#since I totes forgot again until now and it is 1:30 am

[nyutheatrepractices2020]

Our Last Day in Puerto Rico

Hi, my beautiful friends- It's Echo here sending a little hi from a sunny day in NYC :)

Please pardon my late post. After flying back from Puerto Rico, I slept most of these two days and finally, woke up this morning with high energy working on our last blog in Puerto Rico.

At 9:31 am this morning, Clear sent a picture to our WhatsApp group chat, a Puerto Rico flag she saw in Boerum Hill Brooklyn on her way to the café. And then Shari replied: "That's great. I told you Brooklyn has a big Puerto Rican Community." I believed that this must not be the first time that Clear passed by this flag, but finally, she noticed it today. Although we already came back to NYC one after another from PR, each of us still carries a piece of memory, awareness, and connection from the lovely island of Puerto Rico. (pic)

I'd like to speak for myself, when I left home for café bar this morning, I picked a tote which I bought from PR. Then I took a picture of me carrying the tote and posted it on ins story with tagging the designer Angelica. Then she replied to my post with greeting me a lovely day with some cute emojis. And another woman I met randomly on the street in PR because of the sharing of umbrella also replied my story with lovely greets. And then Omar's posts of the protest which happened at night on Jan 20 in PR jumped to my eyes, and I checked all his posts about the protest. I put his Spanish description into google translation. Omar is a local visual artist and music maker in PR, and at the same time, he cut hair for people 14 years ago. Fortunately, I got a haircut from him at the corner of El Basion, the best hair cut ever with the lowest price. All these connections from PR gave me the feeling that my heart belongs to PR, although I only lived there for two weeks, and my body is located in NYC now. It sounds ridiculous but feels so real and surprising. 

Okay, friends, I need to stop ramble these nonsenses and begin the tour of our last day in Puerto Rico. Take a deep breath, Time Machine is launched, three, two, one, here we go, we are on Jan 19 in PR now : ) 

8:40 am The last night when I was lying on the bed, I promised myself to go for the previous morning run around the sea in PR tomorrow! As you imagined, I woke up at 8:40 am, which means there is no enough time for a run. So, I decided to go to Los Pinos to have my last breakfast there. The cappuccino in Los Pinos is the best in the universe; it's been Clear's and my favorite since the first time we tried it there. It tastes pretty intense when you take the first sip. And then the softness left on your tongue pushes you to take another gulp appreciating "what an authentic coffee!".

( I saw rainbow on my toast!)

When I was enjoying the Spanish Omelet and cappuccino in Los Pinos, the mask group already met up at El Bastion. It was busy with rehearsing their performance from 9 am. At 9:30 Saya, Casey, Clear, and I met up in the lobby of our hotel waiting for our uber. Alejandra also joined us because there is no bus today for the going of the last day of the San Sebastian festival.

9:40 am On our way to El Bastion, it began to rain, but at the moment we were getting off the car, it stopped, and the sun came up. The weather is unpredictable here, and we all get used to its wildness. The masked group was still in the process of the rehearsal when we arrived at the dance studio; they were all in black with different props. "Wow! "Wow!" "It's so cool!" "Thank you!" "I'm excited about your performance!" Along with all the "wow" from our physical theatre group, the mask group left the dance studio returning space to us.

(The Mask & Puppetry group just finished their rehearsals)

10:00am After a traditional check-in with sharing our physical and mental conditions, we started our work today from brain dance. As Saya proposed last night, at the end of our warmup, each of us did a movement for Alejandra, showing how she made us feel. In this way, we gave Alejandra our gratitude and thanks. We are all proud of being her students!

( It’s Echo, Alejandra, Amy, Saya, Casey, and Clear from the physical theater group)

11:00am Since yesterday we decided to start our physical theatre piece outside in the garden and then move into the dance studio little by little, we did have to consider the weather condition testing how workable the wet ground outside the garden is. Although the ground was wet, it was not as slippery as we imagined, and we can practice getting used to moving on the wet ground. So Saya, Clear, Casey, and I all voted for keeping the plan as what it is. Based on what we discussed yesterday, there is a solid structure for our performance, including the prologue, Un, dos, tres, pescao game, Duet by Clear and I, Duet by Saya, and Casey, and our group movement.

It was not an easy process to figure out the content of our final piece. When we met for the first workshop, we proposed serval ideas about the form of our performance and decided JOYFUL as our theme based on our own experiences in Puerto Rico, a place full of joy. Something very exciting is that this is the first time our program performances happen the same day as the final day of San Sebastian festival. "I think we should have a public show and interact with audiences." "Yes! I agree with it! We should catch the opportunity to share our piece with local people!" "spread our joy with the joyful people here!" When the discussion happened, the festival is not started yet, and we just launched our physical theatre workshop the first. We had no ideas about what going to happen in the studio and the festival. And it turned out that we gave ourselves too much pressure of delivering a complicated physical theatre piece with public. At the same time,  we did feel the difference in the atmosphere between the circus, after watching some shows at the festival. While the circus involves all the audiences with waves of laughter, our physical theatre piece is more quite focusing on the exploration of movements. We struggled a lot. And finally, we came up with the idea of combining the use of garden and dance studio.

12:15 pm

Yeah! We were done one with the resealing and lunchtime by ourselves! We decided to add a prologue in our piece but also keep it open to ourselves without rehearsing. It is a task from point A to Point Breaching out to the flower by embodying any movements we explored in these 14 days. I borrowed the flower from the angel Angelica in El Bastion! She is an artist in college in Puerto Rico! We also invited her to come to our performance, and she said yes!

( I borrowed the flower from Angelica : ) )

1:00 pm

People El Bastion introduced the reason why NYU students are here and invited people to watch our performance in the square outside El Bastion. Audiences were curious and interested in our puppetry performance. They cheered for us loudly! We are proud of our mask group friends!

(Carey was ready for the performance! Break a Leg!!!)

(Danielle was performing in her mask)

(Aaron was performing in his mask)

(we are proud of you the mask group!)

(the kids were so into the mask performance and even forgot their ice-creams!)

1:52 pm Javier sent his love from Bloomington through the message: "Dear Friends, I want to wish you a great closing session! Warm regards to all the students and interpreters as well. Break a leg!" Thank you, Javier, we miss you!

2:00 pm

The moment after the mask group finished their performance; it began to rain wildly. Fortunately, it did not make us wait too long to start!

When we decided the theme Joyful, the first thing ran to our mind is childhood, and then took some suggestions from Alejandra, we played a traditional Puerto Rico Children game Un, Dos, Tres, Pescao as a hook of our piece. The reason why we chose this game is that people can relate to the game quickly, this game is more like a universal language to communicate and play with joyful. Although different regions own different rules of the game, everyone can jump into the game and play it with people at any time.

Here is how did we play the game. One person faces an old tree in the garden; the other three of us stand at the starting line, getting ready to catch the tree person. The tree person says, "Un, dos, tres, pescao."  Then she quickly turns around to face the group. While she is facing away from the group, the people in the group run towards the tree. Meanwhile, as soon as the tree saying, "Un, dos, tres, pescao" she quickly turns around to face the group. The group must freeze. Anyone who is caught moving has to go back to the starting line. The game continues like this until someone reaches the tree That person wins and is the tree person in the next round. It was so much fun both for players and audiences when we play it, and we even attracted Pam to join in the game in our performance. "I want to play the game!" and then, I saw Pam standing in the starting line with us. We did not plan this, but it is our secret ambition attracting audiences joining us:)

After three rounds, we moved forward our performance to Diamond. When we all face one direction, the leader of that direction will do some movements, and the others follow her. And we also have a secret movement to trigger the Mirror. The person who does the covert action, and another person who stands in the opposite of her will turn to face each other do mirror movements. In contrast, the other two people keep doing movements facing the same direction. And at some point, the mirror pairs come back to the Diamond again. It's much more about Improv including the starting point of doing rhythm movement and starting Clear and my Duet.

When Clear and I began our Duet moving forward to the corner, Saya and Casey were responsible for leading audiences to our performance area. Clear and I devised our Duet based on three stages of life: childhood, adults, and old from connection to disconnection, meaningless to meaningful, and intense to peaceful. One has a posture or movement in the middle, and then the others interact with her developing another position. We continue doing this till we got the feeling to trigger to start the next life stage and move to another performing area.

( It’s Clear and Echo from the Duet)

The last part of our Duet ended in the dance studio, at the moment we "died" on the floor, Saya and Casey launched their Duet by tracing Clear and I.. Then they traced each other by treating the body as terrain. The tracing also mixed with covering negative space along with the changing of speed and intensity. Saya and Casey also reviewed different possibilities of weight sharing between two people emphasizing resistance and resilience. We closed up our performance, facing towards various directions in a square reviewing all of our movements devised by each of us.

(It’s Saya and Casey in the Duet)

2:35 pm It's time for Q & A, an excellent opportunity for us to share comments and ask questions to the other group. JW said, "Your physical theatre piece reminded me of the immersive play Sleep No More." Saya said: "I still remembered the first time we saw your masks on the table, and we had a hard time to guess each belongs whom, but today when you guys put them on, I saw you, your personalities were there!" Alejandra and Deborah also shared their thoughts: "I want to say thank you to all of you! Thank you for being here. It's all about what you brought to the program." We also shared our gratitude and thanks to these two amazing, incredible teachers!

3:00pm Yeah! It's free time from now till 8 pm when the dinner starts! Some of our friends decided to go to the Playita del Condado beach for the last water time. There were two groups of us, the swimming group and the beach taking a nap group! So much fun lying on the beach, taking a nap while watching my friends swimming in the ocean at the same time!

8:00pm

We had our dinner in the restaurant Jamon Jamon together! Look at all these beautiful people!

10:30 pm We can't believe it's the last day of the program! So what? We grabbed some drinks and went to the rooftop together for more chats and jokes! It rained heavily, and the couch was too wet to sit. But it did not matter! We just want to catch each second staying with each other!

12:00pm Okay! We moved to room 306 to continue our activity. And the activity is called Staying up Late Together! At some point, we shared our dream when we were kids. Says's was to become a Tofu woman, the person who sells Tofu around the town on the street with a bike saying " Tofu! Fresh Tofu." Daniel wished to work at pet hospitals when he was in elementary school. Just work there not to own the hospital. Clear showed her ambition when she was little to own a shopping mall so that she could have everything without paying money. You know all my friends were shining when they shared their dreams as children. There were lights in everyone's eyes.

1:20 am on Jan 20 Echo ( lying on the bed): Saya! Although we are all mature adults now in the Master or Edd program, I do feel I am in a summer camp as a child! Full of pure happiness! Saya: (folding her clothes): yes! It's definitely a summer camp!

[5saucyimagines]

THE BOY NEXT DOOR PT. 1 ..(ASHTON)

“MOVING DAY!!” you heard the exclamation waking you up from your not so great night sleep, but is it even considered a night sleep if you had just gone to bed about two hours ago? You rubbed the sleep out of your eyes and looked at the time on your phone, one eye still closed and it read ‘7:00 AM’… “Who the hell is screaming at 7 am on a Saturday?” you ask yourself lazily making your way out of your bed towards the widow to see who was making so much noise. You spot a young girl jumping around outside of a car that parked outside of the house next door that you swore was going to stay empty.. it had been vacant for months now and nothing.. Well nothing till now.. You seemed to be mesmerized by the image from down below; you just couldn’t pry yourself from the window. Minutes past which seemed like hours to you because of how exhausted you were but in matter of seconds it was like life was shoved back into your body causing you to jump back from the window and somehow landing back under the covers. Your breath was quick and your eyes wide in shock…What did you just see? Were you imagining things or did that just really happen? There wasn’t just a new family moving in next door, there was a good looking guy and he had just caught you staring at his family during moving day, he smiled, and waved at you and you.. Well you, literally couldn’t even with what just happened. You had never had much guy attention.. Sometimes you thought you were invisible from the way they would just walk by you and here was this guy, who seems to have looked right into your soul by the way you reacted. A week goes by and you don’t see him again, you’re thankful cause what he caused your heart to do.. Yeah no thanks, you were not a fan. But that didn’t stop you from flashing back to that 30 seconds where he was staring at you, while you stared right back.. Watching his movement like it was something you’d never seen before in your life. It didn’t stop you from remembering The details that had been engraved into your brain like the way his hair swooped or the dimples that were so prominent when he smiled up at you, or even the patches of the leather jacket he wore… it was only 30 seconds but those thirty seconds were ruining your concentration like there was no tomorrow. It was now an entire week later and you just had to get out of the house, sitting there just made you think of it even more, so you called up your best friend and told them that you were going crazy being locked up at home and that you were coming over with some snacks. They agreed and you began to pack up a bunch of snacks into a tote bag and rushed to the door grabbing your car keys with one hand as the other opened the door. Before you could make it out the door you were met with a tall dark figure towering over you.. You slowly looked up realizing the images that you couldn’t get out of your head all week were now standing in front you. You stopped at the patch on his right arm, you blankly stared at it until you heard him say “it’s an eagle” and chuckle. You look up at his face as you came out of your trance, of course it was an eagle… you knew that, you weren’t an idiot.. You just couldn’t believe this was happening, you couldn’t believe he was standing at your front door and there was nowhere to hide this time. But all that came out of your mouth was “oh, haha yeah…” as you awkwardly tucked your hair behind your ear and avoiding eye contact. “so hey … uhm I moved in next door, and I saw you in the window last week and I just thought I’d come over and say hi.. Hey.. Or whatever” You force yourself to look up at his face as soon as you hear the quiver in his voice, he was nervous too… he looked like all those cocky guys that didn’t give you any time of day and here he was at your door with a quivering voice. He just didn’t stop surprising you. “ ..Hey” you say shyly and smile softly. With that he brings himself to ask you to hang out, you look down at your keys and remember that you have plans but then again, when will this ever happen again? You drop your bag behind the door and say “sure … what do you want to do?” you say as you invite him inside quickly typing out everything that’s going on hoping your best friend understands why you’re going to bail on them after you had just convinced them to hang out with you. You close the door behind you with your foot and you both make your way to the kitchen. He takes a seat at one of the stools surrounding the kitchen island. You look up from your phone and just stare at him, you brought in a strange guy into your home… you didn’t even know his name and just by looking at him the only thought that came to your mind was that this guy wreaked of trouble but you were so down to get in trouble if it meant spending time with him, he had you that intrigued. “My name is Ashton by the way…” “Oh, yeah … I forgot to ask.. I’m (y/n)” “Cute name …” You blush and thank him; you sat there and talked for some time.. in reality It didn’t seem like much but the clock said otherwise. It had become midnight which meant he had gone on for about 4 hours and you had no idea what about because your answers had become vague since you weren’t really listening, you had spent the entire time scanning and drowning in every detail that was him. You said your goodnights and you did that for every night for the next two weeks. You had gotten close to the person who once put a shock through your body at the mere sight of him. The butterflies we’re still there but they weren’t as scary anymore so when the weekend came around and he asked you to hang out that night, and there was no hesitation to answer yes anymore. But this night was different he had msgd you earlier and asked you to dress nicely that he had planned something special .. so you followed his request, and just like in his msg he was at your door by 8. And just like usual he was in all black and wearing his leather jacket, you had begun to question yourself what was with him and that jacket? Was it the only one he had? You were greeted with a “hey beautiful” as you locked eyes which through you off guard but you brushed passed it and giggled replying​ with a simple yet teasing “hey nerd” as you closed the door behind you and shoving your keys into your bag. You made your way to his cliche old school classic muscle car and as you stood at the door waiting for him to unlock it from inside as you got an extra dose of the butterflies as he smiled at you from within the car .. you knew tonight was going to be something special.. but you had no idea what you we’re in for and man oh man were you in for a huge surprise..

End of part one .