the next rays of the new rising sun.

Weekly Physical Acting Class - Thursday Nights 10/6 - 11/3

~How You Train Is the Best Barometer for How You Work~

THURSDAY NIGHT, OCTOBER 6th!

CREATIVE PHYSICALITY
with Danyon Davis
Thursday Nights (thru 11/3)
7:30pm - 9:30pm
at Space On White
81 White St. (btwn B’way & Lafayette)
$15 - Drop-In
$25 - 2 Class Pass 

Please email ” creativephysicality@soulstrata.net” to reserve a place, or if you have any questions.

Creative Physicality ~ improve your physical and vocal expression by learning to channel your instincts, imagination, and emotions. Creative Physicality is a fun way to connect with others and practice opening yourself to do your best work. Each class offers a full-body, 2-hour, creative workout; students can also work on individual physical issues over time. How you train is the best barometer for how you work - Creative Physicality offers you an opportunity to practice good creative and physical habits.

Creative Physicality is based on the methodology of Moni Yakim, Head of the Juilliard Drama Division’s Movement/ Physical Acting Program. Danyon Davis has assisted Mr. Yakim for 3 years at the Juilliard School and also teaches Mr. Yakim’s Physical Acting methodology at Circle in the Square Theater School. Creative Physicality weaves together Mr. Yakim’s approach with many other techniques Danyon has practiced over a 15-year professional career - which includes extensive acting, teaching, and directing work at the Guthrie Theater, as well as several years spent performing and training with the SITI Company. Danyon presently organizes the work of Soul Strata Theater.

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#Movement for Actors (and Others!)

CREATIVE PHYSICALITY 

* We will also include a few Saturday classes outdoors in a NYC Park (location TBD)— these will be donation classes. 

Wisdom Recalled on the Advent of the School Year

“When entering into a relationship with an institution, it is imperative to make friends as soon as possible with the security, custodial, and cafeteria staff - they control your quality of life.”

- Max Tzu, “The Art of Slaying Debt”. 

“Ha. Ha. Ha. You’re laughing now— but pretty soon - you’ll be crawling down the street, on your hands and knees, with your mouth wide open, begging for more:  welcome to showbiz, kid.”
- Jeff Weiss’ daily greeting to me, fresh out of Juilliard, working on HENRY V in the park.

To Affirm. A Beginning.

to create art. to sing with THE GREAT HEART OF THE UNIVERSE! the organ of the cathedral. something authentic and full. not copied. not digital. not removed. but here. present. whole. organic. organistic. alive. dancing with vitality. yoked. singing with the deep heart of the universe.

::REBUILD::REVITALIZE::RESTORE::RESUME::

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please show some Love to Chris Wells and the Secret City.
celebrate his ability to connect new york city’s artists with what is good in the world.
we Love Chris. we need the Secret City. please Give. please, thank you.
 

WE ROUST THE ‘VAYGS

Ah — Venice. My new (if somewhat temporary) home. Home of summer surf camps for kids, electricity crackling off the power lines, glamorous bougainvillea — and, well, the homeless.

The homeless situation in Venice, indeed in L.A. and all of California (somewhere between 300-400K, depending on who you ask) is prolific. And I say this only somewhat tongue-in-cheek— the statistic indicates a significant display of strength in numbers with respect to the coming class wars.

My own life has been rather hobo-rific for some time now. I’ve spent four years altogether in my adult life on the road, dragging my recently deceased cat from town to town.

I’ve been trying to roll a seven, or pull the bullets, or whatever pithy luck-at-gambling expression you prefer. It’s really a simple equation, right? Young beautiful actor goes to top school in the country – just add agent, stir, add a sprig of parsley, and start printing money, right?

I’ve recently looked into investing money and this question keeps coming up—
“How risk averse are you?”

I go running just about every morning on the beach between Santa Monica pier and the pier in Venice. Along the way, I am always passing the, uh, disaffected in their r.v.’s – the dudes (and ladies) sleeping in lawn-chairs on the beach, the ripped coal-black brotha’s wandering glassy-eyed thru Muscle Beach in a trance.

…and my heart starts to shudder. My heart dances. There is a singular yearning in me to live essentially – “deliberately”, as HD put it. Some deep understanding in my own biology that wants to plunge thru concrete and plant myself in the soil.

And I think about the mad scramble for safety as night falls, and the lack of what in my Little Lord Fauntleroy world amounts to certain fundamental elements of hygiene. It takes energy to hold that insane counterbalance of hustling and sustenance together. That energy has a half-life thru which it transmorphs into radioactive anxiety. I think about the nighttime hustle and my attention snaps to the cluster of fragments that join together unevenly in my life to shape a definition of comfort.

“How risk averse are you?”
“Do you have the nerve to step off the grid?”

I’ve been living in cities half my life and I have been paralyzed by my sympathies for the down-and-out. Somehow here, though, homelessness as a lifestyle choice seems like more of a defensible posture than in a place like NYC. Yeah, maybe it is just the weather, stupid.

My friend Nel’son has spent quite a bit of time with the down and out here, having recently acted in a movie that filmed down on skid-row. He tells me a large number of the homeless in L.A. are highly educated. I don’t doubt it. This town is literally shaking apart - psychically AND seismically. There’s nothing holding this town together. Not to get all shrill lefty on you, but - to agree to participate in the social order is a tacit approbation of uncivil, unjust empire. To paraphrase Gandhi – “every dog eat a dog and the whole world will go hungry”.

I pass the time these days reading Mike Davis – himself a strict Marxist, or so Connie Conradstein tells me. Hey man, I barely have a high-school diploma, so everything I know about Marxism & Trotskyites I learned on Wikipedia. I do know that Mike Davis irradiates and illuminates southern California right down to the bones. He exposes the murky depths that could drive even a well-educated person insane or off-the-grid— that is, IF he didn’t believe in something greater, like the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

My creative partner Abby and I were sitting outside on the patio of this cute little kitschy, I dunno’, breakfast cereal cafe that I began to frequent upon my arrival to Venice. Free internet access and the owner is a knockout with a whole hippie/ beach girl/ southern belle thing that makes me weak. Her name is Paige.

Anyway— so we’re sitting outside of this place and a vagrant approaches us spewing very addled , very foul racist, violent, and sexual invective. He really got in our space, it was one step away from being way too much. He left without incident, but I thought Paige should know what was happening on the grounds of her establishment.

Paige let us know such behavior on the block was owed to this little bodega next door that caters to junkies with cheap underwear for sale (for when a junkie soils him/herself) and other such emergency needs. But she thanked us all the same. Right there in her prim little polka-dot, frilly summer dress – dressed to sell fruit loops with, like, gummi-bears on top and “nutty monkies” (nutella and English muffin affairs); she said,

“Thanks cuz y’know, we roust the ‘vaygs”

which is railroad talk for,

“we beat them damn hobos til they and their kind know not to come around here”.

I do not intend to stay in Venice, or indeed anywhere, long enough to get rousted.

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