Tuesday 21 December 2010

Iceland Effect


I have spent a whole three months teaching in UK and not written a thing. Yet I had so many insights with the work and influences – a workshop with Tommy Thompson, a lesson and talk with Alex Farkas. I read the Open Focus Brain by Les Fehmi and reconnected with my work with David Gorman. My teaching had an extra edge to it and became an easy experiment, my students learning this stuff and responding and taking responsibility for their learning.

My practice expanded, although my hours at ArtsEd have decreased and I am still in negotiation with them about my new pay scale.

I have a wonderful new band of voluntary assistants helping my hands-on work at Arts Educational Schools in both BA and MA courses in acting.

My friends from Australia stayed for a three weeks and my lodger moved back in again. My Alexander friend C has had her adorable baby – conceived by donor as she doesn’t have a partner and the biological clock was ticking fast. He stopped crying for a while with me, and looks like his Mum.

I returned to Alonnisos for a week at half term and did lots of work in the garden, levelling a piece of land and planting some bulbs and redesigning another part. It was good weather, and I swam a few times.

My swimming had stopped in London and I took 4 lessons in the violin. I have brought it over with me for this Christmas visit to Alonnisos – a wonderful instrument that I purchased for about £50 on ebay. She is worth 4 times as much and I call her Belinda. She has to put up with a lot of squeaks and scrapes but I am making some slow progress. O the joy of learning something new! I don’t find my arms ache too much. I most enjoy putting on some Vivaldi and trying to play along. Or sit in a daze bowing along to a Leonard Cohen film.....It probably sounds dreadful but no-one is listening and I am having fun.

I haven’t yet decided whether to go to Lugano for the International Congress this summer. It is a year earlier so we don’t clash with the Olympics. And the second time we are using Lugano as our venue. I usually lead a workshop and am unclear what I would do it on. Maybe something about the repetition exercise in Meisner as a way of bringing us to the present moment.....or perhaps now this new insight about Unified Field of Attention. I need to purchase my air ticket before VAT rise in January if I decide to go.

All my students at ArtsEd along with me are supposed to be lying down in semi-supine everyday and writing up their experiments as their holiday assignment. I haven’t been assiduous with this myself – I spent four days in Iceland as soon as college broke up – marvellous place. Some years ago ArtsEd had a number of students from there and one man wrote me a great paper on AT entitled the Iceland Effect . Quite right. Iceland has a slow unhurried wide open space effect on the brain. Such an easy holiday and o those Northern Lights (my main purpose for going) dutifully performed as we waited in minus 13 on a thickly frosted landscape. It requires waiting and allowing them to appear. Then two days to get here. Travelling and semi-supine doesn’t work easily. Meditations and application of the principles no problem.

I like best to lie down outside if I am wrapped up and it is warm enough, listening to the surf crashing down, the seagulls wheeling overhead. Otherwise, by the stove in the evening, the tv shouting loudly in the room above, the dog nestling up to me, maybe a cat or two....That’s what it will be today, lazy Sunday in Alonnisos......

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