But before I get to far I need to mention something. Nekol and I walked to the Tate Modern because it's only about a 30 minute walk from the Lambeth borough. It's just slightly past Blackfirars so I decided it'd save us time than having to jump a lot from the Bakerloo and Central lines. It's actually a good thing we walked too because apparently there was a cause for fire alarm on the Bakerloo at Baker Street this morning. Anyways, we got there a little late (10:05) and couldn't find anyone at the entrance that faced the Thames. So we decided to walk around, hoping to maybe round a corner and find our class. Finally, we bumped into our teacher around 10:20 and she chided us and no one else about being late...even though we definitely weren't the last ones to show up. This kind of shut me down and I went through the rest of the class not too happy with life.
Anyways, the first exercise was to set on creating Plot from a painting. Is it the ending or beginning of a story? Why and where did it all come from? The painting given to us was The Beached Margin by Edward Wadsworth.
My story is based partially on reality and partially in fiction. It tells of a mother who has a starfish from her childhood and how she found it...partially true to my own self and partially not. I rather enjoyed the story I created.
The second exercise was to create Character. We were supposed to tell of desires, flaws, wants, and obstacles of people. The suggested painting was of an old couple that looked rather crochety. As soon as I laid eyes on them I wrinkled my nose and turned to look for something else before landing on my new subject. Burdened Children by Paul Klee became my new muse.
I told how these children had lived through World War II and just wanted their parents to be happy again. Their father a soldier of war and their mother almost a ghost of the woman she once was, having had to set aside her gentility to work for their family. They live in London near St James Park, where they sometimes run off to because it's peaceful there. I rather liked it because I could see their story having a happy ending.
The final project was creating Space/Location. We had to walk into a huge Turbine Box, completely black on the inside, close our eyes, and just imagine our surroundings without using visual imagery. In our Western society, we place a heavy amount of our time on visuals and not so much on our other senses.
This is pretty much what you're walking into. You don't know where the back of it is. You don't know if anyone is standing in there or if there are any other objects in there. It is a black void. It smelled of steel, cold, and musty fabric. Noise reverberated like thunder in the sky but it still felt so lonely at the same time. The wall is covered in soft velvet and the floor scrapped against the bottom of my shoes, sounding rough and corse, like sandpaper. After a while, I opened my eyes and I could see everything inside the box clearly because my eyes had adjusted. It blew my mind how monochromatic grey/black everything was. I was thinking that was how it was like to be in The Giver at nighttime.
That was the interesting part of my morning but later this evening Nekol, Claire, and I went to Sketchville, London, England to go see a fringe show. A fringe show is basically like off off Broadway. The show is called The Origin of the Species and is about an archeologist who finds the missing link, names her Victoria, and is taught where humans got it all wrong. It was a two hour show that made me laugh, think, and almost cry. I thoroughly enjoyed it but the area couldn't have been sketchier.
Also, we arrived two hours early just because Tuesday is "pay what you want," which is technically a five quid minimum but apparently that didn't start until 7 and we had gotten there at 6. We decided to get a drink and snack so that we could whittle away the waiting hour. I ended up getting an organic cola which wasn't too bad. The theatre was definitely very trendy hippy. Normally I'm pretty cool with those kinds of things, I even want to learn more about the place and get in with them, but the front house crew just seemed so snobby it put me off. After a long wait, we got our tickets, and began the second hour of waiting before going to see our show.
The show was two hours of awesomeness. If anyone is in London and brave enough to go to the Kingsland/Dalston area to get to the Arcola theatre, then they totally should. If you don't have the nerve to go see it then that's fine too.
<3,
Dre
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