Am beginning to think I'm either not eating enough or eating too much, or ingesting too much unhealthy vibes, what with this constant twice in a row attack of stomach flu (though to different degrees). Left school after 1 hour because by the second student I was staring into space and wondering why the lights were too bright and the room was spinning.
Went home and slept and missed my appointed coffee time and had a massive headache and sat in a corner, or rather, all dark corners of the house, alternating between closing my eyes and staring into space, cold, fighting the urge to knock my head against the wall or something hard. Sniffly.
On hindsight, the stomach flu might have been perceived as worse due to the caffeine withdrawals. Or vice versa.
And what's the point of detoxing from caffeine if I'm going to start drinking coffee the following day? So today I succumbed and felt the nice warm rush of blood to the head and thought to myself "Thank goodness I'm not a drug addict- considering drugs are so much harder to obtain than coffee."
(The last statement was meant to be ironic. I am a caffeine addict as you can obviously tell).
So now I'm taking a break from practicing the cello and facebooking and trying to engage in some life reflection. I reckon because I perceive that I have a slack work life, I don't think twice about expending energy, because I keep thinking "I only work 4 days a week". When in actual fact perhaps I squeeze 7 days work into 4 days, and on my 3 off days I think, "heck I have off days let me paint the town red", and end up using more energy than I think I have. And when work is play, 'work hard play hard' essentially means 'work doubly hard and forget about playing'.
sigh.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008
no more weekend.
After the concert, I realised it was my first time playing in a quartet at Victoria concert Hall. And it was not even with artsylum. +s. It was a good thing I didn't think about it until I went on stage and saw many many pairs of eyes (including one pair that belonged to my dad's cousin. gasp.) And then it was too late. The other players were pretty great. I flipped open the program and realised that I was the only one who took 'short writeup' seriously. The rest had long illustrious music histories. (for example chan yoong han luke ho judy tay anna koor kelly tang magdalene wong the harpist). No competition there.
It was nervewrecking because we only had 1 rehearsal as a quartet, which didn't last for more than 1 hour. But it turned out surprisingly okay, despite the occasional moments of lost-ness. The acoustics at VCH are really nice for quartet - you get a really warm sound. compared to the esplanade concert hall where everything sounds cold and distant onstage and you feel like you're playing to yourself.
Tomorrow and sunday I'm back with the original artsylum quartet at esplanade concourse. 7 and 815 pm. Come if you're interested in oldies. We're playing chinese music for the first set and english for the second. But we're speaking english and music for both sets.
It was nervewrecking because we only had 1 rehearsal as a quartet, which didn't last for more than 1 hour. But it turned out surprisingly okay, despite the occasional moments of lost-ness. The acoustics at VCH are really nice for quartet - you get a really warm sound. compared to the esplanade concert hall where everything sounds cold and distant onstage and you feel like you're playing to yourself.
Tomorrow and sunday I'm back with the original artsylum quartet at esplanade concourse. 7 and 815 pm. Come if you're interested in oldies. We're playing chinese music for the first set and english for the second. But we're speaking english and music for both sets.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
group dynamics
It is 11 pm and it feels like my day has just begun.
Maybe because the final run of 9templegraffiti went phenomenally, in that everything made sense, the dance movements were readable, the chemistry was palpable, and more than everything it was probably the most fun thing I've ever done since I started playing the cello.
Deconstructing fun: We went in blind, and the 3 exploration sessions saw us trying to find our way out of the jungle of knotted bodies, working past the fear/anxiety of playing without a score, and the confusion of having to walk and play and remember our next positions and react to the dancers. The feeling at the end of it, I imagine, was something like coming up for a long drawn intake of breath after resurrecting from the dead.
I don't normally like, or use, the word 'synergy', but at the end, I thought that this must be it. The indescribable third entity that comes out of the friction between two forms, two people, with different ideas of where to go.
I don't know why I'm actually feeling slightly guilty about having this much fun.
Maybe because the final run of 9templegraffiti went phenomenally, in that everything made sense, the dance movements were readable, the chemistry was palpable, and more than everything it was probably the most fun thing I've ever done since I started playing the cello.
Deconstructing fun: We went in blind, and the 3 exploration sessions saw us trying to find our way out of the jungle of knotted bodies, working past the fear/anxiety of playing without a score, and the confusion of having to walk and play and remember our next positions and react to the dancers. The feeling at the end of it, I imagine, was something like coming up for a long drawn intake of breath after resurrecting from the dead.
I don't normally like, or use, the word 'synergy', but at the end, I thought that this must be it. The indescribable third entity that comes out of the friction between two forms, two people, with different ideas of where to go.
I don't know why I'm actually feeling slightly guilty about having this much fun.
the tendrils around angkor wat
Before my free day turns into a totally wasted do nothing day (although "doing nothing" does not always equal "wasted"), I've decided to blog. (As if these words contribute towards the day's productive output.)
(Then again it's not really a 'free day'- I still have to teach for one hour and perform at night.)
Today will be the second and final day of the "9 Temple Graffiti" run. Yesterday was a lot of fun. Working with dancers is quite interesting because after you've gotten past reading their movements (which feels a bit like reading Chinese poetry with a smattering grasp of the language), there is the whole unpredictable element of The Moment, in which spontaneity and 'art' dictates that anything and everything that can happen will happen, to the detriment of prior set plans or cues or masking tape markers on the floor.
The language of the body is new and strange. I don't know where it begins, or ends, because every movement that appears insignificant might be staged, although the staged movement may at many times appear rather plebian.
The label "experimental open rehearsal" really takes the stress off the quest for the perfect performance, and leaves everything to the unpredictability of The Moment.
And music making has been deconstructed to noise producing.
(But interaction with the dancers seems to give meaning to all noise. Maybe because they need to impose meaning on the sounds to dance to it?)
And then there is the fading of the boundaries of each discipline - at the end we are left with the crudest, rawest, or as She would put it, "the organic material", through which we attempt to connect with the other, despite having physical walls separating the musician and the dancer.
Perhaps the set structure of form lulls us into a complacency where we assume the meaning of the notes will get across, like words in a sentence. But when you have only four words with which to speak for three minutes, the only thing that you can vary is the gesture, the manner of speech, and now I think that is where the communication begins.
(Then again it's not really a 'free day'- I still have to teach for one hour and perform at night.)
Today will be the second and final day of the "9 Temple Graffiti" run. Yesterday was a lot of fun. Working with dancers is quite interesting because after you've gotten past reading their movements (which feels a bit like reading Chinese poetry with a smattering grasp of the language), there is the whole unpredictable element of The Moment, in which spontaneity and 'art' dictates that anything and everything that can happen will happen, to the detriment of prior set plans or cues or masking tape markers on the floor.
The language of the body is new and strange. I don't know where it begins, or ends, because every movement that appears insignificant might be staged, although the staged movement may at many times appear rather plebian.
The label "experimental open rehearsal" really takes the stress off the quest for the perfect performance, and leaves everything to the unpredictability of The Moment.
And music making has been deconstructed to noise producing.
(But interaction with the dancers seems to give meaning to all noise. Maybe because they need to impose meaning on the sounds to dance to it?)
And then there is the fading of the boundaries of each discipline - at the end we are left with the crudest, rawest, or as She would put it, "the organic material", through which we attempt to connect with the other, despite having physical walls separating the musician and the dancer.
Perhaps the set structure of form lulls us into a complacency where we assume the meaning of the notes will get across, like words in a sentence. But when you have only four words with which to speak for three minutes, the only thing that you can vary is the gesture, the manner of speech, and now I think that is where the communication begins.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
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