Not Sore; Just Happy

Yesterday was the most fulfilling day I had in a very long time. Linda Bisesti randomly invited me over to CSUP for a 6-hour contact improv class and I randomly decided to go. (All of those workshops on auditioning and how to be an actor in the "business" make me want to kill myself.) But contact improv is contact improv and I've had enough of it to know it's great.

We did about 2 hours of "Viewpoints" which I hope is a lot different than what we did. If it is similar to the work we did yesterday, it's nonsense. That having been said, he split up the class at one point (there were about 30 people there, I would guess) and had half of us be witnesses to the other half who had the whole stage to move... and I got a bit emotional. I haven't witnessed movement in a really long time... probably since the Voice Intensive in 2002. It's such interesting work to me and I never do it anymore.

After our 2 hours of "Viewpoints," the instructor moved on to contact improv, which most of the class described as "sexual" or "erotic." I've done it before and I never had a sexual experience, and I have to admit to not having any kind of sexual experience yesterday either, so I'm not sure what the actors were talking about. Contact improv is tough to describe, but it's very dance-y. It is physical improvisation based on two partners or more exchanging their weight back and forth in various positions. It's fucking exhausting, but very cool to experience.

We seriously did this for the better part of four hours. We finished at six, I went and had a pizza and then went home and crashed.

I can't remember when I spent that long in a studio. It was awesome and I was so grateful to Linda for giving me the opportunity and to all of the students for being as open to the work as they were. There was still a lot of silliness and masturbation (as is usual with university students) and you would not believe the ridiculousness of Nathan Weaver (why did he even show--to sabotage other people's experiences?), but I think overall the students really gave themselves over to the work and had a beneficial experience.