It was a long journey to
get me to the LEATSS (www.leatss.lu) doors. First time I heard about
it was about 5 years ago and ever since I was thinking of going, but
my life offered or pushed me into other priorities... Then I got a ½
scholarship from my club (www.pirates.lu) last year. I was delighted, just until I
realised I couldn't go because of medical reasons. There have been
hard times afterwards and the fear of not getting into the summer
school was growing. I applied for the scholarship offered by the
school as well. In the email I explained many reasons that ate up all
my money and savings and just a couple of weeks before the classes
stared, I got a YES.
I was warned that the
kitchen there is only adapted to “vegeterian” and “non
vegeterian” choice. Wrong! It may have appeared on the outside, but
once the kitchen staff found out about my lactose and gluten free
diet, they made sure that I got special dishes without them. I never
considered myself as a modest eater, but during the 8 days of school
I probably ate two to three times the usual. And didn't gain a single
kilo!
The schedule started with
the 9 am warm-up and ended at 9:15 pm. We had 4 breaks in the
meantime and an optional hour to spend in between. It was intense.
And time flew like it is always flying when you're having fun. and every evening ended downstairs by the bar, having a couple of drinks and even more fun!
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| The fountain, where we found a few minutes of rest and sunshine |
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| Same fountain, view from the garden |
There were a Theme and
Skills classes, a Student project and Swaps, that is to get a taste
of other themes and skills. My Skills was “Speaking from Head to
Toe” with amazing Sarah Case and my Theme was “There’s Plenty
of Song in Stock” with wonderful Graeme Du Fresne. And often Sarah
was wonderful and Graeme was amazing! It wasn't just the connection
my groups had with the tutors, it was the enthusiasm from both sides
that made hard work so delightful and the success so easy! In both
groups I belonged to the minority of the non-native English speakers
and there were moments when I felt I almost don't understand the
language. My vocabulary, good enough to work in the institution and
help creating serious reports about this and that for years, suddenly
seemed so poor. There is so many new words I learned and forgot that
week! I will not let myself forget those many ways of relaxing all
the muscles needed for speech, the melody of Shakespeare's lines, the
darkness we discovered in a modern prose example, the fun with the
relaxation techniques, the fffffff, vvvvvvvvvv, ssssssss, ššššššššššš
(shhhh), zzzzzzz and žžžžžžžžž (zhhhh) we filled our room
with! Vibrating your lungs, muscles and bones.... and most important:
breathing. Skills that I have conquered. Rhetoric. The art of
persuading. Quoting lines from Shakespeare was never easier! And the
modern text. And the accents.
Singing in a Stock
character was the other fun, we were Cinderella's evil sisters, the
Wolf and the Red Riding Hood, Gangsters, Lovers and Ms Trunchbull. No
matter the gender of singers, or the fact that some of the songs
were, as Graeme mentioned, f*cking difficult, we conquered them all!
A week later, “The Hammer” is still banging in my mind, when
“Barcelona” or “I'm So Over Men” are taking a break.
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| My Theme group |
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| My Skills group |
The Student Project. What
a fun! There was no competition, but if there was, I'm sure that the
group I was the part of, would get a reward as the one that had the
most fun. The runners-up would have been very close. The directors
volunteered and selected the pieces they wanted to work with, the
tutors assigned the remaining students to them. The process was to be
the most important and when we were reading the Bear (A. Chekhov) for
the first time, I had no idea that just days later we would be
chasing each other in the park at around 30 degrees heat and
improvising on a completely different situations and the fun and the
laughs we had!
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| The view from my window |
The invisible bonds we've
been weaving through the week. The friendships we made, and were
taken all over Europe and beyond. The addiction that turns into the
post-school depression and the only cure is coming back again. One
more week next year...
„Come“ they said
„it'll be fun“ they said an d' I believed them. Boy, was I wrong!
It was so much better, it was so much more.
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| Me at the end of the week: tired & happy |
Special thanks to Pirate
Productions a.s.b.l. And LEATSS who both financially contributed to
my scholarship. Loving thanks to all who were there in the convent of
Clairefontaine for the Summer School 2013. Luv'ya all!
