We got yelled at during class again yesterday for being too noisy, this time by the crochety old English professor next door. To be fair, I have no idea if she is actually crochety (although she is old). All I have to go on is that her glasses were all the way on the end of her nose when she opened the door and intimidatingly reminded us that her students were trying to think and do “real work” next door. As if acting isn’t difficult. Humph.

This happened after we took turns reading a Marx soliloquy in groups of three, starting at a whisper and slowing getting louder and louder until we were shouting at the end. The teacher also handed out pieces of chalk to the rest of the class and we were entitled to throw chalk at the people reading if they weren’t articulating enough, which of course just turned into a competition of trying to get the chalk to land perfectly in the poor victim’s hoods but at least the audience was entertained. The floor was quite colorful afterwards.

Speaking of colorful floors, our breathing exercise for the day was to lay sprawled out on the floor for the first ten minutes of class taking super deep breaths and then “projecting our breath towards the walls and turning it into paint so that we could cover the entire room with whatever color or design we wanted”. What does that even mean?!

To warm up the body and exercise our trust, we stood in two lines across the room from each other and took turns closing our eyes and running full-speed towards our partner and attempting to stop just in front of them. I don’t know if you’ve ever run with your eyes closed, but it’s pretty scary, especially when you hear the steps of the other people next to you. As a terrible judge of space and speed, I stopped a full meter and a half in front of my partner the first time and then ran into him the second time. Oops. One of our other warm-up exercises was to walk first like an angry businessperson and then like a tiny little flea. Last time I checked fleas don’t walk. Just sayin’.

Also we got our scripts for the final play, but I won’t be here since it’s in February so that’s disappointing. The main character is a man who has a job at a theme park dressing up as a duck but gets fired for his Marxist rants that don’t actually make any sense. It’s gonna be a spectacle indeed.