This entry has nothing to do with spoons. I just love saying
the word “cucchiaio.” Go ahead. Say it out loud. It’s pronounced
coo-key-EYE-oh. I dare you not to smile.
Today is November 12th. Like…what? How can it
already be the middle of November? That means I’ve been here for over two
months, which also means that the ratio of days I’ve been here to days I have
left here is growing dangerously high. You know what they say: Time flies when
you spend your days in Tuscany rolling around on the ground and eating fresh
gnocchi.
I got home to the villa this past Sunday
afternoon after an incredible weekend in Venice and Florence. All the ADA
theatre students traveled together by train on Thursday, November 7th to Venice and
checked into our lovely hostel called Foresteria Valdese that reminded us of
the bedrooms from Madeline and had a balcony view right on one of the canals. A
group of us then walked with Claudia, our beautiful movement teacher, and
Monica, our amazing head of student life, to the Biennale, the modern art
exhibition that happens in Venice once every two years. (Hence the name, which
means "biannual" in Italian.) I referred to it as the Olympics of
art, because countries from all over the world send work to be displayed, and
each country gets their own little building where the art is shown. We walked
from building to building in a lovely outdoor garden, getting a completely
different experience in each one. Our large group split up when we were in the
exhibit, so I was walking around with just Amanda and Claudia. I loved seeing
how different each piece was from country to country. I was particularly
fascinated by the exhibits from Israel and the USA, but the one thing that
stood out to me the most was in the exhibit from the Netherlands. The doorway
to the building was covered in newspapers, and I had hardly noticed them on the
way in. As we were leaving, I glanced at one of the headlines and did a double
take because it seemed to just be three random words strung together. I started
to read the article and realized that it was utter nonsense. It was written in
English, but none of it made any sense grammatically. I looked at the other
papers to find more of the same. We were perplexed, so we read what had been
posted by the artist about the exhibit. It turns out that he had created all
those newspapers himself. They were comprised of every single word in the
English language, and each word was used only one time. It absolutely blew my
mind. We didn't have time to see every country because the garden closed at
6pm, but what we did see was outstanding. That night, we all went out for pizza
as a group. It was my friend M.E.'s birthday, so afterward, we went out for a
glass of wine before heading to bed.
On Friday morning,
we had breakfast at the hostel and then boarded the vaporetto, a Venetian water
taxi, to head to the island where we would be taking classes that day. The
rehearsal space we were using was gorgeous. We had an amazing movement class in
the morning with Claudia, and then we broke for lunch. Before our Commedia
class started in the afternoon, all sixteen of the Muhlenberg students in the
room had to register for spring classes. It was quite stressful, but we made it
through, and had a great class with Michela. We headed back to the mainland,
and we had just gotten back to the hostel when my friend Mike walked into the
room and said he had found a relatively inexpensive gondola ride opportunity
and was wondering if anybody was interested. It was dark and it was drizzling,
and Mike, Amanda, Kevin and I rode in a gondola along with two Canadian girls.
The buildings all lit up along the Grand Canal at night were breathtaking. I
asked the gondolier if he would sing us a song. He said no. I then proceeded to
sing a small snippet of an Italian song that I knew to make up for the lack of
musical accompaniment to the lovely views. After our gondola ride, we met up
with some other friends went out to dinner, then met a very kind street vendor
who was selling the most beautiful candle holders that his family had made with
polymer clay. He spoke to us in Italian about his favorite places in Italy and
gave us advice on how to be safe in Venice. We then ventured to a jazz bar that
had bras hanging from all over the ceiling (apparently patrons donate them to
contribute to the ambiance). Then we got some snacks at a little cafe and hung
out in a piazza where there was a statue of Goldoni, the most famous Commedia
dell'Arte playwright. M.E. and I did our Commedia scene in front of the statue,
except we used random Italian phrases instead of the actual text, which made it
a lot funnier. We all also chose that moment to practice the new multiple
person weight sharing game we had learned in movement that day, so all the
Italians walking by definitely thought we were out of our minds.
#physicaltheatreproblems.
The next morning,
Saturday, was spent wandering the streets of Venice as Amanda, Lily, Joseph and
I headed to St. Mark's square to visit the basilica and the Palazzo Ducale,
home to the prison from which Casanova once escaped. My deep love for St.
Mark's basilica that was established four years ago when my high school choir
sang there was instantly rekindled as I walked through the door. The ceiling is
detailed in gold leaf, which makes the whole church shimmer in the light. I got
to see part of a mass and hear the readings in Italian, which was beautiful and
made me miss going to church in the states. We then made our way to the station
to meet the rest of our group and catch a train to Florence, where most of the
students then transferred to another train to Arezzo, but I stayed in the city
with Amanda, Janie, Genevieve, and M.E. to celebrate M.E. and Genevieve's
birthdays. We went out for a nice dinner, hung out for a while at a bar called
Volume where we enjoyed delicious nutella and banana crepes, and then spent the
night in a hostel. Sunday morning, we had some pastries and a cappuccino on our
way to the train station, and then I spent the evening relaxing in the villa
watching the rain. Even bad weather is beautiful when it's happening in
Tuscany.
As far as other stuff that's happened between fall break and Venice...Here are a few highlights:
The first Friday after fall break, there was another open
stage night happening in town at Spazio Seme, which is the creative space that
our tarantella teacher Gianni helps run. I decided to perform, because I was
scared to do it, but I also knew that it would be something I’d always
remember. I sang the song, “If You Want Me,” from the musical Once, while my friend Clay played guitar
and harmonized with me. I was so thrilling to sing one of my favorite songs not
just for an audience of my peers, but also for a bunch of Italian strangers. It
reminded me of how lucky I am to be here and to be able to take advantage of
these wonderful opportunities to grow as an artist.
The next day, Saturday October 26th, I went to
Florence with Amanda. We went to the juggling store that our juggling teacher,
Scotty, had recommended. The man there was very sweet, and gave us the name of
a place where we could go on Wednesday nights to meet other jugglers if we
wanted to. Then we went to the Galleria dell’Accademia to see the David. There
was an exhibit on loan from the Uffizi that had a lot of medieval religious
art, which was really cool to see. Then we rounded the corner, and there he
was. I had seen David four years prior when I was in Italy with my high school
choir…but that didn’t stop him from taking my breath away. He is one work of
art that is really not overhyped. Most statues you see are rocks in the shape of
men. David is a man that happens to be made of rock. The detail and life in the
stone is unbelievable. I’m so happy I went back to see him. Then Amanda and I
met up with my friend Kayla, who is currently studying in Florence. She showed
up the best place in town to get sandwiches, cannolis, and gelato. We explored
a little bit, and then hung out with Kayla in her apartment before I headed to
the train station. It was so great to see her- a little taste of home all the
way on the other side of the world.
We had a two-week long mask making class with a Swedish
master mask maker named Torbjorn. I was definitely apprehensive going in, since
I do not consider myself to be a person with any visual art aptitude
whatsoever. I hadn’t the slightest idea how I was going to magically charm a
piece of leather into becoming face shaped, but I resolved to be open-minded
and to give it my best shot. On the first day, Torbjorn introduced us to the
process and asked us to pair up, because to save time and resources, we would
be making plaster mask molds in partners and then using them to make two
leather copies of the same mask. My partner was my friend Mike. The first day,
we started to shape clay into the face of our chosen characters. Mike and I had
chosen to make Arlecchino, one of the servant characters. Over the next few
classes, we finalized the shaping of the clay, smoothed out any bumps with
special tools, layered sheets of plaster onto the clay face, removed the clay
from the plaster shell, mixed liquid plaster, poured it into the plaster shell,
let it set, peeled off the shell, shaped the leather onto the new hard plaster
mold, cut off the extra leather around the border of the mask, cut eye holes,
and attached a string to the mask. On our last day with Torbjorn, our mask
“final” was to put on our finished masks and create a character in front of the
whole group. It was amazing to see everybody’s finished masks and to see how
they came alive. Every single mask worked so well, including mine, which was
surprising and gratifying. The only thing left to do is to paint our masks if
we want to.
We also had our final voice presentation for Kevin’s voice
class. Our first week back from break, Kevin gave us our assignment, which was
to create a vocal presentation revolving around text from Shakespeare’s The Tempest that we had worked on in
class. We were also given the lyrics to a song that a character in the play
sings, and were instructed to make up our own version of the song in the final
presentation. Our group of 14 students opted to work all together as an
ensemble to create a piece together rather than splitting up the work, which
ended up being rather complicated and stressful at times, but was incredibly
rewarding. Over the course of that week, we bonded so much as a group during
the creative process. Each person had at least one solo moment in the piece,
and you could see the collaboration through the way different ideas were thrown
into the mix and were built upon and built upon as others contributed their
thoughts. I was very sad that Kevin’s class was ending, but our piece turned
out beautifully, and it was a wonderful note on which to end our time with him.
From now until the end of the semester, we have voice class with a new teacher,
Marjana. She is incredible, and very different from Kevin. She’s been teaching
us some Bulgarian folk songs and we’ve also done a lot of work with polyphonic
singing.
Halloween in Italy was a rather strange experience, because
the holiday is not really acknowledged here at all. Luckily, since the
Accademia is full of American students, we weren’t going to let it pass without
celebrating. At dinner that night, we had a murder mystery event where we all
played different characters and had to figure out who the killer was. Also, a
few of the MFA students had organized a big costume party in the Teatrino, our
small theatre. I went dressed as the Spirit of the Wind, based off of one of
the songs we had sung in voice with Kevin. You know you’re at a theatre school
when the song at the party that gets everybody the most excited is “Total
Eclipse of the Heart.”
The Saturday after Halloween, I travelled to Orvieto, a small
city located between Arezzo and Rome, with Amanda. It was an absolutely
beautiful afternoon. We walked through a park with spots to see the scenic view
of the hillside all around, and then we just wandered around the streets,
stopping in a few shops here and there. It was drizzling a bit as it got dark,
but it somehow made the streets seem to glow, so we didn’t mind at all. We
stumbled upon the duomo, which was absolutely glorious, and reminded me a lot
of the duomo in Siena. Outside the duomo, there happened to be a chocolate
festival going on, so naturally we got some pre-dinner cannolis. We found a
really cool emporium called “Il Mago di Oz,” which seemed more like a museum
than a store, and had a whole bunch of pictures on the wall of famous people
who had visited. We also found the sweetest little woodworking shop where the
man was so kind and excited to show us his beautiful creations. For dinner, we
split a dish of Truffle pasta and ravioli in a butter sauce. It was such a
relaxing day and definitely one of my favorite places I’ve seen so far.
The next day, Sunday, I walked into town with Amanda and
Genevieve to visit the monthly antique fair. On our way there, we stopped at
Gianni’s family’s pastry shop as we usually do on the weekends. For the first
time, Gianni was there when we visited! He stopped working to have a coffee
with us and chat. He said, “Ah, you found me!” Then his brother, who is almost
always there when we visit, said to him in Italian, “They come here every
weekend.” Which is true. Best cappuccino in town, hands down.
The 2nd Cabaret was last week. The theme of this
one ended up being a sort of mirror world, and new perspectives. I accompanied
M.E. as she danced by singing “What Sarah Said” by Death Cab for Cutie. It was
a very emotional piece, but I enjoyed collaborating with her and with everyone
else in the cabaret as they performed their different pieces.
Last night, we had an open mic night here at the villa. I
juggled and told some Demetri Martin jokes, which was a lot of fun. Later on, I
also sang “Let It Be” with Amanda. She had wanted to do it because singing in
front of people terrifies her, so to help her get over her nerves, she wanted
to perform a song with me. She did beautifully, and it was a joy to support her
and to see her conquer her fear.
When we all aren’t in class, we’re likely to be found building
giant blanket forts in the Salla Danza, or snuggling together and watching
movies while eating Chinese food or pizza. In the past few weeks, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Two Towers, and Big City, a random French movie that was lip dubbed and subtitled
in Italian that Mike had found at the Saturday market. It was a story about children
in the Wild West in America, and was the strangest blend of hilarious,
horrifying, and brilliant.
I love being here. I love the people, I love the places, I
love the food, and I love the classes. This villa really feels like home.
