Is It A Ghost?

Is it a geisha? 

No! It’s Commedia Dell’arte! The first and second lovers to be precise. 

I realise I hardly ever get around to writing about what I actually do in school, but oh well. Today I am, for today I had the opportunity to take a few pictures of what we’re doing, and that makes posting just so much more interesting.  

A new subject of this term is Commedia Dell’arte, and we have it for four hours every Thursday.  Today we were using makeup, and while we waited for the last few people to finish their makeup, I quickly got my iPad mini out and snapped some pictures. 

Now, what is Commedia Dell’arte you might ask? I’m sure Wikipedia can help you with that. But since I’m so nice, I’ll give you a short briefing: 

Basically, it’s “comedy by the craft of improvisation”. If you go to watch a Commedia Dell’arte play, you’re going to watch a comedy improvisation. The theatre company will have already planned the plot, or the scenario, but they will not have rehearsed it and so they don’t necessarily know how to “get from” one part of the scenario to another. That is improvised then and there.

In Commedia, there’s a basic stock of characters, and mostly one actor will play the same character for the entirety of their career – the one that fits them best. The characters themselves are “types”, almost like caricatures of different society types I suppose, such as the proud master, the innocent young lovers, etc. The characters are more or less two-dimensional, predictable, and very “exaggerated”. 

 

All the characters have masks, except for the lovers, of which there are two pairs. There’re the young lovers – the 2^nd lovers, which are the innocent ones. Then there’re the 1^st lovers, who are anything and everything but innocent. These two pairs use the makeup shown in the pictures, and these two pairs were the characters we were working on for the day. We’re slowly going through all the characters, and by the end of term we’ll make a small performance. 

Art

Nail art, to be precice.

Guess what? I found a new "canvas" I enjoy drawing on. And in correspondence with that, I just bought a small nail art kit consisting of eight colours, some glitter and diamonds. 

Each colour is equipped with a thin brush and a precision tool. 

It’s a newly acquired hobby, and the nails in the picture are just my fourth time of drawing on my nails (done with the very kit mentioned above), so I'm just a real beginner, but practice makes perfect. 

A sensible, good investment of money? Maybe not. When I ripped open the packaging I could clearly picture my mum rolling her eyes and groaning at my useless purchase. But I find my new little hobby to be quite a lot of fun and know I will use my little kit a lot, sooooo oh well. You only live once, as they say.

Snow Likely

Is your journey necessary? 

Guess what I saw when I shuffled into the kitchen this morning. Snow. And it was coming down hard – still is, actually. It’s a few centimeters of snow out there, and already trains are closing down. I know I have complained about delayed trains in Norway many a time, but I take it all back. At least those trains were running.

I’m not in the need of a train for the day though, so to me the whole thing is quite entertaining at the moment. I know a few others who aren’t so lucky however. Ah well, the charm of England.

Yesterday on the other hand, the girls from my flat and I went on a day trip to London, and while that was definitely one of the coldest experiences of the year, it at least wasn’t snowing so we got home safely. 

Despite the cold (we all agreed we need to go on a warm day next) we did have fun. We went to Camden Market, and it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen! 

It’s basically just a gigantic market, but when I say gigantic I really mean gigantic. There were so many stalls and so many cool and wondrous things to look at. It’s a web of narrow, winding pathways and stalls with all kinds of goods to draw your attention and make you never want to leave. 

  

I thought I’d go home broke, but instead there was so much to look at I couldn’t decide what to get and hardly bought anything. What I did buy though was an antique style pocket watch to 5 pounds, and three little bags of water orbs, 1 pound each. They’re tiny beads you put in water, and then they grow as they absorb it. You put them in plants to keep them hydrated. I only bought it because I thought they looked awesome, though.  

 

But the funniest thing of the day must have been when we drove in to London (one of my flat mate’s boyfriend drove us since he had to go to London anyway), and a big sign said “Snow Likely. Is your journey necessary?” Oh, the cute, little English people.

Crash And Burn

Mayday in studio one.

I don’t know what happened, I honestly don’t. One moment I was flying through the air; the next something hit my head, and sharp, abrupt pain spread like a spider’s legs through my mouth. Severely disoriented, it took me several moments to realise my front flip from the trampett had gone horribly wrong.

After reviewing what of my memory is tangible, I have managed to gather the key points of the horrific accident. I was turning in the air – as I was supposed to, but I must have rotated too slowly, because I hit the ground with the back of my neck, my momentum pressing the rest of my body down onto me, instead of continuing the rotation so I’d end up on my back. Imagine my body basically breaking at the middle, legs crashing with my head. 

Thick pain throbbed heavily through my left thigh, the leg rendered in such a bad state I needed two people to support me to the toilets. Rinsing my mouth with cool water, red liquid and slime splashed into a white sink to the sound of a disgusted groan.

….I’m making this sound really dramatic, aren’t I? It wasn’t actually. Well, yeah, I landed wrongly, got a bump on my thigh and three small “holes” in tongue from biting it, but that’s also all. I didn’t hurt my neck at all, which is quite surprising and quite lucky, I suppose. We were practicing fall-techniques, “falling” in different ways and landing in a secure manner on our backs. It gave me quite a shock, but that’s also all. 

I just felt like being a Drama Queen. Have a lovely weekend.

The Picture Of Desperation

A very creative picture though, I must say. 

So the thing is, we have Aikido tomorrow (Monday), and last term we passed our grading. That means we are no longer white belts, but yellow belts, as I told you all before Christmas. That also means that last Monday, the teacher told us that if we didn’t have a yellow belt by next Monday (tomorrow), then we wouldn’t be allowed in to the lesson. And if we aren’t allowed in, we get an absence mark. And if we get three such marks, we fail the entire year. 

Long story short, it’s Sunday and I and two others in my class weren’t able to get a hold of a belt. ...So we got creative.... with yellow food colouring and our white belts…