Surviving Day One

Despite jet lag, insane blood sugar craziness, and feeling a little bit ill, I survived my first day of classes at CWU.

I just arrived home from my first Advanced Movement class (Rasaboxes) covered in chalk.  I think the technique holds lots of promise.  The morning was spent meeting classmates, talking about the course, and doing breathing exercises and yoga.  I left for our lunch break feeling a little bit nervous about surviving the second part of the day (the class goes from 9am-5:30pm), due to exhaustion and not having been able to eat a whole lot the past few days.

After lunch: pretty freaking cool, and I came out of it feeling a lot better than when I started this morning.  Basically, from what I gather from Day 1 (and this could all very well be wrong and change tomorrow) Rasaboxes is all about using breathing, body, facial expressions to make the audience experience a different emotion (Rasa).

The teacher likened a Rasa to the juice/essence of an orange.  People experience oranges differently, they pick up on different subtleties of the flavor, smell, textures, but it's still the same orange.  In rasaboxes, you map out a grid on the floor, and each box represents a different Rasa.  We labelled the boxes with chalk.  Each box "contains" varying levels of different emotions or universal feelings.  There's a box for anger, pleasure, the Hero, fear, sadness, the Clown (laughing, joy, humor), discovery, disgust/sickness, and one more that we haven't really delved into yet that represents something I think is akin to clarity, or a spiritual box.  We drew words, pictures, and symbols in each of the boxes that helped us identify what each Rasa represented.  When actors step into the box, they take on movement and breathing that embody the Rasa that is inhabiting that box.

As actors, I think we try to focus on physically and vocally embodying a character, but what was so cool about today was noticing, both as an actor and as a witness, what a strong connection BREATH can give you to an emotion or a character.

By the end of the session, I could step into a Rasabox,  physicalize that Rasa, and just by breathing differently slip into an emotion so quickly, and transition between emotions so quickly I was amazed.  It was a really cool experience, and I think tomorrow is going to be another really good day.  

 This probably will only make a whole lot of sense to the actors out there...  or maybe to other people as well.  ...And if it doesn't make sense to anyone, I'll just go ahead and blame it on the jetlag.