Day 6

Rain!!!

Today there was a nature hike scheduled in the morning for the Glomus group. When I woke up and saw the buckets of water that were falling out of the sky I had the feeling that it was better to stay inside. When I reached the breakfast café, my compatriots told me that the hike had indeed been canceled. The next half of the day continued in much the same way, huddled under roof or umbrella, marveling at the strength and speed that the rain was coming down. It was easy to imagine being flooded out of the area. The way the creeks changed to rivers within a few hours was startling.

In the small group – cooperative composition with Nathan – we had our first visit by the 20 or so Malaysian children. Nathan led the group with calm, yet strong energy, using almost entirely body language rather than spoken language. Most of the children only took a few minutes to become comfortable with the situation and were then quite attentive and responsive to participating with the group. By the end of the session they basically knew the song that we had prepared to teach to them.

The large group – drama/music/movement/shadow puppets –used the time to begin the process of stitching together the material presented by each of the three teachers. We had been practicing various exercises rather than one theatrical piece, but we wanted to put them together with a sort of story shape to be entertaining for our audience on Friday.  It was decided that the first work presented would be what we did under the guidance of Komrul Hussin with Malaysian shadow puppets, musical theater accompaniment, and dance with puppets. From that segment we would move on to theater fights as taught by Seppo Kalevi Kumpulainen and the emotional body conversations as taught by Jenni Johanna Nikolajeff. We managed in our short class time to choreograph a basic shape for the fight scene before we had to break for the day leaving the full shape of the performance to be completed in the final rehearse the following day.

-Isabel