training - we're back!

Training. Nona is parked outside the Westside Circus warehouse, spilling coffee and breakfast-making ingredients out her door. Luke sleepy and cute, me ready to train. Skipping, strength, cardio, handstands, acrobalance. My handstands have gone backwards. I don’t hold anything for longer than 30 seconds. Conscious about over-training.

Christy trains hard and is red faced from the work but smiling. “We’re back. I feel like we’re back,” she says over coffee at the end.

We run acro tricks that we’re already comfortable with. Do easy tricks but with combos we aren’t used to. Moments of standing sweaty, the three of us facing each other “What will we do now?” and then thinking of the next thing.

Luke says, “You know what? When we do this show, everyone is going to say to you two ‘you’re so strong!’ and no-one will say it to me.” We laugh. It’s true.

While they’re making breakfast and I’m putting my shoes on to leave, Luke starts talking about an idea. An acro-against-the-wind-scene. The three of us struggling to get somewhere. The tension and slow motion of that. The new show is starting to feel like a reality.

I’m home now. Another letter from the bank's lawyers. Looks like our landlord has made a very big mess. Odds of getting evicted 100 to 1. Jono and I looking at housesitting in Montmorency – which makes training at 8 in the morning a little harder... but not impossible.

kick ass

Christy and Luke are back from Gippsland. Went round to theirs in the ute and took them to the Brunswick baths last night for the last hour til the pool closed. Sat ourselves in the spa (tripping over the old men) and talked scheduling. Three sessions of physical training and one of performance work a week? Getting performance trainers in to work with us? Shannon to train us in acro? I think: I should have a look at the Arts Vic dates. We’ll know if we got the funding 15 weeks from when the application went in. That will effect our planning.

Drove out to Northlands with a bottle of juice each. ‘Kick Ass’ Luke said we had to see it. ‘It’s creative development for the superhero show.’ Which it is. Squealed with laughter and horror at the action and the gore. Appreciated the soundtrack immensely “I don’t give a damn about my reputation.” And were slightly disturbed by the whole child-soldier element.

Drove home through the dark Northcote streets and talked. Talked about how often superhero movies will have a moment of redemption where the superhero lets a bad guy go after having him fully at his mercy. Or the classic moment where an action hero will let a bad guy go and immediately be attacked by him again and need to kill him.

I think you could do that moment over and over and over again. The hero nearly killing the bad guy and then relenting. The bad guy coming back for more and then the hero getting him in his power and nearly killing him and then relenting and so on…until someone breaks it up. Could be hilarious.

About how revenge makes violence ok. Or how it doesn’t really. About how satisfying it is to see a bully go down. How Spiderman and the Phantom don’t kill.

Luke despises the phantom. I tell him he’s prejudiced and Christy laughs and nods. He tries to explain that it’s the costume. No one could look good in that.

I drop them at the warehouse and kiss them goodbye. Eight o’clock in the morning for training.

Anzac bisuits on the table when I get home. Cute, baking housemates.

ps. addicted to statcounter

So i put a statcounter on here and I can't help checking it all the time. It's kind of amazing to know that folk are at least ending up at this site - whether or not they are reading it. (it can't have been my mum every time!)

training without 'training'

So the plan is to do a creative development in July-August whether or not we get funding. And the hope is to make a show with some impressive skill in it. That means training. And Luke and Christy are away which means we can’t work the triple acro skills we’re interested in performing so I’m trying to stick to a routine that at least keeps my strength on a level for when the training starts.
This routine is new and it’s the first time I’ve really regularly done my own training that isn’t within a tumbling class or with a partner.

I try to do at least an hour a day (which isn’t much in the scheme of things)
Every other day I’ve been doing weights and cardio at the gym plus some handstand drills and flexibility. On the off days I either do half an hour of hula hoops (2 minute drills of each skill) plus handstand drills and flexibility or I go swim a kilometre – which includes some sprints to get my heart going and some backstroke to stretch out my pecs which are always tight.

With this routine I think it’s possible that I am getting more cardio fit than I was and if I keep it up my hooping will get better. My handstands have definitely gone backwards. We’ll see how the rest goes when we actually start training tricks.

Still no news on whether we actually are getting evicted.

Gippsland

Luke and Christy headed to Gippsland for two weeks. Doing Bubblewrap for some of the smallest schools in Victoria and then teaching the kids and making a show over 5 days of workshops. It’s a Westside Gig and they headed off in the Westside Circus van at stupid o’clock in the morning. Possibly a good plan not to take Nona up those mountains – at least until Luke puts in the new V8 he’s hoping to. I’m not going because uni. Essays to write classes to go to.

Also maybe a house to move out of. Really not much communication going on from the real estate…

inspiration day

It’s my birthday and we go out with Ania to see the Business. Standing in the foyer of the Arts Centre Black Box waiting to go in and Luke is talking to Ania about sound recordings – what equipment do we need to record interviews that we can then use as soundtracks for the show? Ania talks about mikes and mixers Luke can plug into his mac and it sounds expensive. We are going to start the interviews soon and we don’t really have the money to buy equipment. Maybe the digi recorder Alex has taken to Japan?

The show is beautiful. We are in stitches and then heartbroken. Their clowns are so delicate and each moment of connection with the audience is a delight. Jono loves it (perhaps because it has no tricks. Jono has very little patience for tricks – he thinks you may as well go watch a gymnastics competition).

My favourite moment is when the voice-over announces that they have only 5 minutes until the concert starts. There is a rush of ridiculous happy busy-ness. I love it because I love the question ‘what does a clown think is the right thing to do at a given moment?’ And one clown thinks the most important thing is to brush his teeth and another thinks he really has to complete knitting the Finnish flag.

I talk about it with Luke in terms of the Wiped Out costumes. Because the questions is ‘what does a clown think it’s really important to wear and carry when you are about to catch a plane to the tropics?’ and there is so much scope for glorious ridiculousness…

Walking up Swanston street to Cookie for dinner, Christy and Ania talk Oz. Ania is doing the music for the Circus Oz show and they are in creative development at the moment (‘it’s ten til six every day, ‘ she says, ‘which is pretty much nine to five for artists’). All the acrobats are learning a brass instrument because brass band is part of the show. ‘Some of them have never played an instrument before,’ she says, ‘they are doing so well.’ Its fun to know Ania is doing that work and exciting that she’ll be bringing that experience to our projects.

Imagining her being on tour with Oz somewhere in Europe and emailing us sound-clips she has put together for Kapow!

No news on whether we’re really getting evicted or not

getting evicted and planning shows

The Sheriffs came by the front fence last week with a ‘Notice to Vacate’ because apparently our landlords have defaulted on their loan. The best bit goes, ‘All goods, personal property, furniture, machinery, etc may be removed and placed outside the property line.’ Brilliant. Since then I have spent approximately 5 hours talking to the real estate agent and the tenants union and 20 hours talking with various combinations of my housemates about our possible futures. And I haven’t started looking for a new house yet.

So now I am asking questions like, ‘Could I live in the country and do what I’m doing?’ ‘Would this be a good time to go on adventures around the world?’ Or ‘Would it be a good time to get a loan and buy a house so this never happens to me again?’ But neither adventures, nor getting a mortgage leave enough room to do what I want to do.

How to scramble through the muddle and still train physically, plan financially and make theatre work that inspires me?

The security of Nona, a home that you actually own, is suddenly way more appealing to me.

20 k's of Mountain hiking

Jono leads the way with his map and his long legs and the rest of us follow doggedly, along spectacular mountain ridges, down rocky snowgum slopes and up dense fire-regen where we have to push and scramble through young eucalypt branches all at face height.

When the walking is easy I talk. First to Luke and then to Christy. Luke is talking about ideas. He woke up burning with them and is inspired to write his own blog about physical theatre and what he is thinking. He says it would help him to articulate his thouths, if he is going to do public speaking about his work or if he does a masters which he wants to one day.

Christy is talking dates and money. If we go to New Zealand how will that impact on my masters and my writing? Do we want to come straight back to Melbourne and do Fringe? If we plan a touring schedule to work for in 2010-11, can we aim to earn enough money to live on for the three of us?

We are thinking about publicity because if we want to have publicity for the Melbourne Fringe in September we need to hire a publicist now which means we need to do a photoshoot, have an image, figure out who the best publicist is…and we are making those decisions without hearing if we have any funding for the creative development.

‘We should have a meeting,’ we say because now we are inspired, it would be useful to have diaries and numbers in front of us.

As it gets later, Jono starts to get worried. ‘We need to keep moving or we are going to be walking in the dark.’ The last 7 k’s of the walk is on a well marked fire trail so it’s not dangerous, just a bit slower and more difficult and we only have one head torch between the six of us...

We come out into the open and hit the fire trail on dusk. Again the light is stunning, the mountains getting more and more shadowy spread out around us and the pink, pink sunset sky slowly fading. We walk across the broad hill looking over the dark boggy moss with the pale road in front of us and the clouds move aside until the stars are brilliant.

The last kilometre of track is rough and rocky and we can’t do it without the light. Jono, by far the tallest walks in the middle and the rest of us negotiate space near him where we can see the track. “School of fish got nothin’ on this” Luke says and it makes us laugh. This would be a classic physical theatre trust game. We stumble into camp hungry and blistered and Jono cooks again and the rest of us kitchen-hand around him.

heading to the high country

We are going hiking in the high country for my birthday and Luke has emailed me a list of their hiking equipment and where to find it in their warehouse. I go over in the ute to rummage through Nona and their cupboards for hiking clothes, backbacks, sleepingbags and a trangia, holding the list printout in my mouth when I need both hands and checking it regularly.

I pick them up from the airport at nine am. They left Dunedin on a bus at ten last night and are totally sleep deprived. We load the Bubblewrap set alongside the hiking gear and head north up the Hume to Mount Beauty where we are meeting Jono and the others.

We talk about Dunedin. Christy says the folk at the Fortune are interested in having us back – maybe in September? Although nothing is definite because they are changing management structures and someone else will be making decisions. Maybe they would buy the show, or maybe we would come to some kind of co-production arrangement where they also help us tour other parts of New Zealand. They will email us more information soon. It’s exciting to think about a residency there and the possibility of touring.

Luke is checking out the road - they will be driving here next week, taking Bubblewrap on tour in Gippsland.

We hike nine k’s in to Roper’s hut that night, and the last few kilometres are at sunset. Mount Bogong is in front of us and Feathertop behind. We are in high, open alpine country with heaths and mosses and can see layers of blue hills in the bright evening light. We walk and talk and then Jono cooks bolognaise over the campfire while Luke and Christy fall asleep, leaning into each other in their gore-tex and beanies.