A few days of changes in one respect; of dreadful fear in another. Such is the way of life to throw these horrid cousins at you together, joined at the hip and seeking you to be their third. But good things can arise: until the last few days I have always been a complete failure in standing on my head, for example, and though I have dreamed of it, I have never successfully rolled across another person’s back. Our teacher is an excellent fellow, and he has given me the confidence to perform both these tricks and more, although a certain ease and virtue still eludes me. It’s something to do with being upside down; I can’t stand it. But he is of the sort that he will not take that for an answer, and stands waiting for you to try, and then supports you until you achieve. In that mark, he is one of finest the teachers I have ever had in these arts, and never afraid to demonstrate. On Friday, for example, I spent a good amount of time helping catch him as he threw himself into our arms in a manner reminiscent of Tony Jaa or those other masters. Although I am afraid of what is to follow in his classes, for once I am hopeful too, and I have found a trust in myself and my work (and me fellows) that I have never experienced in Britain.
Apart from the acrobatics we have been continuing to work on our Fitzmaurice tremoring exercises, which surprisingly enough have not turned out to be complete bullshit. We have also made headway towards starting The House of Bernarda Alba in discussion of it. However, voice and movement classes, for me, pale when compared to the vivid experiences in Production with Andreu. As I noted – never have I worked like that before, and am only too happy to think on it. In these more actor-training session, we have also worked on finding real responses to impulses delivered by others – limiting the theatricality that is, abhorrently, the first response that comes to mind, in order that a truthful response be revealed and worked on. Another exercise saw us drawing on deep memories of unfairness and gradually working up the same emotions, firing them upon a neutral partner. It was a remarkably cathartic and freeing experience to go to town on a rancid Trojan such as I made exist, and a useful technique to remember.
Visited the Sagrada Familia on Wednesday – Gaudi’s insanely delectable folly perched in the middle of Barcelona. It’s been a long time since I walked into a building and was genuinely taken aback. Or for that matter had a religious experience. Or had my preconceptions (how foolish now!) shattered like an antique grandfather clock plummeting down a lift shaft. The Sagrada may still be under construction but the twisted, skeletal structure already knocks the socks off – let’s say, St. Paul’s? – no, that place has the edge on history; Lincoln? – no, the edge there’s on scale. But in the casual dexterity of the architect, the images it conjures up and the overwhelming beauty of the space, the Sagrada beats the proverbial out of all of them and the halls of Moria combined. Everywhere I looked there lay a different fragments of a lost, mystical world; towers rising against the walls, robbed from a romantic fairytale, contrast with elliptical glass lighting structures, laced with seeming hairline fractures, staring omnipotently down on the congregation of the nave like the eyes of the Nephilim. Rows of marble teeth hang zig-zag from every available edge, curiously regular against the roving lines of the columns that protrude from the floor and climb immeasurably to split like bacteria, and split. One wonders what manner of god is represented here, in what looks for the world like a giant ribcage – and there it is. For all the lifts, the spiral staircase a hundred foot high, the choir bleachers hanging vertiginously overhead in a shower or rock, metal and glass – and the glowing, almost-flourescent stained glass, it seems I have encountered the vulture-picked body of a titan’s corpse. One hopes that in Gaudi’s posthumous exploration of the god-body, the heart is left to fossilise; it wouldn’t do to restart it.
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