Rehearsal Playground
Week Seven: The Elysium Etudes / The Tree (Part Two)
Happy Saturday, friends. Welcome to EA’s Rehearsal Playground. Each week we’ll celebrate our Mainstage material and capture graveyard echoes emanating from EA’s Spoon River.
All subscribers have a new Weekly Character Challenge + February’s Mainstage Rehearsal Project waiting below!
How It Works
Each Saturday delivers new weekly character rehearsal challenges straight to your inbox. Something dynamic, something experimental, something transformational. Something to push the boundaries of truth in character. This Spring … the world of EA’s Spoon River.
Your Weekly Character Challenge
What is an Etude?
Knowing comes from experience.
From having been there.
When you’ve sat on the edge of the pier watching the sunset and you’re asked what it was like … you can speak from the contours, the subtleties, the harmonies of the experience.
There isn’t a Daily Body need to describe it “correctly.”
You simply get to speak from what you know.
Etudes are a decision, a mentality, to spend time completely in character. No matter what the world around you tastes like or surprises you with … you remain “all-in.”
This month, we’re going to apply the power of the Etude to the development of your Spoon River character.
Up next, The Meal Etude.
Feeding the body of your Spoon River character.
Something so simple, so fundamental, so foundational to daily life.
Something we’re now adding to our base of character experience …
A new texture of character knowing, fueling a deeper feeling of character confidence.
The Etude begins the moment you leave home to secure ingredients for your meal.
Once you’ve got your ingredients, prepare and then eat your meal however/wherever feels right as your character.
When clean-up is complete, release and capture the experience by writing down any questions/unknowns that show up for 10 unfiltered and uninterrupted minutes, then “flip the page” and do the same for any knowings/discoveries now finding you.
Find a free-flow to the work of capturing your discoveries/challenges. Anything that shows up is crucial to capture. Let it all pour out onto the page.
There is no such thing as a wrong or right discovery or challenge. Capture it all.
Etude work is the essence of living freely within form.
The instance your Etude begins, any preparation, including these parameters I’m sending your way, should immediately give way to the priority of living freely.
Always accept what is happening as more than enough.
Always accept whatever happens - all of it - as the character.
Release any idea of interruptions. Surrender simply to the unknowns of living life.
It is impossible to be interfered with in this work.
It’s your preparation, your meal, your tastebuds, your character.
Your gift to yourself … getting to spend time alive within your Spoon River body.
How It Works
On the first Saturday of the month, our Mainstage Rehearsal Project gets posted for subscribers to play with all month long. Each project builds out an array of rehearsal tools, applying them to work you’ll remember forever. The stuff that makes acting worth investing in. Worth believing in. This Winter … we begin with The Tree.
February’s Mainstage Project
This month, Creatively Communicate what only you can taste of what it will be like to be you at your oldest, wisest creative self.
Find an image to ignite that taste.
Find a song to ignite that taste.
Find an object (one you can actually touch vs. discover online or see behind glass in a museum) to ignite that taste.
Find a poem to ignite that taste.
Create an original piece of Creative Communication to ignite that taste - expanding on the forms of expression listed above.
Graveyard Echoes
Doc Hill
I went up and down the streets
Here and there by day and night,
Through all hours of the night caring for the poor who were sick.
Do you know why?
My wife hated me, my son went to the dogs.
And I turned to the people and poured out my love to them.
Sweet it was to see the crowds about the lawns on the day of my funeral,
And hear them murmur their love and sorrow.
But oh, dear God, my soul trembled, scarcely able
To hold to the railing of the new life
When I saw Em Stanton behind the oak tree
At the grave,
Hiding herself, and her grief!
Andy The Night-Watch
In my Spanish cloak,
And old slouch hat,
And overshoes of felt,
And Tyke, my faithful dog,
And my knotted hickory cane,
I slipped about with a bull’s-eye lantern
From door to door on the square,
As the midnight stars wheeled round,
And the bell in the steeple murmured
From the blowing of the wind;
And the weary steps of old Doc Hill
Sounded like one who walks in sleep,
And a far-off rooster crew.
And now another is watching Spoon River
As others watched before me.
And here we lie, Doc Hill and I
Where none breaks through and steals,
And no eye needs to guard.
Play Along With Your Own Spring Character …
Read Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River (click here).
Choose your Spoon River character or work with one of the echoes above.
Invest in your character over the Spring with our weekly work.
Share your discoveries and challenges. (click here).
Cinema Elysium Presents … The Saturday Matinee
ALL MONTH ON SUBSTACK
I’ll be providing feedback for paid members posted work and available as a teammate for the discoveries and challenges inspired as you explore.
