Rehearsal Playground
Week Five: 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
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 first, The Sunrise Etude.
It begins by waking up and preparing yourself to leave home prior to sunrise.
The moment you step outside is when the Etude begins.
Remain fully in character throughout and ensure you get to experience the sunrise outdoors. As the sun rises, pray to G-d from your soul about whatever feels necessary. Remain open for G-d’s response for at least 30 minutes post-sunrise.
After 30 minutes, write down any questions/unknowns that shows 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.
And, remember, in the world of Spoon River … G-d speaks in mysterious ways.
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
Doctor Meyers
No other man, unless it was Doc Hill,
Did more for people in this town than I.
And all the weak, the halt, the improvident
And those who could not pay flocked to me.
I was good-hearted, easy Doctor Meyers.
I was healthy, happy, in comfortable fortune,
Blest with a congenial mate, my children raised,
All wedded, doing well in the world.
And then one night, Minerva, the poetess,
Came to me in her trouble, crying.
I tried to help her out—she died—
They indicted me, the newspapers disgraced me,
My wife perished of a broken heart.
And pneumonia finished me.
Mrs. Meyers
He protested all his life long
The newspapers lied about him villainously;
That he was not at fault for Minerva’s fall,
But only tried to help her.
Poor soul so sunk in sin he could not see
That even trying to help her, as he called it,
He had broken the law human and divine.
Passers by, an ancient admonition to you:
If your ways would be ways of pleasantness,
And all your pathways peace,
Love God and keep his commandments.
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.
