Under the sea, Wish I could be, Part of that world...

As many people probably know my biggest wish is to be a mermaid, to live deep at the bottom of the ocean and live amongst the fish and the coral and just swim.

This has been my dream since the first time I saw The Little Mermaid as a child. Since I memorised the lyrics to Part of Your World and changed it slightly so that I could be part of their world. I never want to grow up, and I want to spend my existence in the water with the fish, exploring, being free, freer than a life with legs allows.

I love swimming and it saddens me that I hardly ever go anymore. So I have decided that as I have Wednesdays and Fridays free from lectures I am going to aim to go at least once a week.

In the meantime here is a picture from my twenty first and a half birthday where we all dressed up as things beginning with the letter A... I bet you can guess what I went as!!

It's been four months but it's finally here. Just wish I wasn't wearing white undies!

Nothing like the movies

I'm feeling pretty unmotivated. I should be doing work, in fact, I need to be doing work. For tomorrow! But I can't find my motivation. I want to do it, to get good grades and finish with a bloody good degree but it feels like something is stopping me and I can't figure out what.

It's odd how I want to do it so much that I'm excited but that at the same time I can't even put my laptop down for half an hour to read some hand outs, instead I'd rather be sitting here on facebook watching the minutes pass as nothing at all happens or write another blog which will probably end up feeling a little pointless once I've finished it.

Maybe I'm just not an academic. I don't do well with written work, that's why I failed A Level. I don't take in things when I read them, that's why it takes me weeks to finish a single book. I'm a doer, I have to be up and about on my feet, I have to be able to see things, to touch them, to smell them to really take it in, understand and learn. Maybe that's why I can't find my motivation.

Either way, whatever it is that is pulling me down, it is fair to say that this is nothing like the movies. When I finish this blog and put down my laptop, reach for all the paper and start to read and highlight I won't have any inspirational music playing in the back ground, I won't be surrounded by books which in a scenes time I will have magically read and understood and I won't be running up some massive steps as a way to get over writers block and jump up and down when I reach the top at the joy of my success. Instead I will most probably sit in my room, alone, in silence, surrounded by 40 odd pages of back to back handouts with a highlighter which will eventually run out, then I will work into the night living off cups of tea trying to finish the work I have once again left to the last minute.

This could take some time.

Karaoke. What a wonderful phrase.
Karaoke. Ain't no passing craze.
It means no worries for the rest of your days.
It's our problem free, philosophy.
Karaoke.

That's the idea anyway. And sometimes, if only for a while it works, and while you're on that stage singing what seems like a brilliant idea for a song when you see it in the book all your problems disappear. Then you step off the platform and they all come flooding back to you, knocking you over like a giant wave.

This could take some time.

Easy to say that we're done with the dance
Let the curtain descend and bring to an end
This one-act romance
Easy to know there was never a chance
Time to let go
You're a hard guy to forget

Off the table.

Suck it up. Calm it down. Move on. It's over.
Suck it up. Don't break down. Spit it out. Start over.

Closure. It's a funny old thing isn't it. It doesn't always come in the same joyful free spirit package you're used to, sometimes it's forced upon you. It's weird that closure, a thing you need to move on, can be something someone hands to you. It's even weirder when the person who gives you this long awaited gift is the one you've needed saving from the whole time.

"If that's what you want then fine, it's off the table chick x"

It hurt for a moment, I'm not gonna lie, it did. To hear that what you've feared all along, that your feelings are wasted and there is nothing you can do because you've just been given the sealed envelope, the story with 'The End' written at the bottom, and no matter how much you scrub that ink isn't going to move, hurts. Of course it does. Even when honestly you've always know that anyway. To hear it from the mouth of the person killing you, for them to become the one saving you instead with those three simple words, "Off the table", makes it all the more final than you ever could yourself.

I never expected him to give me the closure. The him who has filled so many of my posts with stories of second chances and swallowing pride. But he has. And all I can say is

thank you x

Bowling with the sides down

I am really enjoying the new semester so far and I think a lot of it is due to me not being with my best friends. Of course I miss them but it's so nice being able to come home and talk to them about my day, letting them know what already I feel I am achieving and knowing that tomorrow they'll be coming back to do the same with me.

Today was a long long day. Lecture started at 9.15 and ended at 1.15 with a four hour break before returning to carry on with the devising process for our site specific performance currently titled Not Waving. The first session involved us visiting the site, a brook down the road from the uni, and exploring the area. The walk took over an hour and saw people fall down banks on their bottoms, mud splash up the sides of almost twenty pairs of wellies and people climbing in and up trees. It felt just like being a child again, having the freedom to explore and being aloud to get muddy.

The visit was truly inspirational and the entire group came away with a million ideas of things to bring to the performance.

After a quick break to recover from our muddy adventure we began devising some movement pieces in groups of five which were inspired by extracts from The Flood by Maggie Gee.

White flash of a wing where an arm
is swimming
dissolving, now to a ghost image blurring,
doubling in the haze of the future -
one last white curve would complete loves circle
the future bending to find the past
life from the end to the beginning

Our group experimented with lifts and flips as well as moving as one and mirroring.

Our task for next week now is to return to the site and adapt our piece to fit around and use the surroundings. This is why I love performing so much.. the possibilities are simply endless. As Sarah Kane once said "in theatre anything is possible".

After our lovely four hour break we met up again for a slightly less physical session. We worked alone mostly for this session, thinking about and listing the things, the people, the activities, the food, the drink, we would miss if we were to lose everything in a natural disaster. After picking four and talking honestly about them to the rest of the group we moved onto thinking about the different forms of water. A lake. A pond. The sea. Tears. A brook. A stream.

We then had to write about our chosen form of water. I wrote about the tear.

The Tear

The filling up of the eye, feeling the moisture build, bubbling as it reaches an uncontrollable level before spilling over and falling.

The feeling of the wet salty emotion making tracks down the cheek, constantly flowing from an unstoppable source.

So many things fill the tear. Love. Hate. Pain. Joy.

It glistens as it smoothly runs down your face.

The silence of the tear when you don't want anyone to know you are crying. The lump in the back of your throat where it centres and the puddle that builds on the bottom of your chin before it falls and crashes to the surface below with a gentle splash.

It's a bit rough but I'm thinking of perfecting it. Currently it is work in progress and just a simple example of the work I am so excited about being part of. I think bowling with the sides down was definitely the right decision.

A Change in the Weather

I don't consider myself to be the most intelligent of people, nor do I pretend to know what is going on in the world, either now or throughout history. If you asked me the dates of the first and second world war I would probably get them wrong and if you asked me to talk about George Washington or Winston Churchill, even Tony Blair or George Bush, I would probably get everything wrong. This is not something I am proud of. At all. In fact it disgusts me at how little I know about the world we live in and events that have led us to where we are today.

It is on my list of things to do before I die. To learn. More importantly to want to learn! I feel my failure to know anything about history all stems from school and my lack of interest in anything related to the news. I always saw history and museums as old boring places full of old boring books and old boffiny men who lived with cats who drank tea while listening to classical music. And as my mom surrounded herself with news papers and constantly had the news on, a very adult thing to do, I became hateful of it as acknowledging it would, to me, mean growing up. Something I have a great issue with.

However, since starting university and meeting people who everyday surprise me by how much they know about history I have begun to feel more and more uneducated, a feeling which honestly cuts me to the core, and from working with theatre groups on professional performances which involve a lot of research I have begun to learn and appreciate what is and has gone on in this world. Yet despite my will to learn I never seem to take things in and keep them there, locked in my filing cabinet of knowledge. A very saddening truth.

I suppose a lot of this blog today comes from my first lecture of the second semester, Directed Public Performance. Basically, two tutors direct twenty students as if they were a professional theatre company which eventually ends in a public performance. The tutors have the majority of the power in this module, they devise a new play for us, they decide on the venue and through a series of workshops choose what eventually goes into the play as well as ultimately directing it. For my group it has been decided we shall look at climate change and the affect of global warming, again something I know very little about.

Until today at least...

As part of our lecture we watched a film documentary called The Age of Stupid (2009) it is set in 2050 with a man looking back through archives which have been stored after the destruction of the planet. Made up by a series of documentaries and cartoon animations it explains everything about climate change, what started it, what continues to help it grow and what will happen if we do not do anything about it.

The figures are quite shocking:
- The French glaciers are melting between 7 to 10 meters a year
- In 50 years half of the existing ski resorts will close down if climate change does not stop
- Because gas isn't transportable waste gas is destroyed in Nigeria via flares. These flares produce 70 million tons of carbon per year, the equivalent of 10 million British homes
- America use twice the amount of energy the UK and Europe use, 9 more than India and 50 more that Kenya
- 80% of our carbon footprint needs to be cut by 2050
- In China 1 new power station is made every 4 days
- 9 wind turbines will produce enough energy to power 11 thousand British homes, yet most communities do not want them for fear they will "spoil the view"

These are just some of the figure given throughout the film, and some of the images are truly shocking. In Nigeria it followed a 23 year old girl try to raise enough money to train to become a nurse. In the town where she lived they had no hospital and no school, half of her family had died due to drinking dirty water and they were finding it more and more difficult to fish for food as the water was contaminated from oil spills. Their town was a central source of oil and Shell had promised to build them a hospital and get them clean water if they sold them their oil, yet three years later the hospital still remained some overgrown ruins.


Another story followed a man who worked for Shell drilling for oil. He was a survivor of hurricane Katrina, and had rescued over 100 people from their flooded homes after the devastating event, including an 89 year old man and a 6 month old baby, as well as the pets of the people he saved. His words and the images of the event were honestly touching.


In France an 80 something year old tour guide told how the glaciers have changed over his 50 plus years of touring. When he started you could walk over them on foot, now you must climb ladders of unbelievable distance, animals used to graze on the hills but now there is nowhere for them and he recalled comfortable summers unlike the ones they experience now.


There were more people the film followed and imaged beyond description but the film educated me on things I previously knew nothing about.

So I end this - rather long - blog feeling a mixture of things. I have started to educate myself on world wide events, which I feel is a very positive thing. I have become more aware of both the importance of climate change and also peoples ignorance to it. I have been moved beyond words.

I highly recommend The Age of Stupid to anyone and everyone. It is something we need to tackle, and it is something we need to do together because if we don't start acting soon, we won't have a world left to save. More shockingly, it won't be us who will have to deal with it, it will be our children.

"We knew how to profit the Earth but not how to protect it. After all our efforts the final act is suicide." - The Age of Stupid