The Faulk Family

Day 5! Busy Busy. Woke up, ate breakfast, and it was my day to lead the warmup. I taught them Samurai--OF COURSE! Then I did two Boal games. First, I led The Bear of P. (can't remember the town's name..) and then I led The Vampire of Strausburg. It was a blast, and I think everyone liked it. After warmup, Laurie taught a class entitle "Community Based Theater." We started with writing on two sheets of paper what communities we belong to, and then what communties we want to work with. Our sheets looked like this: The following are just some of my own personal notes from the class that I want to remember: 1. Push yourself our of your comfort zone. 2. Community-based theater lets community do the art-making. Sometiems this means less structure and more chaos. 3. Cornerstone's 4 Key Values: Respect, Diversity, Flexibility, Mutual Mentorship 4. We received a sheet called "Guidelines for Dialogue" that I loved. It had basic rules for having good dial...

Day 4 was the Fourth of July! It was our first day off. We normally don't get Sundays off (it's usually Mondays), so it was nice. I mostly just hung around in the morning and caught up on some sleep. After lunch a few girls--including myself--went to the Hansen Dam water park to get some sun. Unfortunately, it was closed because that's where they would be setting off the fireworks in the evening. Bummer. Still, we would not be shut down, so we went over to Humphrey park (where we had the auditions the day before) because we saw they had a pool. When we showed up, nobody was there so we assumed that it was also closed. Luckily, we decided to ask and it was open! It had a diving board, and a water slide, and a lot of rules. You had to check in everything in the locker room and could only take a towel and a book or whatever out with you. No beach bad full of awesomeness or anything! So weird. You also had to go out in your swim suit or at least show that you had ...

Day 3! This day started off with breakfast and then our auditions. We were all required to audition for the play so we would know what the community members would be going through. It was really easy and fun, and I think it was a great audition idea for inexperienced actors. They had us pick a short sentence from the newspaper and read it to them (memorized if you wanted to). Then, the director (Juliette) had us say that newspaper line in many different ways and in several different situations. It was pretty fun. After that, we had a meeting about how auditions would be run that afternoon and how to canvass on the streets to get people to audition. The process would be as follows: 1. Arrive and sign in. 2. Fill out audition form 3. Take their picture 4. Have them choose sentence from newspaper 5. Escort them in. 6. They will be told if they get a callback. 7. Sign them up for a callback time. 8. Give them a callback slip. That afternoon after lunch, we went to set up auditions a...

So, day 2 of my Cornerstone Internship. I woke up, had breakfast (every morning our co-company managers set out a spread of food like cereals, hard boiled eggs, yogurt, granola, fruit, toast, cottage cheese, etc.), and went to warmup. Each morning we have a warmup lead by a different student. Since this was the first day Laurie (one of the staff) did the warmup. I know some of these things won't be very interesting to read about, but it's for my own documentation, so oh well haha. For the warmup we first walked in the space in many different ways and situations. Then, we got in a circle and took turns walking up to someone, looking at them, and then replacing all of them (so taking upon ourselves their being, their way of standing, carrying themselves, etc.). After warmup, we did what they call cultural mapping with Michael (Cornerstone's artistic director). Our first exercise was to place ourselves on an imaginary map on the floor, with the center being Pacoima. Th...

OK, so as usual I have a little catchup here. I'm writing this on day 7 of my internship here in LA with Cornerstone Theater Company. I am participating in their Summer Institute program, which lasts four weeks. I am living and working in Pacoima, which is a northern neighborhood of LA in the San Fernando Valley. Cornerstone is a community-based theater company based in LA that lives with a community for about a year and tries to learn more about that community. A playwright, who is present for all this, then writes a play about the community and community members are invited to be in it along with a few professional actors and a few institute students like me. My job here is assistant stage manager, but I haven't got to do a whole lot with that yet. Anyway, those are the extreme basics, more details to come! I left Salt Lake City on July 1st and got into LAX in the afternoon. Then, I took the FlyAway bus to Union Station where I was picked up by Cornerstone staff. I fe...

Sorry, still playing catchup here. On April 25, 2010 we had our first anniversary! Since it was on a Sunday we chose to celebrate the day before. Daniel surprised me with beautiful flowers, a nice card, a cupcake from the Sweet Tooth Fairy, and a Golds Gym Pass! I've been wanting one for forever. I got him a nice pair of designer jeans and he was super happy! To celebrate we went out to dinner at The Melting Pot in Salt Lake City. It was AMAZING! It's a fondue restaurant where like literally everything but your salad is fondue. We started with a cheese fondue appetizer where they brought out yummy things like vegetables, breads, and apples to dip in the cheese. The second course was a salad. The main course was a variety of meats and seafood uncooked. You then cook all the meat one piece at a time in the fondue pot. It was quite the adventure. Dessert was my favorite. They brought out tons of dessert goodies on a plate and we dipped them in chocolate that was drizzled with mar...