Started this blog 26 Jan 2012 – (work in progress)
3am-6am finished painting ‘5’ – 7 (2012) 6xA4: acrylic, chalk on card and Kleenex… this one was started on the floor of the Judith E. Wilson Studio Theatre, housed by the English Department, Cambridge University, on Monday evening for a very switched on dynamic Israeli teacher (whose name escapes me right now) teaching Lecoq and asking the question ‘Can we make paintngs in the thatre? – feels like a breakthrough, this series.
go deeper into the knowledge of the pedagogical basis of Jacques Lecoq.
www.ecole-jacqueslecoq.com/en/biographies_en-000004_t9.html Cached
I agreed with everything Richard Branson had to say (on canabis) BBC R4 1pm news. However I am surpised, these days, that the ‘occupational’ (or devotional) advantages of the sacred weed are not more easily expressed – Bob Dylan used it, so did John Lennon and Bob Marley.
The Shakespeare Princple employed it with superb effects. I used it when I was marathon sculling. It as a banned substance in the World and Olympic 2000m Rowing scene…but I was outside all that – and West Australian rowing coach, Laurie Anderson, was interested in the four stroke cycle (and yoga applications) – and ended up giving me a four-year apprenticeship, effectively, at the West Australian Sculling Academy, on the Canning River – the site of the Commonweath Games Regatta in 1962. This experience took me into professional coaching. A lovely way to make a few quid.
Here is the beginning of blog on canabis I published on the day that Professor Nutt was sacked by the Gordon Brown administration:
| Gordon Brown versus scientific truth |
Added 29th March 2011:
B.K.S Iyengar: Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
P.39 Five types of Yoga.
Kaivalya pada opens with the contention that prodigious yogic powers may be inborn, acquired by merit, accumulated through pracice in former lives. They may also be attained through use of herbs (ausadhi), incantation (mantra), devoted disipline (tapas), mediation (dhyana) and total absorption (samadhi).
I smoked too much free marijuana when I was nineteen picking grapes in Mildura, NSW, in 1981: so much so that I hardly touched the sacred weed all through my twenties.
I don’t know much about shale but if Nigel Lawson reckons there’s ‘a bridge’ between himself and Green Peace – that’s something: my advice is legally bind shale-extracted gas revenue with experimental investment in the kinds of schemes (tidal) that I have been arguing for with the Thames. Protypes in the Green Economy. A transitional time – a time to prove that the vision Caroline Lucas has been proposing, so diligently – and with such infectious good cheer in such a dull and (sometimes visciously dramatic) cockpit, the House of Commons – that Green Economies work – on all levels.
Painting today after the wonderful first Lecoq session last night in which we all became elastic bands (I overdid the double-lotus backflip) – with a slight ache in the shoulder-neck – now gone after a day of painting and listening to Radio 4. I love the drama. It was John Bechervaise, my Antarctic explorer grandfather who first told me the story of Joseph Conrad’s An Outpost of Progress. It was a brilliant performance – it took us half way up Styhead Tarn where I was going fishing while he climbed a few peaks. He loved to climb and he loved to walk. We once found a platypus in the wild – quite near Geelong, my birth place in the Year of the Ox.
Exercise. Take T.S.Eliot’s The Wasteland and without changing a word perform it on stage – perhaps with the ‘characters’ just performing it in whatever surrounding they chose, or find themeselves, and it will ‘work’ in a theatre. On the other side of the pond role of the playwright-director became Bob Dylan on the one hand and a whole host of others on the other… I could go on. It’s what the great Jewish intellectual, Erich Heller wrote to me about – and its what Michael Tanner is alluding to in the Spectator with a very rare ! ref the great Samuel Johnson’s total lack of music.
halfpence to beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. “And why should they …
www.samueljohnson.com/poverty.html Cached
Can it be true? For he certainly laid claim to the dramatic impulse of the (18th – how could the ‘professional’ stage keep up? It couldn’t but that didn’t mean the profoundest connection that is possible in the field of art – the umbrella-art of theatre – disappeared. It just went underground – and it still does, when it can get away with it.
Michael argues that it next emerges with Wagner – and in many ways he’s right. Plenty to pin down.
Beckett counts.
So does Dickens who had the total dramatic impulse of the age at his fingertips – and he proved it with the one-man shows.
I love his American tour diary.
The moment he discovers two black men playing fiddle and dancing with a tambourine in devastating poverty in New York with wild pigs running the street.
In recent times the split between body-truth and ‘learned lines’ has been pretty total. ‘Dirctor’s Theatre’ directors when they are any good come back to power of the word and do their best to integrate it into the ‘total theatre’ thing – unless they’re latent fascists – then they just take the power and manipulate the event. Great playwrights like Arthur Miller and Anton Checkov don’t do that…and from what I’ve gathered over the years neither did Lecoc.
Peter Brook is a profound humanist – as Ted Hughes was – as Salmon Rushdie is. The pathways to mystical Islam exist – they do not need to be found – Sufi wisdom, for example, teaches that the next person you meet will be the teacher you have been looking for. (Thanks to David Lan for that – it was part of a Peter Brook story, Notting Hill, mid nineties.) Where is the past?
Jester: Why do you want to know?
You say: Is that all you have to say?
Jester: Why do you want to know? Here’s my breakdown of the ‘Can we make paintings in the theatre’ session at the Judith E. Wilson Theatre, beneath the Cambridge University English Department, 9, West Road – just along from the Stephen Hawking Building. A lovely space – couldn’t be more perfect.
If Bertrand Russell concluded that the end of mathematics is abstraction and poetry then I am inclined to believe him.
Did you know that the great David Bowie shares a birthday with Elvis? Today I start working with Robin Gillen as Banjo Nick and Robin Hood. Bill Gates on Radio 4 right now , build up…quote of the day from Andy Murray, in Melbourne: do things ‘a little bit different’ Who knows how far you can go, Andy? Thought-shift to the end of a an unwritten poem
Nick Ward Scenarios search-term of the week:
‘andy pandy loves plum cake’
World Economic Forum. ‘India is the toughest country of all’, says Gates: 2-4 years to eradicate certain diseases. Agriculture – give farmers better seeds. Investment in farming is paying. The Green Revolution of the 70s was right. On Gm? Creating seeds involves GM. Why I’m optimistic: the impact of these pounds everyone in the UK should be proud of. Everyone who is very rich has been asked ‘will you give your money away?’ I’m having such fun. The rich are going to have to do a greater share. Capitalism is a phenominal system because it creates innovation. Other systems don’t allow that to happen. How do we put up taxation? I look at my son browsing and tooling. I don’t talk about who I’m going to vote for. Do they maintain a generosity? I am hoping both candidates will back that generosity’.
Well spoken. I liked Caroline Lucas on Iran. ‘Israel is the most problamatic place in the planet’ is how I put it to my charming and inspiring Israeli Lecoq teacher – and she agreed. Israel is changing and it has to. Iran is changing and it has to.
