The Hamlet Project

I have a Feldenkrais client who doesn’t really get it. She doesn’t feel anything when I give her a Functional Integration lesson and wonders what she should feel. There’s something about her questioning that makes me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. It zooms past my experience with her and out into my whole identity as a practitioner, then as a person.

Then today, I had a client who, the moment I touched him, began to thank me and did not stop the whole rest of the hour. Everything I did seemed to him just the right thing and he let me know, affirming it all with words.

This is generally a bit of overkill. It’s not up to my client’s to give me affirmation. But today – it was much appreciated. To have such a graceful accomplished gentleman find everything I did to be remarkable, went a long way toward repairing my shaken confidence.

For the most part, I’ve mostly played string instruments – those with frets, especially. Once, in an art class, I made a mandolin out of tin can. I had to build the neck myself. I  made the frets out of nails that I cut and then hammered into the wood.

Frets are so much a part of my sense of how things are organized, I may have missed the double meaning of this entirely. I thought only of someone running fingers over frets – I didn’t even consider that fretting someone might also be to upset them – to cause them to fret, as it were.

My mandolin made from the olive oil can was called a Candolin. I still have it. It’s hanging in my mother’s music room. It’s hard to pack and move. There is no case for the Candolin.

Also – it doesn’t play like a mandolin. The tuning is such that it is unpredictable. The frets aren’t placed precisely enough for predictability. So the Candolin is not a particularly useful or tuneful instrument. I cannot really play much upon it. Pretty much only clown songs.

‘Sblood is such a good swear. It’s just fun to say. It’s not so great once you work out where it came from and why it’s a swear. I mean.. . His Blood. . . like, it’s invoking a religious figure and stuff in his body, which is a little bit holy.
Which is why it’s blasphemous to swear with it, of course – just like Zounds – which is His Wounds.
It’s all a little bit gross and morbid.
But if you don’t think too deeply about these and just SAY them with vigor, then, they are just wholly delightful, linguistically. It helps to be one syllable. It gives you a lot of places to go with it.
But – of course, here, they’ve punctuated this so it has the feeling of starting a sentence with “Goddamn it. . .” which is, of course , essentially what we’re dealing with here.

One of the benefits of being a puppeteer is that you make
Almost anything speak if you have to.
It’s not always the right voice
And not everything SHOULD have a voice
But you can always give it a shot.
Salt shaker
Sock
Bulldozer
Tissue
Cardboard tube

Making objects talk is almost always entertaining.

There’s a Kids in the Hall sketch that features a tiny oompa band. I don’t remember what happens – but the tiny oompa band is very vivid in my visual memory. They’re about mouse sized, with tiny instruments.
There’s also that joke about the 9 inch pianist. I imagine a little organ as much the same size as the oompa band in the sketch. It features a tiny organist as well. And it’s a tiny PIPE organ, also.
The tiny organist wears tails, which he flips out of the way when he sits at the organ. He plays classic horror film tunes and dramatic arpeggios. The pipes of the pipe organ are such that it looks like it could be played like a pan flute.
It’s very handy to have around when you need some foreboding chords played.

There’s a warm-up I do – both for myself and for actors or students I work with that involves traveling up and down – from the lowest note to the highest, though usually we go the other way round – that is, from the highest to the lowest.
I would sound many a person from top to bottom – anyone who wanted to expand their speaking range or their singing. It’s so easy to just speak the same handful of notes in the same small band – but if you’re going to be onstage, the audience will appreciate some outliers.

I’ve developed a little practice for myself that I do when I can. I just sing for ten minutes – no set songs, generally no words. I just make sound for a set time. Sometimes it sounds like a Slavic folk song, other times, a faux French pop tune. Most days, I don’t sound at the top of my compass or dip down to the lowest note. Most days, I hang out in the middle.

Today, though, I went to the top of the compass and suddenly understood why my voice teacher in college wanted me to go up there. On good days, the top of the voice can be fun. Maybe I’ll go up there tomorrow, too. And also hit the lowest note.

Like a deft surgeon of secrets, you could extract mine from me, painlessly. So fast, so precise – you knew right where to make the incision and how to sew me back up. Never before had I felt so understood. You had every mystery in hand.

It’s different now. Maybe you have extracted all the mysteries there were. Maybe you stopped wondering what my secrets were or what I was thinking. So in the intervening years, I’ve grown quite a few new secrets and mysteries. There’s a world in me now that you don’t understand and don’t seem to want to. I could pluck them out myself – but what would be the point? I let the mystery grow, like moss on a stone, expanding on the inside – unseen, unknown and well hidden.

The operative word here would seem to be SEEM. Because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don’t actually have a clue. They keep trying to manipulate Hamlet. They keep trying to get him to reveal himself – but he catches them at it every time. They don’t have the slightest idea about where Hamlet’s stops are.
Horatio might know where the stops are – but he wouldn’t use them. Claudius might also know Hamlet’s stops – because he does keep on pushing Hamlet’s buttons. But Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are much too obvious. They blunder right through almost every interaction with Hamlet.

In the early days, I felt like your instrument. I felt like you were playing me, like a piano. Some notes up at the top of the keyboard, some at the bottom and the notes in between. I thought you were composing on my body, like you’d compose on the piano.

There’s the feeling of being an object, and sure, that’s not so fulfilling. But being an instrument is something else. It is a creative expression in several ways at once. I miss being your piano.