oh les beaux jours

I lean closer to A-A, who sits next to me.

The best thing about this class -- lips barely moving, eye on the prof -- is the view.

La seule, she whispers back.

Monday morning, third floor of building H, Campus Carlone, on a hill just west of downtown. The November sun is hot, the windows are thrown open. A line of traffic down the promenade, the port behind the hill, a lone sailboat on the water. The blue of the sky melting into the bluer of the water.

Frizzy-haired Mme B and her autopsy of Beckett's Happy Days can hardly compete. I don't have the stomach for literature classes anymore. The dissection of each once-living theatrical moment (word by word, image by image, symbol by symbol) just makes me queasy.

And so I float in and out of her stream of consciousness, in and out of the open window. It's breathtaking, à couper le souffle. She quotes Verlaine: Oh les beaux jours de bonheur indicible and I blink at the azur and I think, exactly.

breath

We're at a stage in our work -- a very, very early one -- where everything is discovery.

Baby steps. Understanding the distance between our bodies as something that connects as well as separates. Training openness. Allowing impulses, allowing responses.

The project is new. Connected to school, yes, but bigger than any single subject. It is our attempt to perform our way out of a theatre-as-literature paper. But it is also a feeling, intuition, that our bodies can say something together. That something will happen if we close ourselves in the auditorium for long enough.

We only know where we are starting. A miniature text, a single page, with nothing but stage directions. Four bodies. A space.

It's going to be quite the trip.