for next term and our work in a Research Group. We have three in my group - we’re going to be researching how to develop a performance through the interaction of specific roles: Director, Dramaturg, and Performer, so I'll be spending the next few weeks reading like crazy and determining what my work as a Dramaturg actually IS. I'm planning to interview working dramaturgs over the next term (and maybe see if I can talk someone into a residency or internship), and it kind of feels like I'll be doing a self-generated BA in Dramaturgy along with the MA in Advanced Theatre Practice. Also, it will be nice to have a little time for sight-seeing - I've seen 14 shows since I've been here, and only been to the Albert and Victoria Museum for a few hours. The most sight-seeing I've done was on a "research walk" - a marvelous field trip our cluster took that consisted of walking around London's South Bank for three hours, stopping to write occasionally about what we were seeing. It was AWESOME, and we didn't even go in anywhere! (I do have pictures of that.)

I really should have more "Welcome to London" posts up soon - I'm planning a Globe tour and a sunset London Eye excursion ASAP. Now if the snow would just melt so that the trains will run so that I can actually get to all these places…

* * * * *

In other news, flapjack (not pancakes, but a chewy oat-y bar cookie - like a really buttery granola bar) is delicious. Cadbury Fingers cookies are my new favorite treat. The English are not nearly as interested in ice cream as Americans - I've never seen more than four flavors of Ben & Jerry's or Haagen Daas in any one place, and never any other than those four flavors anywhere else. People don't actually drink tea nearly as much as you'd think (coffee, fizzy drinks, etc…, instead). Street markets are everywhere. I still haven't tried fish 'n chips. Brits love to hear Americans trying to sound British, generally so they can laugh at their accents. I've been "love"d and "darling"ed more times than I can count, by men and women alike. Everyone drinks, all the time - alcohol aisles take up a fifth of any grocery store, and they are fascinated by the fact that I don't. Almost none of the Brits I've talked to (and I'm at a drama school) can do a credible American accent (neiner, neiner). My favorite quote from the term comes from one of my course-mates: "Now that I'm talking, I'd like to say something." My next-favorite quote comes from one of our favorite lecturers, in Cultural Landscapes: "You are all vile, horrible people." (You had to be there.) I am 98% certain that I do, indeed, need a PhD, so another project for the break will be coming up with a research proposal and finding the right school. I'm thinking about going to Italy for my birthday, and yes - I am smirking at all of you because I can actually do it.

More to come!

Tube Times

With all the time I spend on the Underground, this could become a regular post title.

... Except that I'm moving, and that move should cut my Tube time by two-thirds, I reckon. AWESOME.

Anyway, today I volunteer-ushered for a school show, and was then drafted to stay and be paid to work the box office for the evening show. (I love being useful.) On the Tube ride home I was carrying my loaded backpack and a paper box (one that reams of paper used to live in - the box [like most things here in the UK] is about half the size of a US paper box). In a half-empty coach I set the box down on the floor next to me, since I couldn't hold it on my lap and read my book at the same time. At the next stop a couple of guys who were THISCLOSE to turning on to White Rasta Road boarded the train and beelined for my paper box. I smilingly asked them to be careful not to crush it, and the kid nearest me practically stood on his own ankle to make sure he didn't bump it, pointing out how careful he was being the whole time. Then he turned to his friend and asked where the girl was, the "one with the South Afrikaaner husband." In a "conversation" that was repeated at least three times over the next 6 stops, he reminded his friend, "Why would she say that? Me and my whole family's from South Africa. So what if her husband is from South Africa? Don't step on the green box (my paper box)." There was a little change in the box - probably 10p (pence, er, pennies) in 1p and 2p pieces (did you know they have a two-cent piece over here? They do). He and his friend commented on the fortune in the box, and told me quite seriously that in South Africa you could buy a loaf of bread for 8p. Or a bottle of some kind of malt liquor.

When I got off the train he notified everyone in the coach that the "green box" was coming through, and even made a trumpeting noise to announce it's approach. Then he asked his friend where that girl was, anyway.

Serious, a joker, or just high? Whatever it was, at least three of us on the Tube tonight had a good time.

Speaking of a good time: Scaring the bejeezus out of your Luxembourgian course-mate because she's got the hiccups with a bolt-from-the-blue shriek + "I'm demonically possessed" expression and coincidentally freaking out the table of BA girls right behind her at the same time = PRICELESS. Man, those first-years have got the death-glare down PAT. (Seriously, Luxembourg. I know, right?)

My New Favorite Christmas Tune(s)

Brilliant.



(To see the full-screen version - sorry, it doesn't fit here; or, at least, I don't know how to make it fit - go to this link.)

I've definitely ordered the album.

(And I just got chewed out for listening to this too loudly in the quiet study section of the library. You know how you never want to be the annoying person on the bus/Tube that makes everyone else listen to their music? Oops. I think I may, instead of grumbling that they're jerks and idiots, just wonder if they're unaware how much their audio is leaking. AWKWARD. And seriously, nothing is quite as embarrassing as being told off by a Brit. It could be the accent.)