In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing. - Tom Stoppard

Hola! The first picture is at Trafalgar Square. Today was Canada Day, anyone know why? 

The second picture is Geoff, Cameron, me, Robert, Alex, Ted, and Kyle at the Household Cavalry Museum, which is apparantly new. I dragged them all because they couldnt come up wtiha  plan for themselves and I wasn't about to stand out there sweating for an hour until we had to go over to the theater.

Paul Ready was awesome today! All of us agreed he looked really different compared to how he was in Time and The Conways last night, especially the fact that he was SO Skinny!!! He wore suits and a tux in the play, and look much bigger. He was definitely very tiny and skinny, and not clean shaven like in the play (haha). But very nice, funny, and a little bit quirky. He taught us some really (like seriously) useful tools for reading shakespeare. If you read it one time, it's so hard to get anything out of it. But he showed us some really cool things you can do. And we discussed words that should be stressed and stuff. My favorite thing he taught us was actually where Shakespeare has hidden within his plays places for characters to take a breath or a pause (a  beat). In the plays themselves, the ONLY stage directions given are entering and exiting. It's hard to explain on the internet, but it has to do with iambic pentameter and when lines don't fill up the normal 5 feet of one like and must be finished. Or...a pause can be taken for about 3 feet (if two were used up), and he showed us how we can tell based on what's being discussed between the characters so we can tell who should and why take a pause there. very cool! 

Geoff and I are the first group to work with him tomorrow on our Shakespeare scene, so I hope we get a lot out of it. Most groups have four in them, so I'm glad it's just Geoff and I so he can really work with us. He also is letting us ask questions about Time and the Conways tomorrow, so I'm definitely looking forward to that.

I talked to an audience member one night (A Little Night Music actually), about if there was a rule about standing ovations in London. He said "No, not at all" and I said "Then how come no one ever stands up to applaud?" and told him about when we saw History Boys and no one did. He said "I think English people are just more reticent."  

....That is annoying. Every show so far has been AMAZING. and even if it weren't, I can SEE how hard every actor is putting into these shows. They're fully dedicated, and that should be enough to satnd up! Not to mention, I've already dedicated 2.5 hours of my time sitting on my butt to watch them, the least I can do is stand up to clap for them (since they have been working much harder!). In addition, You gotta stand up to leave the theater anyway.... grr. I end up clapping and bouncing in my chair just because I want them to know how much I appreciate their performances. They're so fabulous!

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Arcadia

by: Tom Stoppard

So this was a play we had to read ahead of time, and I was extremely excited because it was the play I enjoyed the most that we had to read. it was very difficult to understand, and also dealt with different time periods (Time, as you can see, is a common theme this week, and is also a prompt for our first paper, oh boy!).  Except for this one we have two different time periods, 1809 and the present, occurring in the same room! At first they go back and forth between scenes and then finally the two time periods merge and are occurring simultaneously on stage! They just can't see the other people in the time period. The present characters are trying to find out what was going on with the past characters. And we get to figure it all out before they do, because they're basing their research on notebooks, primers, letters, etc. and we're watching it unfold in the other time period. 

The difficult part, is not only the way Stoppard writes, but the way he finds a clue, but you don't even realize it's a clue until much later. This is an extremely useful skill in writing, but is rather hard to follow on the stage (especially for a bunch of teenage boys who ran around london all day, are exhausted, and didn't actually read the play beforehand....zzzz.). Thus, I was very glad I read it beforehand so I knew what to be paying attention for. Besides, there were a few things I didn't understand while reading it that made a WHOLE lot more sense watching it on the stage! 

Again, it was another very visually appealing show. The set was plain but expansive and gorgeous, which sounds like an oxymoron, but i liked it a lot. It was a cut-out rectangular room, and I liked it when they create the set with three walls, and not sort of this oddly shaped room that works better for an audience to be able to see everything. It was very cool. 

I also liked the costumes a lot. The 1809 ones that is. Very pretty, especially Lady Croom. 

One of the coolest things I like about the play is that three of the people in the present are looking for three different things in the past. For Bernard (funny pronunciation in England!), it's the past of Lord Byron, who is actually at the house of the Coverlys in the 1800s but never seen on stage. Hannah is looking for the Hermit who lived in the Hermitage (because what really is a hermitage, without a hermit?) during that time period. And Valentine, starts off looking at grouse at the time and mathematical equations, but once he discovers some of the things Thomasina (the young girl of the Coverly home) had written in her lesson book, switches over to commit himself to her ingenious, profound, and unheard of before then, ideas. 

The latter, was my personal favorite search. Valentine was played by Ed Stoppard (Sound familiar? - It's the author's son!) finds out that Thomasina developed an equation of an iterated algorithm that can graph unimaginable graphs, such as that of a leaf, by plugging in an x, solving it for y, and then plugging the solution back in for x again. What you get (as we learn in the play), is a whole bunch of random dots on a graph, making absolutely no sense, but when you do them a couple...million times, using a computer (something Thomasina, obviously, had no access to), you get that graph. and Valentine helps her to finish what she started because she dies (so sad!) before her 17th birthday. Then comes my favorite quote "In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing."

He also finds out about a discover she made that added a dilemma to Newton's theorems. Her idea that heat is the one thing that we can never get back. and as another character says "Everything will turn cold" or to room temperature, and there's nothing we can do to run it backwards, or get it back. it can only run one way. You can throw a ball through a window, but you can neve rdo it backwards. you can pick up all the pieces of glass and try to put them all back, but you can never collect back up all the heat of the smash. It's gone. Coffee will go to room temperature. Everything will be cold. 

In the end, all of the characters find out part of what they're looking for. But even then, Hannah, realizes that's not what is even important.

"It's all trivial - your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron.  Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in." - Hannah

"When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore."

"Then we will dance."

(Septimus and Thomasina)

Good actors as usual, too. This is a super hard piece, with so much going on and SO many props, so I gotta hand it to them. 

It was a great comedy, intense ideas, and top notch theater. good night!

More tomorrow if I think of anything else. I definitely won't forget this one.

I would love to do it some day, turns out Clum directed it one time a loonnnng time ago at Duke. go figure.

Tomorrow: working with Paul Ready on our individual shakespeare scenes. questions on T&C. dunno what else between break and then War Horse. Should be incredible. Huge puppets that have to be controlled by six people. Horses puppets controlled by SIX people! And apparently the actors ride them!!! should be awesome. Clum also got us tickets for a saturday matinee he wanted us to see. We all voted and it was unanimous that we wanted to see it. apparently it rains onstage and that one.

I can't believe this is my life for the next five weeks. I was talking to one girl, Eugenie, about how much we like this schedule. Class, sightseeing, Oh! and Off to the theater for the evening! EVERY DAY!. 

Stoppard put me in a writing mood. So clever.

Bed.

Cheers!

Bec