#this is yarrow

[hours]

Water is Difficult

by: Tara Bergin from: This is Yarrow

Oxygen and hydrogen in liquid state, convertible by heat into steam, and by cold into ice (Mr. H. Fowler, Mr. F. Fowler, you do make things sound nice). In summary: water is a liquid consisting chiefly of this. Just one of these things, so the Fowlers say, is due to appetite. But I have a thirst / I have a fear of / I have a sin of — and Lucy is on her knees before you, water, admitting that she might not believe. ‘What does it do, what does it do?’ she asks, ‘except leave?’

Tell her before she herself decides to go: Things break — even water. Water must break if we are to enter and live.

[hours]

Acting School

by: Tara Bergin from: This is Yarrow

Tomorrow is the day of the main performance: I play, not by choice, a spritely, foul-mouthed American. Generally, the cast is following the Strasberg Method: we never try to be jealous, or stirred up for no reason at all. In today's rehearsal we begin, as always, with articulation:

Lips: trill Jaw: spring Palate: soft Tongue: pointing pointing out from the mouth and we are humming all the while,

humming all the time and all the time centring — rubbing the centre and rocking and aligning: pulling the string up from the crown and not the chin and looking out with the eyes not the chin and before speaking, before singing, all the time increasing our capacity for breath.

The Director has told us that exiting well is an art. It will prove no less vital to your life as an artist, he says, than entering. While the good entrance might be slightly more central, exiting well could be a turning point in your career.

And now we must practise how to drink water when there is no water. Once Aoife ceases to argue about the fact that we have nothing in our mouths, we can get on with the task of learning. Swallowing air, as the Director says, might not be the same as swallowing water, but for our purposes at least, there is a sufficient amount of physical truth in what we do.

[hours]

Looking at Lucy's Painting of the Thames at Low Tide Without Lucy Present

by: Tara Bergin from: This is Yarrow

Water is terribly difficult to paint — and to drink, also, don't you find? — it's terribly difficult to drink water. In winter in particular. Lucy says we must drink eight glasses a day, but the truth is I can't abide it.

Lucy's face looks terribly bruised, do you find? Especially under artificial light. Is everything all right with Lucy, do you think? She seems quite abstracted, most of the time —

and artists will insist on painting water, despite its obvious difficulty and, above all, its secrecy (they say the marine world is notoriously ‘close-knit’).

I detest it, of course — the work. I simply can't stand the academic realism of the whole endeavour. That's not to say it isn't worth something.

On the contrary.