Sunday 21st October
Day Two of the Teacher Training Programme, and things started to kick in properly. There was no mucking about now. (although there was still tea). Out came the Rapiers and Daggers, up we got on our feet, and off we set on an exhaustive tour of footwork and weapon techniques. For the whole day - 10am til 6pm, we blasted through each and every technical point in the Star Footwork System (this will mean nothing to you, I know, but trust me), moving onto every conceivabe operation of the Rapier and Dagger. Each technique was performed repeatedly until our efforts met with Philip of Death's satisafaction, whereupon we were grilled on the salient teaching points, the problems we might encounter, the minutiae of variations in technique, whittling and worrying away at any aspects of the criosee or the reinforced parry that we weren't one hundred percent agreed on.
On one level, it's a thrilling sensation to be pushed so rigourously to a point of technical perfection. A palpable sense of being part of an historical tradition of schools of defence stretching back across untold centuries informed my efforts as I valiantly tried to match the sheer beauty of Philip of Death's demonstration of a bind with expulsion. On another level, it's a working day that leaves bone, muscle, sinew and mental activity in ruins (although it's great for toning the buttock and leaves your forearms with that sort of wiry look that I like to think convinces people that I'm far steelier than my otherwise wispy physicality might suggest).
We didn't quite manage to break the back of every technique, but by 6.15 we had to wrap up, holding some of the joy over until the next session. At which point I took to my heels (leaving a set of rehearsal sweats at DSL for next week) to get to Leicester Square for 7.30 and meet Brian at the pictures. We hd tickets this evening for the live satellite broadcast of Ross Noble's stand-up gig, which he was performing in Liverpool, but which was simultaneously being broadcast to audiences in every Vue Cinema in the country. Having run all the way from DSL to Broadway, then from the tube station to the cinema, making it on the button of 7.30, it was then nearly 40 minutes before the show started, which would have given us ample time to furnish ourselves with beer, had we but known. Anyway, Ross was brilliant, well worth the crippling run, and we laughed like bastards for the entire two hours. Watching a live show which is right in front of you, but actually happening three hundred miles away shouldn't be such a strange sensation to anyone who owns a telly, but somehow in the cinema it took a bit of getting the head around. Still, it felt like a unique national cultural event, and when Ross, in Liverool, said that everyone in Leicester Square had probably just gone 'Boo!', we all did, as if somehow he would know. Aren't humans strange?
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