Thursday, 1-27-11

Today I spent about two hours working on my flamingo costume. I sewed pink fabric onto the wooden dowels I got to make (admittedly kind of rough looking) wings, and used cardboard, tape, and a shoelace to make the beak. I'm pretty pleased with the overall effect though. Pictures of me in full costume will hopefully go up sometime next week. For now, here are some pictures of the wings and beak.


(In retrospect, I shouldn't have used my bed as workspace. The comforter is covered with tiny threads of pink fabric now.)

Today in Movement we did some work with our animals, applying the Bartenieff Fundamentals of Developmental Movement we've been learning to our animal physicality-work. This was nice because we had a good long time to work in character, and a very specific set of movement ideas to explore. The Bartenieff movement work looks at basic levels of connectivity through the body, beginning with Breath and working up to more complex dimensional exploration, like the diagonals of the extremities, the centering of the body in the hips, or other unconventional muscle exercises that give us simple, physical ideas to work with. Looking for particular explorations of, say, the Contralateral connectivity in the flamingo was an interesting way of improvising with the animal and looking for new ways of moving.

I'm also looking at music for my flamingo circus trick for tomorrow. I'm thinking something by Herb Alpert would be appropriate. I want to do a sort of balancing trick but the problem with balancing tricks is then I actually have to be able to balance something. Haha, maybe I can balance something light and square-ish on my cardboard beak.