Weekend Update: October, 6th (... A few days late)

Cheers one and all! It's me again. Sorry for being a few days late, but the weekend was jam-packed with so many fun activities (aka sleeping for many hours) that I haven't had a spare second until now.

Tuesday-
Today after a long day of classes (what else is new though) we got the opportunity to go the National Theatre to see a new show by Irish playwright Enda Walsh called Ballyturk. It was phenomenal and starred Cillian Murphy from movies such as Inception and the Batman movies. Seriously this was one of the best shows that I have seen with stand-out performances by all three of the actors. I don't want to spoil too much of the show but it followed these two men that were locked in a room and what happens when they are given the option to pick the one man that gets to leave the room. It was intense and crazy, but definitely memorable.

View from the bridge at night

Friday- 
We got the chance tonight to go see a production that one of our teachers directed and created! Our Physical Theatre teacher Ally directed/created an ensemble work called Beyond Cragporth Rock. It was a nice contrast to the show we saw on Tuesday as the venue was the converted upper floor of a bar with a nice blackbox setup. The show was awesome and really incorporated a lot of what we have been working on in Physical Theatre with the LeCoq method etc. And it was just cool to see the work of one of our teachers in a setting outside of the classroom. 

Saturday-
AKA THE DAY MY LIFE CHANGED FOREVER. So today I went to the Royal Opera House to see the Royal Ballet perform, which if you could not glean from the previous sentence, was clearly life-changing. Royal was performing MacMillan's Manon in celebration of the work being created forty years ago. Everything about this production was superb. Roberta Marquez as Manon and Steven McRae as Des Grieux were PHENOMENAL. They both brought a rare mix of performance and raw technique to the stage, which is much harder to find than you would think. MacMillan's choreography is stunning, and the multiple pas de deux in this piece were among the most intricate I have ever seen. I can definitely see MacMillan's choreography being influenced by Ashton, Balanchine, Nijinsky, and even Humphrey and Graham. The ballet was done in three acts, with each act moving away from classical movement to modern movement as well as shifting from strictly narrative to more expressive. This piece is very critical to look at in order to understand the many changes that were happening in dance at the time. I hope that I get the chance to go back to the Royal Opera house to see more dance there, as this was definitely a show that I will never forget. 

My awful attempt at a panorama shot of The Royal Opera House

Sunday-
This morning I got up semi-early to go visit the Victoria and Albert Museum to work on the ongoing project we are working on in acting class called building a character. I am lucky enough to only be about 20 minutes away from the V&A AND IT'S FREE so there are really no cons to this situation. I was absolutely enamored and inspired by the collections at the museum. There is really no rhyme or reason to what exactly is in this museum, but there are just various collections that are sure to please anyone. Although I did not fulfill my objective of finding out more about my character, I throughly enjoyed the room of giant Raphael paintings. It was also very odd but rather satisfying to see a piece of art and say to myself "wow, this has been in every history text book I have ever had, and I am now seeing the real deal." I took a couple of pictures, but not that many because I was too busy exploring. I can't wait to make it back here so that I can really look at a few more galleries in depth. 

Margot Fonteyn's Odile tutu from Swan Lake

I have no idea what this was, but a huge doorway was just chillin' inside here

I really took a picture of this because I did not know how they got this inside here

Well that's a shorter post, but that's all I got for you. The week is blazing by and I have a lot of things to accomplish before I can go on FALL BREAK which is including a 5 day trip to Paris!!!! Things that may be happening this week (so you'll just have to tune in and find out): seeing the one and only Lindsay Lohan in Mamet's Speed the Plow, seeing the new Urinetown, another trip to the Globe to see Julius Cesar, and another trip to Sadler's Wells to see Matthew Bourne's Lord of the Flies (although it's technically sold out, but if there's a will there's a way). Over and out, y'all!