The Faulk Family

Hello all! Long time no blog! I've never been good at writing in a journal and apparently I'm not good at blogging either, but I'm trying to get better...I promise. So, I'm going to try to do a few catchup entries. First up is a summary of the rest of my Cornerstone experience. Just as a recap, in July 2010 I attended the Cornerstone Theater Company Institute in Pacoima, California (a neighborhood of Los Angeles) where I lived and worked with amazing people, learning how to practice community-based theatre. Some highlights! Highlight #1: We got to visit a community garden, which I think is an amazing concept! To read more about it, go here : I pulled this carrot straight out of the ground and ate it! Well, I brushed it off first... The lovely Alice Beaver and I Highlight #2: Awesome Mexican food. Tacos al pastor! Highlight #3: Me and my fellow ASM butch boss lady playing with babies at rehearsal Highlight #4: More Mexican Food! Highlight #5: Liz and I got to see In...

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 ...