Harvesting the harvest, you're my pumpkin-eyed girl

Note from Jon: Teacher has to diagnose. This is key. Has to come up with solution. How well can you do that and how quickly.

Note from Geoff: Students have different growth patterns, that cause them to evolve at different periods.

Jon: Can we as artists still be moving forward even if it is slow? Image of tightrope walker, having to constantly adjust. Clawing to make natural and effortless. This work has intrinsic value as not only an actor but a a human. Have something to pass on.

Last class for us was a watershed class. Use process to profile character, interpret, see it and see how this can be used. Going to be doing this work pf profiling a character.

This is a process in flux. It's not dogma. Gets more compressed over time. How much more of this work do we have to do in order to see how it applies?

Don’t have a fixed goal and enjoy the journey of the work. Count your blessings with all of this.
Something wil get to you, come to you. Once touch proximal emotions, reach all of them. Really it is just energy, doesn’t have to deal with anything specific.

Have to put in time, know what to do-- it's a matter of doing it.

Once get to the cheese -- have enough to know who they are. Once you’ve opened a portal to them with streaming, youve got the voice down, movement, will come in on its own. Lines create imagery that werent there before. Streaming itself has different purposes. Its a utility. Can we find the person?

Repeating note: don’t question an image. When working on script or scene, fear that it might be the wrong stuff, but in the end, we’re looking for certainty. Director is attracted to the same thing that you are.
Do not skip steps in script. When you do go forward, it’s connecte,d its indigenous to the character. Don’t psych yourself out. Using script to stream.

You have to have faith that the process works. Script is demanding, and have to be able to be secure with what comes at you, without the threat of rejecting it, or needing to change it.

The best thing to do in the work, is not put too much pressure on what needs to be done. Just experience it, let it come over you, allow yourself to receive it. In the end, its so powerful, its the core of creativity. Dont feel like you can't count on Jon.
This work is like a guitar - don’t know until its in your hands.

Harvest:

This class was powerful for several reasons. One of the things that Jon said really resonated with me. "You have to earn the muscles to hold the script." Somehow not simply the dialogue we had about the work, but also Tiffany's character specifically felt like a watershed figure for me, in terms of the whole acting process. In conjunction with Jon talking about developing the muscles to hold the script and a patchwork figure who is doing everything she can to hold herself up, I had the realization that this is ultimately what we are doing with the work. Every icon or symbol or feature of the scene, is a key, a point waiting for light to hold it up, but we have to spend enough time, take the necessary breaths, really commit to seeing the character in their phenomenal presence, such that every part of the scan is its own effort in holding up the image in living space.

I read recently that the Ancient Greeks had two concepts, that weren't so much concepts as they were observational forces through which they encountered their primal living. These were "nomos" and "ethea". The second term is the original root for "ethics". The original meaning basically was how an animal appears in its "haunts". Nomos is more collective, it has a broader feeling that describes a universal law of hard work, or showing up to the group. It is the root for "name", like "nomenclature". You "make a name" for yourself.

What I really felt in this class is how we are training ourselves to pick up on the scent or resonate at the same vibration as the character we're profiling. We're trying to get into their haunts, or understand their ethos. Jon said this work is like a guitar and you can't really know it until its in your hands. In the same way, he's saying specifically, that our bodies are likewise instruments, and it takes that day-to-day devotion to "feel" the person.

Geoff hit it home for me when he said that it's like "she retreats to devotion to mitigate her grief". In that phrase, I saw a cluster of women that I've known including my mother, who have strong devotional qualities to them, usually reflecting as religious/spiritual faith.

Really oddly, and I would like to share something that came to me years ago when I was taking classes in the coop. I had developed a few small devotional practices almost by accident, though definitely connected to streaming work. I had developed a little prayer with predictable lines that I'd say before every meal. At some point, I remember an image coming to me that seemed literally "out of the blue", and I couldn't quite make sense of it, but I also didn't just it. I would see far in the distance, among billowing pearl white-yellow clouds in the sky, a massive golden arch, just suspended there. No beginning, no end. At first, I just would see it, very distant from me, and acknowledge it, but then it became connected to the little devotional time I'd carved out for my meals. I found myself each time wanting to get closer and closer to the arch, and I did some of the work that we've done where we zoom up real close to it. I found myself suspended miles into the air, into these clouds, and very close to the golden steel-like material, angular, cutting, four-edged. I remember every time how significant this felt to me, and I would frequently find myself moving down along its bends, precariously, as if on a roller-coaster. I could feel the wind flow through me, and tremendous fear but also complete faith that it was where I needed to be.

I hadn't thought about this image in years until Geoff mentioned the Greek concept of "arche", and it piqued my interest hard as I've been studying a lot about the Greeks in the late 5th and early 4th century BCE, and especially Plato, who I'd mentioned developed a most-likely connected concept of his essential "Forms". As Geoff had described, the concept is basically trying to describe someone's birth point, where their creative force originates (what animates them), from whence their generating force or urge comes, especially as it is seen by an observer. It's the same root that is found in the term "menarche" which describes a girl's first period. For a girl, this is the first time she really "feels" or senses the signature line of creation, of the creating force of the universe, and her perceptivity syncs with it.

The point of expressing all of these things is to describe how far I was from my own grief and primal "signature" at the time, and how devotion has brought me so close to really feeling the instrument of my body, albeit a difficult process. I really felt through Tiffany's work, and the work we did in groups and as a class is bringing me closer to my own "signature" which is inevitably making it easier to resonate to another's. The symbol/metaphor Jon gave regarding a guitar, a stringed instrument, was also part and parcel to the integration of all of the things I've been studying in this work and otherwise. In some way we're already stringed; but how do we hold our own bodies? How do we hold them up? Every detail we attuned to in Tiffany's work was like learning a new melody, but they were none of them unrelated to the other.

The word that really did it in for me, in tonight's work, was Jon's emphasis on the "gut". He said, "wait til it hits you in the gut". Thinking about that character born by Tiffany right now, I find myself getting teary-eyed. I feel like I know her, and I want to devote myself to knowing her. She feels like a bend in me.

Lastly, I want to share this because it just feels appropriate. There's this Greek term called "splachnizomai". It means " to be moved as to one's bowels; hence to be moved with compassion; to have the bowels yearn". It's the term used in Matthew 20:34: "And so Jesus had compassion (splachnizomai) on them: and immediately their eyes received sight, and they followed him". The significant thing for this character, might not be that christ is on the cross and hanging there and dying, but that she can feel how he is, despite of the pain or sorrow, lifting himself up. She feels and understands why the tomato can't afford to lay on the ground.

Thank you folks so much for being such incredible artists. I look forward to our next class.

Josh

Well, I ate this post up like a hungry dog! Yummy!