Week 7 (October 26 - November 1)

First Year Discovery Project:
Pericles, Prince of Tyre

"Your present kindness makes my past miseries sports"

1. Pericles, Prince of Tyre (October 28/29)
We finally had the "Showings"/Open Rehearsals of our First Year Discovery Project: Pericles, Prince of Tyre! Everyone who has ever gotten into Juilliard Drama has gone through the "Discovery Project." During its earlier inception, it was called "The Test" and was considered traumatic by students who have gone through the process. The project and the people who comprise it (from the faculty and students admitted) have since evolved into what it is today and it is far from being "The Test." For me it served as an introduction to the process in which we would approach rehearsals for the next four years of our studies or possibly, for the rest of our lives.
Every now and then I get reminded of the fact that I actually got into this school and the idea just stuns me. There is so much joy and discipline into the room that I cannot begin to fathom the amount of gratitude it would take from me to encompass the environment in which I have chosen to grow for the next four years. This process has reminded me so much of the joy of storytelling and reintroduced me to the tools that will be useful to me for the rest of my life: Curiosity, Awe and Wonder.

Group 48 on the set of Pericles!

Group 48 with Richard Feldman, Jenny Lord and Dawn Sato

​Thank you also to Group 47, 46 and 45. You teach us 48-ers how to love, how to be generous and how to support one another.

2. US Social Security Card Application / Winter Coat
After showings last October 28 and 29 (Wed/Thurs) we had our first Intercession last Friday (October 30). I finally had time to head downtown to the Social Security Card Center on William St. to apply for my SS card so I can begin to work on campus. The process took less than one hour. Then I headed over to the Uniqlo store along 5th Avenue, 53rd Street to finally get myself a decent winter coat.

3. Filipino Junk Food!
When I got back from the SS Card Application and Winter Coat purchase I checked my mailbox and discovered that I've got a package arrived from my mother's friend in California. Lo and behold, I got a box's worth of Filipino junk food: Pancit Canton, Clover Chips, Nagaraya, Oishi, Chippy, Chocnut, Tuyo, Calamansi juice, Mango juice and the controversial Skyflakes!

4. Roundabout Theatre Company's "The Humans"
I went with a couple of Group 48-ers last Saturday (October 31) to catch the evening performance of Roundabout Theatre's "The Humans" along 46th St. between 6th and 7th Avenue.
The play reminded me of Annie Baker's "John" which we saw last September 6 at the Signature Theatre​. Both had the feel of "quiet" plays in which you had very "realistic" and "detailed" sets that evoked certain portions of a house or an apartment. You see characters fleeting through different sections of the house and speaking about seemingly "mundane" topics evocative of what we usually get worked out about in the routines of our day-to-day lives. There were portions of rhythmic conversations but there were also unapologetically deep silences and empty spaces.

Majority of productions I've worked on (and have seen) in university and professional productions in Metro Manila always had people onstage "doing things" or talking except with the occasional blackouts and scene changes. Many lived by the "rule" that there should be no "empty spaces" onstage and shifts between episodic scenes should be quick as if "cross-fading" into one another. "John" and "The Humans" belong to an entirely different sensibility and I wonder if this is evolving into an emerging trend. And what does this reveal or comment upon how we perceive the pace of our day-to-day lives?

5. Poetry
I am finally falling in love with poetry the way I've always wanted to thanks to Kate Wilson's Voice class (we memorize and unpack a new poem every week). I've always been interested in poetry and was fascinated and partly envious of people who understood and wrote poetry because they seem to be getting something from the poems that I'm not getting. My biggest frustration with the way I had been educated with literature is how literature has been shoved down my throat in terms of "scholarly analysis." Poems had been handed out to me as one would in scientific papers and demand analysis of its symbolic, metaphorical whatnot nonsense.
Poems are not meant to be analyzed but lived in the body. They evoke those awkward spaces in life that are hard to name but truly exist. At present I retreat into poems as a kind of assuage to the emotions I go through in waves but find hard to express or name. Thank God for poets.

Here's a section of a poem from Bukowski:

CONFESSION

I want to
let her know
though that all the nights
sleeping
beside her

even the useless
arguments
were things
ever splendid

and the hard
words
I ever feared to 
say
can now be
said:

I love
you.

- Charles Bukowski