I’ve made it halfway through the second week of my diet and have discovered that I have very hobbitish qualities. Every time I sit down to have a meal, I do alright. Very yummy, filling and all those good meal-like things. The issue I’m having is that just as I put everything away, store all the goodies. I’m hungry again. Breakfast… 2nd breakfast! Whee!

Which brings me back to the Starflyer reference. The only album of theirs I actually have is called “Can’t Stop Eating”, which is currently my motto. From what I can figure (and from discussing this with a few others), basically my metabolism is asserting itself in the absences of certain foods.

The diet has been keeping me off of starches and complex sugars – which isn’t bad. But what those heavier foods do is give my body something to chew on. By eating only lighter foods for the past week or so, my body processes everything lickety-split and wants more. Instantly. Exercising ridiculously only exacerbates the problem. In fact, I screwed up my sleep schedule pretty bad by napping for several hours a day during the first week: exercise – sleep -eat – sleep – wake up – exercise -sleep – etc… It was pretty boring, let me tell you.

Everything else seems to be going great. I have to cook more, so I’m getting more used to making that part of my daily habits. The energy levels are higher, all that jazz. I’m just hungry all the time.

The second phase of the diet doesn’t add in all that many heavier foods, but there are some. I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to potatoes and bananas so much before.

Anyway, I just ate dinner about 30 minutes ago, so I’m hungry again. Time to go raid the fridge for some more berries.

However, I’ve been struggling with flagging energy levels and a few other issues even with the gluten-free diet. From what gluten-free friends and family have told me, the first year is a rough one. Your digestive system takes at least 6 months to repair itself from the gluten-poisoning – a mark I passed a few months ago.

The tough spot now is that most of the semi-healthy eating habits I’d developed over the years aren’t compatible with my new diet. Add the fact that over the last few years I’ve really upped my physical conditioning means that I need a lot more healthy food intake than previously.

Enter the latest effort. I’m trying a health diet called the Maker’s Diet. It goes through three phases meant to purge your system of toxins and re-balance insulin and pH levels. Also, it tries to instill good eating habits while the diet is in effect. The eating habits are the big draw for me. Getting rid of toxins – great. Finding ways to get my energy levels back up to normal – much better.

So, off I go. I’m starting to feel the detox effects – which bite. Hungry all the time because I’m trying to fit a health diet into an active dancer’s work habits. When the book mentioned exercise it had a grand total of 30 minutes a day. It also considered meditative breathing exercises as… well, exercise. Don’t think several hours of conditioning, rehearsals and performances count as meditative breathing.

Anyway. Should be all better in another week or so when the next phase kicks in. I can eat a couple more things then!

After 6 months of being gluten-free (minus periodic poisonings) I’m starting to realize just how sensitive my body is to environmental and dietary factors. Concentration, energy and mood are major factors that I can usually trace to inadequate nutrition. Contrary to my usual opinion that pain only means you aren’t trying hard enough, I’ve decided that I need to start looking at my long-term diet structure as means to fix these problems and get on with the other methods of delivering pain to myself (parkour anyone?).

A friend has recommended that I try the Maker’s Diet, which is based on what we know of Biblical diets and the failings of modern agriculture. The cincher is that this friend is also gluten-free and had other health problems that have been largely mitigated by the Maker’s Diet.

Now I’m not fully on board yet. However, the Maker’s Diet has this handy little 40-day experience thingy that’s meant to detox your digestive system and reset your body. I plan on giving that a try and seeing how things turn out. At the end, you end up on what is essentially the long-term Maker’s Diet. If it works well, I guess things speak for themselves. If it doesn’t, I’ve eaten really healthy food for a month.

The biggest item I hope to get out this is finding a way to think about nutrition in a more structured fashion. At the moment, I live by the “surrounded-by-health-conscious-people bachelor” code: i.e. I buy better quality ingredients, but still eat like crap.

We’ll see what cute hyphenated label I give myself after this

For the curious, the move was just down the road, but I ran out of funds to furnish the place until about 2 weeks ago. Two months of sleeping on an air mattress while working, training and performing will pretty much wreck your season.

Anyway, the place is furnished now and my back thanks me profusely. Things are sort of getting back in the saddle now – rather than hanging on to a stirrup and praying the ground is level. As I was thinking of updating this thingy I came across a poem that kind of speaks to me right now. Hope you enjoy:

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure;
the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair;
the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring:
these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings.
If we refuse to hold them
in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain,
we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.

– Parker Palmer, from A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
<img src="http://jonathanlowery.com/files/2010/11/shadow-3.jpg" alt="Shadow" width="300/" /

via imonk

Basically, I can’t eat grain products anymore. It’s a genetic condition called (among other things) celiac disease. My sister was diagnosed with this a few years ago, so I’ve been on a semi-cautious lookout since then. Gluten is a protein found in grains that has basically gotten way out of hand since farmers invented cross-breeding to increase harvest yields. Over the past couple hundred years the gluten content of grains has gone nuts. We’re talking multipliers in the hundreds. The human digestive system isn’t designed to handle that much gluten, so an autoimmune disorder has arisen that basically destroys your small intestine – making you unable to absorb nutrients and and generally turning you into a sickly person.

A few days ago I was attempting to go to sleep after a rough day when the thought occurred to me that I was exhibiting a lot of the symptoms for celiac. In the morning I cut the grain products out of my diet and almost immediately noticed a difference.

I hadn’t realized how bad I had been feeling until today. When I woke up, feeling great, I thought to myself “Gee, I like feeling this good. Sure beats being sickly.” Then I ate a protein bar I thought was gluten-free. I was incorrect. Within a few minutes I started feeling the ‘sickly’ symptoms coming back and double-checked the label. Yup, trace amounts of wheat involved in the manufacturing process.

So now I’m embarking on the new diet. It’s a big lifestyle change, especially for a bachelor “starving” artist. The hope is that by switching over, I’ll regain a lot of the energy that I haven’t had for a few months now. Even in the few days I’ve been testing the gluten-free diet I’ve felt more alert and energetic. The improved mental state is awesome. We’ll just have to wait and see what sort of long-term effects the change has in store as well.

In conclusion: Big life change, but don’t bake me a cake to celebrate

And now, over a year later, we’re in the final rehearsal stage for PUSH’s re-telling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Our version of Dracula departs from the original novel for mostly practical reasons. We don’t have the numbers to fill out Stokers’ main cast, much less all the supporting roles. We also don’t have a good way of staging a weeks-long cross-European chase with trains and boats. At least, no way that wouldn’t leave the audience catatonic from intense boredom.

The central liberty we’ve taken with the story is to tell it from the perspective of the madman Renfield. In Stoker’s novel, Renfield is a sort of motion sensor for Dracula, his actions parallel Dracula’s movement and desires. Renfield also serves a crucial plot point by becoming the weak link in the defense of the asylum he is housed inside. A local writer/actor and friend of ours, Danny Hoskins, wrote and speaks Renfield’s part on stage with us as we alternately become his nightmares, fantasies and actual characters.

(YouTube doesn’t seem to be working with me today. Video’s are here.)

On the spiritual side of things, Dracula is an interesting story to tell. There have been a lot of sidelong glances from many church friends who ask “Why Dracula? Isn’t it all about EVIL?” The short answer is: yes it is. Our ‘Dracula’ is a story about absolute evil. In a society where morality is more of an opinion than a standard, we felt this would be a particularly compelling idea. It breaks the social norm and makes our vampire story a bit different what pop culture is producing. It’s a conversation point, which is what we always hope will occur when people watch PUSH perform.

We’re pretty excited about Dracula, if you couldn’t tell. This is by far the biggest project we’ve ever worked on – the show is almost an hour long. It’s also a chance for us to merge the many worlds PUSH draws our art form from. The narrative of Dracula draws out our classical story-telling mime background. The horror element allows us to indulge the more extreme movement training. There’s even a moment where I get to bring out some of my old circus training and hang from the ceiling.

We’ve got more videos and pictures up on our Facebook page if you want to take a look (which I’m sure you do). We’re using social networking pretty heavily for this show, so there will be plenty of updates before the show goes up.

Well, not entirely “oops”. I realized I would have a more stable frame of mind this week, so I decided to wait until I could collect some thoughts to share. My church (Mosaic) just finished our annual church retreat this past weekend and PUSH began company classes this Tuesday, so my end-of-summer funk has now lifted.

I get all funky towards the end of summer because I run out of things to do. I don’t exactly have an affluent lifestyle, so when work takes off halfway through the summer I end up with a lot of free time and even more inertia. This only lasts about a month, but it feels like forever and a day to me.

Luckily this is all past and I’m now viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses again – at least until the end of the year when they’ll become frost-tinted glasses.

I’m going to try something ‘new-ish’ on this go-around of posting, too. Instead
of making one massive post that I don’t want to write and no one wants to read, I’ll be chopping this up into bits over the next few days. This should make Chad very happy since I’ll be using that ‘delay post’ button to do this.

So without further ado, here’s the preview!

Dracula

PUSH is rocking the house this Fall with our most ambitious work to date – a one-act retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Videos and pictures will be upcoming.

New Hobby

This summer was actually productive at times. I’ve found a new hobby on the weekends by training with a local parkour group. Great fun and kept me in shape in the off season! I need to keep talking about this subject because formatting problems are messing with the heading below… still not there… there we go!

Promotion

I’m a full-blooded member of the PUSH company this year! No more intern/trainee status for me!

Catch y’all later!

Anyway, Chad asked for something to explain the last few months of my life. This is slightly humorous since I actually saw Chad back in April, so he knows about half of what I’m about to relate. I’ve edited things down ‘cuz these were a couple of packed months.

March

Picking up from February (yes it’s been that long), I move right into March. I don’t really remember much of March at this point. Let me check my calendar, one moment…

Ok, it appears the highlights of March were our performance at Roberts Weslyan College. Roberts is kind of a homecoming show for PUSH. The weekend after we performed a group of Roberts guys actually parodied us at a talent show – after weeks of practice and rehearsals – as ‘PULL Physical Theatre’. They’re even on YouTube:

Yes, they stole our logo, too.

April

My calendar tells me that April was when Chad saw me. April was also the month of residencies. PUSH was teaching multiple classes at a local high school the entire month, slowly retiring one project after another as the month drew to a close. Darren and I also taught a bullying residency during this month, which was awesome. We had a group of 3rd and 4th grade boys who were either ‘bullies’ themselves or were being pushed to a breaking point as a result of being bullied. With all of the out-of-studio work, we had a really wacky schedule. We ended up rehearsing mainly in between classes at the high school since they had a dance studio available for us.

To make scheduling even more difficult, I took a week off to travel down to Mississippi, where I saw Chad. My main reason for this trip was to participate in an even for my mentor, Dr. Lou (not to see Chad, unfortunately). Dr. Lou asked me to be present at a book signing and literacy event he organized for the re-publication of his novel Wind of Destiny. This was a great reunion of old friends and generally a pretty fun excuse to get warm for a few days (Spring is a rather confused season in upstate NY). I also put on mime make-up for the first time in 2 years at that event. I managed to remember enough to not embarrass myself.

May

I was glad to get to May because it meant a return to a more regular schedule… sorta.

Our company got back into our regular studio routine, but we were in earnest rehearsals for our Geva run which started at the end of the month. Adding to the stress were the displacement of one of the company from her apartment via basement fire and smoke damage and the end of the year crunch of school performances. Johanna (the fire displace-ee) was also working on costumes for our Dracula trailer, so she lost a lot of time by being evicted from her own space.

Our end of the year crunch is interesting enough to bear mention as well. It turns out that PUSH is essentially in league of its (our?) own when it comes to arts in education around Rochester. This has prompted a curious circumstance at the end of this particular year. You don’t need me to tell you schools have lost a lot of arts funding this year; but this has actually benefited PUSH (weird, right?). What happens is this: schools waited until then end of the year to find out how much of their budget was left over for arts education. Then, because they didn’t have a whole lot, the schools decided to spend what they had on a proven quality program. We’ve actually ended up with the same or even more work than we had last year!

GEVA

So this is the big event that ended May and began June. Honestly, I’m still not really sure how it got to be so far into June… Or am I surprised it’s still June? I can’t remember.

Basically, this was a two-weekend run with a week of tech before hand. It was fun to be back since we had such a good experience last year. We premiered two new works and performed a trailer for a third during this run. The new pieces were “Time” and “Flight 1549″. “Time” is an exploration of the shifting perspective of time during track and field events and set to voices of professional athletes describing their personal experiences. “Flight 1549″ is based on the successful emergency landing in the Hudson river in January of this year. The piece is set to the cockpit tapes of the pilot and ground control calmly discussing the emergency until radar contact is lost. We become alternately the birds that caused the accident, the plane itself and the passengers inside.

The trailer we debuted was for “Dracula: The Shape of Evil”, which is a one-act length work we are working on for this Halloween. I’ve put a couple pictures of the trailer up here, so if you were wondering, that’s what they’re from.

On a personal note, on top of the tech rehearsals and run of the show, I had 12 consecutive days of family in town and then two days of friends from out of town later on. I loved seeing everyone, but I was most definitively exhausted by the end of the run – which was this past Sunday.

There! I have now bridged a four month gab in internet gabbiness. As a further note to appease the Chad-like folks out there. I do think about writing things a good b

Yet another month passes in whirl of activity. February was spent attempting to hang on while we worked on a month-long teaching residency in a local school. I had a great time, but so many things got sucked out the open window I’m still trying to catch them weeks later.

Retreat

I’m writing now because I have a few minutes and I keep thinking I ought to do this more. I’m gearing up to head out to a church leadership retreat tomorrow, which should be an interesting experience. The leadership style here is so different than anything else I’ve encountered. Not that it’s wild or uncanny, it just hasn’t fallen into my range of experience before. It’s been a long road to adjust and then appreciate how they work.

The attractive part of this is that PUSH works very much like Mosaic (my church), and I believe PUSH has one of the most sane approaches to living as a performance company I have ever seen. So if I can get a little deeper into why/how this system works, the better able I will be to utilize these concepts in my own career. I’m definitely looking forward to a little bit of life lesson-ing at the moment.

Just how cool can I be?

I can get into the newspaper! That’s how cool I can be!

This is an article published about our residency in February. I got the front and center picture because… well basically because I was teaching in the gym, which looked better than a cramped classroom. But do read – we taught complicated neuro-scientific principles about the relationship of art and the brain to fourth graders. Talk about challenge!

Webster 4th-graders work with PUSH Theatre

You wouldn’t expect the average fourth-grader to be familiar with neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran’s laws of art.

But at Schlegel Road Elementary School in Webster, 75 students are learning these concepts and putting them in motion, literally, as part of PUSH Physical Theatre’s monthlong residency at their school.

Theater company founders Darren and Heather Stevenson and fellow performers are teaching the fourth-graders to express ideas through pantomime, coordinated body movements and improvisation. Teachers say the students love it.

Part of the program’s success has to do with where the fourth-graders are developmentally: They’re physically strong and capable of self-control, but they haven’t yet fallen into the self-consciousness of adolescence.

“I think they’re really starting to feel comfortable expressing themselves,” said enrichment specialist Tracy Nail, who has helped coordinate the residency. “The kids are in that area where they trust each other enough to try things out.”

They now understand principles such as symmetry, metaphor, generic viewpoint, isolation and grouping, which are among the eight laws of art put forth by Ramachandran and philosopher William Hirstein in a scholarly paper from 1999. The rules help explain why art appeals to the human brain.

One class of Schlegel fourth-graders has come up with a complete routine illustrating each concept with their bodies. To show contrast, for example, half the group reaches over their heads on tiptoe and the other half crouches low. Then half the group runs in place, and the other half moves in slow motion.

Each of Schlegel’s three fourth-grade classes has its own routine.

The students will perform in front of the entire school Friday afternoon, and for their parents that night. PUSH will perform as well.

Fourth-graders Noah Cardella and Adrianna Visca, both 9, showed off some the moves they’ve learned in the past month: leaning on an imaginary table, being dragged away by a helium balloon, and putting their hands on an invisible wall.

Noah says his balance has improved, but only after working at it: “Practicing one night in my bathroom, I fell,” he said.

The PUSH residency at Schlegel was funded by a $5,000 grant from the Arts & Cultural Council for Greater Rochester.

STVEALE@DemocratandChronicle.com

A few updates…

Google Attack!

In a strange set of circumstances, I have apparently become he web’s leading authority on Jerzi Grotowski, according to Google anyway. Seriously. Type ‘Jerzi Grotowski’ into Google and see if my article on him isn’t first on the list or close to it. Unfortunately, if you Americanize his name to ‘Jerzy Grotowski’ it doesn’t work, so don’t do that!

In response to the attention I have re-written my Grotowski article. Most of the changes are actually corrections to the horrendous 11th hour grammar of the original. It is much easier to comprehend now. Points are followed through, thoughts do not flow over tall cliffs and sentences now finish in the appropriate places. Yay editing!

PUSH

PUSH was featured in a news article in our local paper, the Democrat and Chronicle. It has a short interview with my director, Darren Stevenson, and some video of some new choreography we’re working on. The link to the interview is here. Or if you just want the eye candy…

Yes, I did just call Darren ‘eye candy’. But it’s only skin deep… You should try working for him. It’s like working out and working – at the same time!

Upcoming

Be on the lookout for a few articles coming up sometime soon. I’m working on an update to Darren’s “A Case for Physical Theatre” that will attempt to show specific examples of things PUSH does as a result of those ideas as well as the changes nine years have made to the company.

I’m also working on a couple research articles for our upcoming work on ‘Dracula’ that I’ll try to toss up here whenever they’re done.

‘Dracula’

Oh yeah, ‘Dracula’ itself has been postponed until Halloween. We’ll be doing a shorter run at Geva in June as a stop-gap and then coming back for a longer run over the ghouly holidays to present the Count in all his glory. Should be a lot of fun.

Well, that’s all for now!