" As soon as you step out your door in this city, that's money spent." Erika is telling me about Paris, in her categorically disordered apartment near Gare de Lyon..It is appropriately zen, she confirms, as the table in her living room is angled with a floral arrangement and clumps of keys hang together on one section of wall. There is clearly a calm order to the vast space, a rarity, a museum of collections from her life with her deceased filmmaker husband, Robert, and gifts from artists in her circle, authors and hippie gurus. "Everything in this space is either gifted, loaned, or second hand." Erika has adopted me, introduced me to her women's dream circle. Last weekend I met an author, Ione, from New York, who comes from generations of African Americans who were never enslaved. Her mother was a travelling actress and author, her grandmother a showgirl, her great aunt, a doctor. We discussed our dreams and how they translate into our real lives. I told the group of 16 women, musicians, authors, therapists that I feel now in my life is the time when I am sleeping hard and dreamless, but nearly everything I write down about the way I want my life to be in Paris has transpired. That I feel my life being my dreamlife...a dreamlife out of cans: canned tuna lunches, canned white beans and green peas, canned lunch and dinner with grapes for breakfast...a dreamlife with grist...
Actually, Erika, her earnest blue eyes, and braided gray hair illuminated in early afternoon window beams reminded me to use Grist, the roughness of teachers and students at Lecoq, to my advantage, when I came to her apartment for tea, harping about how a teacher showed up to class drunk. I could smell it on him, and he was curt, harsh, and long-winded. " I'm not going up there with the mask while he is that way! I feel vulnerable. Truthfully, doing the neutral mask work is impossible, unsolveable. Alone, in a green tiled studio in front of 25 classmates, I must believe I am in the sea, being taken with the current, but not appearing as a victim, with the superhero WILL to survive pushing through my body and mask. Then launched to the beach, my feet showing the resistance in the sand. Then I see the forest and traverse it, before coming to a mountain, scaling the mountain, observing the valley below, letting gravity pull me down the mountainside to a river valley. Cross the river to a plain to watch the sunset. We all have yet to do this task correctly. To show the changes in terrain, the moments when our eyes see the mountain and our body chooses to climb it. Each actor has a different challenge. And wearing the mask demands that you push it, that you become, as our teacher Paola says, a Gorilla Superhero...King Kong in the mask. Your arms and legs splayed, your head up to the horizon. The head chest pelvis forward ready fearless primitive animal. Yea..I got it..In my mind I see it, but the body doesn't translate what my mind knows, as Paola points out how small my movements are, how I am thinking too much. "You are lost in the space". I have been stopped at the beginning of my journey.."You don't see the space"...."Your underwear is showing" ... " Your pelvis is too far back, and your body looks split" ..." You need to be bigger" .... Some days I don't go up because I know I can't solve the mask, I can't breathe in the mask, I have anxiety.
After meeting with Erika and the dreamers last Sunday, I went to the mask work with more daring and openness. This is an invisible imaginary world and I make it! I was the first to go, which I never am. As the first you always get the most time with the teacher in front of the class, and the harshest critique, most often. This week the sea was stormy. I began undulating as I was pushed, sucked back and striving for the shore..Eyes to the horizon, the mask must live! Part of me was waiting for Paola to stop me. I was exhausted in the mask..heaving. Finally thrown up on shore, sucked back again, struggling to get up and see the forest...
"That's it?" Paola asked.
"I don't think you're finished"
" No, no of course not, you're right"
Paola had me go again, clapping at me to hurry, planting my legs wider, making the storm more extreme in the ocean, urging me to push my pelvis forward. "Tres jolie!" she shouted as I spun in my waves. It's too pretty! No, the waves are cruel and unpredicatable, you don't decide where they go, how you move. More resistance! Fight! Now! See your way out! Get to the shore! Stand planted firm big, tilt your head down and your eyes to the horizon; Push the mask. Oui oui! Oookaay. MERCI!
I saw Paola through the eyeholes...see me..her grist prompting me forard, not letting me get away with anything, not letting me hide...dream.life.bigger.
The mask stifles your breathing
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