お久しぶりです！I apologize for the increasing gaps in how often I've been posting. It's not that nothing exciting or interesting has been happening, but as the end draws near I have unfortunately been focusing more on the target than what happens on the way. So, time to focus in the here and now. What's been going on here you ask? Three things: Juggling, Mimery, and Science.
Juggling
Last weekend was my first (and last) juggling show with the group that I have been a part of since coming to Japan. They only do one show each semester, and I this term I juggled clubs in a routine which consisted of a series of battles between different jugglers. My partner and I were to pass clubs with a person in between us, thereby trapping them within the vortex of deathly, whirling juggling implements. This was nerve-wracking for several reasons. 1) I could barely juggle clubs before coming to Japan 2) For some reason, they put me on the side so that if I messed up my throw, I hit the middle guy in the face. Why I was on the face-side, I will never know. During practice I hit the guy at least 5 times, and actually sent his glasses flying once. Despite a respectable amount of practice, I was understandably nervous when the performance came around.
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| The vortex of deathly, whirling juggling implements |
The actual performance was great though. Well, I mean we kind of completely screwed up the first half of the routine, but it was a ton of fun. The audience was great, I just had as much fun as possible on stage, and we nailed the ending, so I think people we walk away thinking it went well, regardless of a less-than-sterling start. Overall, it was a nice reminder of how much I enjoy performing. (There will be video at some point, but until then here are some pictures).
Mimery
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| Poster for the mime show. the guy on the right is my professor. |
This semester I've been taking a class titled "The Art of Mime and Pantomime", which is basically a mime history and development class taught by an adjunct professor who's day job is as a touring, professional mime. The class generally consists of a lecture about a certain time period or style of mime, followed by some videos displaying that style. Short version: It's awesome. For our midterm assignment, we all had to attend our professor's show this weekend, and write a response paper. I had never actually seen a full mime performance, and this one was absolutely incredible. Turns out that our professor has a partner or two, and among them they did everything from an epic game of tug-o-war, to a one-man soccer game (complete with a red-carded foul and a goal), to a puppet which rebels against and kills his puppeteer, ties the strings to him, and animates his corpse like a puppet, all as one-man skits. How you depict all that with just one person and no words, I have absolutely no clue, but they did it, and it was truly incredible.
Science
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Take explores the magic and wonder that is conservation
of angular momentum. The museum had a huge room of
hands-on physics stuff, what more could you ask for? |
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I miss science. A lot. Fortunately for me, Tokyo is an enormous
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| Classification of stars....in Japanese |
city, and therefore has more than a couple museums hanging about. Today, I went to the National Museum of Science and Nature (国立科学博物館) with one of my friends from the juggling group, Takebayashi (or as he is known in the juggling community, Mister Take [ミスター竹]). The museum was basically Japan's version of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, with a dash of Japanese history thrown in. Although the exhibits seemed a bit smaller, and it was definitely not in New York, I had a great time adding a bit of science to my otherwise sadly-non-scientific-stimulating daily life.
Takebayashi is actually a geology major who wants to work in a museum someday, so it was really cool to go around with him and hear what he had to say about the various exhibits (not to mention being with someone who could actually read the signs). We ended up spending the majority of the day in there, although I would have been happy to spend another day in there just to make sure I was getting my necessary dose of sciency-goodness.
In retrospect, it's been a fairly eventful couple of weeks. At this point, I'm mostly just coasting along until it's time to go home, but there are definitely some things I can do to make the most of my last 6 or so weeks in Japan.
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