17 February

Today I arrived in Campinas after a long night of travel. Brazilians seem to be very into red-eye flights; I guess the airports are small enough that it makes sense to spread the flights out into the nighttime.

The Rio airport seems pretty small for such a major city--Garulhos in São Paulo is the same way. One reason: They are only airports, not shopping malls! There are a few shops and cafés, but not the embarrassment of overpriced retail that you find in Denver, Houston, or Minneapolis, where I once had the opportunity to test and buy an electronic mattress immediately upon stepping off the plane. It's ridiculous.

Arriving in Campinas after Recife is like going from Brooklyn to Boulder. At least, the neighborhood where LUME is located is clean and quiet, a landscape dominated by single-family detached homes. It's another world. Of course, in America this neighborhood would seem run-down and poor, but here it's solidly middle-class.

LUME connected me with some graduate students at UNICAMP who have a spare room to rent. I don't know if I'll be here just for the weeks of classes, or if this will be my residence for the whole stay here. My main host is Henrique, an environmental scientist. I've got a room in the back, in a small separate building... and there's a WASHING MACHINE! Amazing.

I haven't had much time to visit, as I needed some food and a lot of sleep after the night of travel. So I've had a nap, a little practice on the pandeiro, and the requisite Portuguese study session...

I have the Teach Yourself books, a general lesson book/CD and a grammar, and I'm trying to do at least one chapter in each per day. I'm also trying to read magazines, and I bought an anthology of Vinicius Moraes' poetry, to slog through with a dictionary... In Recife, I was with so many english-speakers that I feel kind of behind in Portuguese acquisition. Here I'm being forced to speak more. It's good.

Cirque du Soleil's Alegria is playing in Sampa now; I might get a chance to see it. TAM airlines is one of the sponsors, and the in-flight magazine featured an article about a clown in the show, the only Brazilian in the production. He builds his material based on games he played as a child-- a devising technique that intrigues me. Can I set up a series of games or make-believe situations for Ferdinand based on my old childhood pastimes and fantasies? Can it be a rough sequence that I can improvise through? A structuring of the Ronlinite Clown Journey?

I'm doing a lot of thinking by asking questions and not trying to answer them right away, as Dr. Bob Maurer suggested in his workshop at Dell'Arte... He says the human brain cannot refuse a question, and it will work subconsciously on them if they are consciously and verbally posed...


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19 February

Yesterday was a mess of getting settled in the new town, and starting the Cavalo Marinho workshop.

It started with trips to the grocery store and the bank, and a run to LUME to get some of the luggage I had left there: a big duffel bag, which I had to carry by hand to Henrique's house. On the way, while shifting it to my left shoulder, it banged into my glasses — and they broke.

These glasses are more than four years old; getting new ones was something I've been procrastinating on for a long time... but now my hand is forced. I need new contacts too, so I'm debating just getting contacts, since I need them more for work, and waiting on the glasses. Glasses are more comfortable for me over long periods of time, though — and I confess I like how I look in glasses. The vanity of the Dottore! So maybe contacts are a way of taking off that mask and living more dangerously....

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The Cavalo Marinho class was great; Jesser de Souza, of LUME, is a natural clown and an impressively strong and centered person. After we became acquainted with each other we played a tag-like game called Victim-Villain-Hero: a distillation of Melodrama to its essence! One person starts as the villain and casts his gaze on the victim of his choice: he then chases that person, who at any time can call on a Hero, who then chases the old Villain, who has now become the Victim. If anyone is caught, or if a Villain gets confused and chases the wrong person, they're out. It's a high-pressure way to learn the names of the group, and what Jesser was trying to teach with it was the basic mime technique of pushing and pulling space--the players, with their intentions, can move each other around. This, it turns out, is critical for the group-dance aspects of Cavalo Marinho, where a circle of musicians and audience is created, and everyone dances. Individuals move out into the space and invite someone else in, and the pushing and pulling of the invitation, like leading and following in ballroom dancing or tango, creates the dynamic space of the performance.

We learned the basic steps, which are pretty simple, though we all struggled with them. I feel quite intensely my own self-blockage here: I'm not releasing myself to the dance. It reminds me of one of the parades we did two weeks ago in Recife, where I literally felt myself standing in my own way. To a certain extent, the dance steps here (and the drumming in Recife) are a question of rehearsed technique-- like a fingering pattern on the guitar, time spent simply doing the moves is what gives one the ability to use the movement as a foundation for performance. But I think the lesson of Ronlin (and Michael Gelb, the Alexander teacher) is that if you release yourself to the activity, you can learn it faster and really just do it. But this takes enormous centering and attention (and, as both Gelb and Ronlin would tell you, repetition): in Zen, it's a whole other kind of training. And most of us are so caught up in our habit of trying to get it right, trying to look good, etc. that we hold ourselves back from learning.

How deep can I go with this kind of attention during this workshop? That's my focal question this week.

It's a natural question you may have now: why am I contending with this after two and a half years at Dell'Arte? That's a question I beat myself with all the time. As much of this as I did learn there, I think I still have not conquered the hang-up of my realtionship with schools--the politics and power structures that I've feared, loathed and respected way too much over the years. For most of my life, my sense of my own success or failure as a human being has been tied to my performance in school, an attitude instilled in me by my parents and teachers, which inspired a crash in the third grade from which I've never really recovered. The progress I made over time at Dell'Arte was largely erased by the failure of my thesis project. And it's not a coincidence, I don't think, that I choked on the most formally academic project in the work of the school. I feel like I'm just now starting to recover the centeredness and willingness to explore that I lost last spring. I am not surprised that that's happening outside of the school.

OK. It's 9:20 am. Class is at 2. I need to go look into new glasses and contacts.... but first I need to do tai chi.

Hey all,

Sorry it's been so long since my last post; travel was hectic and things have been incredibly busy. There has literally been NO time to write.

The last day in Chaipas saw me catch some kind of gastrointestinal bug that had me running to the john for six straight days; worst traveler's bug I've ever had. I flew to São Paulo on the 21st and instead of trying to travel to Recife immediately, I checked into a hotel at the airport and tried to just chill out for a few days. By the 25th, though, I had to be in Recife so I bought a plane ticket and flew... and immediately upon landing here, I started feeling better. Nice to be home...

Since then, it's been a whirlwind of drumming classes, travels around the city, buying new drums, and partying during the run-up to Carnaval, which started last night. The photo here is my new alfaia and two new bells, a gongue and an agogo. I'll be parading with them tomorrow and Monday.

Today it's off to Olinda to hopefully see the giant puppets that city is famous for.

Bom Carnaval!