Day Twenty Two - Don't Eat Pasta From Viagio!

I woke up feeling sick as ever this morning and forced myself to throw up - I had some dodgy pasta for dinner last night and was feeling ill when I went to bed. I felt sick all day, and still do now.

However, I got up and went to the David LaChapelle exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris. He does these amazing photographs, which are created rather than caught in the moment. They were very colourful (some had changing lights), reflect a lot of pop culture, and tend to comment on today's materialistic society.

There was no photography allowed inside but here are some pictures off the internet of some of the stuff I saw:











I didn't go to Movement class today because I absolutely did not feel up to doing handstands and forward rolls with the state of my stomach. But I went to improvisation with Thomas. We started with a quick warmup in which our characters were to have a swearing/slapping/punching fight with another character. I had a punch up with Remko's Granny character. It was brilliant!

Today Thomas asked us to come up with situations for improvisations. This helps us see how to write, which is what we've been asked to do for the final two days of the workshop - write a scene for some characters to play. I'm getting unnecessarily worried about this because I'm not organised, but Thomas just said to make a little scene that shows our characters, which seems achievable.

One suggested situation was a blind date at a restaurant that hadn't had a customer for 3 weeks. Another was a family on stranded on boat who haven't eaten for ten days (they ate the child). And the one that I was in was set at the Queens garden where four workers (low low down) for the Queen were invited to a party, and every character had to assume that all the other characters were part of the royal family, rather than workers. So we were playing Misunderstandings. I didn't do so well today. I didn't get killed (because Thomas isn't like that) but if Philippe were there I definitely would have! Thomas gave me the feedback: "your character is too comfortable in this situation. It's as if he's playing a host. He needs to be much less comfortable." Agreed.

• "Need to have a sense of the boundaries of the space. Otherwise we lose you."(Thomas is big on space - he trained at Le Coq).

• Don't keep the things that worked once but now don't work. You have to be sensitive to this.

• When you find things that work don't stick to them too much or else they lose the spark that makes them resonate with the audience.

• I'm having trouble with entrances. I need to come on with something (anything!) right away rather than dribbling onto the stage.

In other news...everyone's favourite roommate Oliver is back...along with his rubbish all over the apartment. AND I just got a txt from Elouise saying 'Rent per month is 720 euro [I agreed to and have paid 480 euro] plus 60 for water/electricity plus 40 for internet. I cant lose money. I wish that Oli and you get on well.' If she thinks I am going to pay for all that (or any of it) she has got to be kidding. I'm just going to ignore that for now, but if things get ugly then I will go to the NZ Embassy (because now things are actually really wrong) or leave.