Still raining in Campinas.

In my notebook yesterday I wrote a little of the frustration I was finding in zazen and reminded myself that this is the point I get to every time I try to bring zazen back into my life; it's fun and a challenge for about a week, when frustration sets in and I usually quit. So this is the point that Jacqueline (the woman in Mexico City who gave me the zafu) was telling me to push through. Sitting today, I could often get to a count of three before my mind wandered off for the next five minutes... progress, I guess.

I think a big part of the frustration yesterday was actually not with zazen but with my whole experience here. It's pretty clear at this point that LUME doesn't need me for much; they're a pretty self-contained operation. And unless something changes for them to give me something active to do, I can't stay here. It's that simple.

Carlos Simioni, the guy who invited me here, acknowledged this to me yesterday. When I got to the theatre, he said he needed to talk; when we were able to sit down, he apologized and said that there had been some misunderstanding about my purpose here. He didn't really realize that I needed to be here as part of my degree program.... And that was all pretty clear to me, by this point. The day before, I had faced this fact pretty clearly and decided to make a proposal for staying; otherwise I'm afraid I'll have to go to Belo Horizonte and try to finish the internship at Grupo Galpão or somewhere else.

I think, at heart, it was the language difference that made for a miscommunication between me and Simi, and I'm not angry with him. I don't think Brazil has quite the same system of "internships" (or "estagios" in Portuguese) that we do, and the formality of the arrangement wasn't apparent to him. So it more or less amounts to an unfortunate misunderstanding, but it still leavees me with little to do for LUME that will satisfy my faculty at Dell'Arte.

I made this proposal to Simi: I would build a set of Expressive masks, covering six emotions, that LUME could use as part of their general research practice. I would make twelve masks total, with each emotion depicted in a state of innocence and a state of experience. I got the innocence/experience idea from what I've heard of Sue Morrison's mask teaching; I've never tried it myself. But I've wanted to do a set of expressive masks for a long time, and six masks is not enough labor to fill out another month and a half's worth of time here. Twelve is a good number, and an immense design challenge for me. And when the masks are finished, I will lead a workshop in wearing the masks with the seven LUME actors, and leave the masks with the company when I go home. He liked the idea, although he said the company never uses masks, and siad he would propose it to the other six today. They would essentially be taking on this new aspect of their research, almost just as a favor to me. I don't know if they'll go for it, but we'll see what happens...

On a side issue, I've gotten to see LUME's main clown show three separate times in the last two days. It's called Cravo, Lirio e Rosa and features just Simi and Ricardo Pucetti, with Simi playing two different clowns. It's very funny, although it's pretty random; they get away with a lot of stuff that, if Dell'Arte students tried, would get us pelted with tennis balls or just kicked offstage. The show is basically just a couple of clowns showing up and doing some goofy things, but with no real arc or set of themes (though the things themselves are generally pretty funny, and Ricardo is a brillaint improviser). Maybe that's just my own knee-jerk Aristotelianism kicking in, demanding unity. More troubling is that they don't play their relationships consistently; Ricardo is pretty low status, and Simi (with both his characters) takes high status initially, but the relationships change to equal status a number of times with no justification, as far as I can see. Maybe I'm just being sophomoric here, and I'll have more sympathy when I've done a show of this scale and caliber myself someday....