Payazo

I had such a great time at my host grandma’s birthday party last week. Five of her eight kids, three of their spouses and three of her grandchildren were here to celebrate and it was so much fun for me to sit with everyone and feel so much like a part of this family. I see my host grandma almost every weekend, but it was great to see her so very, very happy. Before she went home I asked if we could take a picture together and she very proudly put down her cane and stood up especially tall. In the picture that’s me, Domonique, abuela, my host mom and three of the other siblings.

Saturday was Dia de los Cruces and even though I still don’t know what Granada was celebrating it was fun to walk the city and see all the people. Every major neighborhood here gets together to decorate a huge cross and then judges select winners based on different categories (best cross in a plaza, best cross by a school, etc.). What was most surprising to me was seeing so many baby girls, little girls, women my age, older women all wearing flamenco dresses. I knew Spain was proud of its flamenco, but people were dancing to music all over the city and it was incredible to see groups of people my age standing in the street and clapping the rhythms so their friends could dance.

Then Sunday was Spanish Mother’s Day so our host mom made salmorejo, a special and very typical Spanish dish, and the whole family and a family friend sat around the table and ate together. After lunch Domonique and I brought out the flowers we bought for Araceli and she was just so happy that we had thought of her.

Later that night I went with our program director, who is also my theater professor, to a local club/bar because a small theater company was putting on a short performance. In true Spanish style the performance started 45 minutes late, even though the three company members are from Argentina, Italy and France, but fortunately it was worth the wait. It was a unique performance because the dialogue was entirely replaced by music and sounds generated by a live musician and the other two performers did all sorts of funny and bizarre tricks involving a large box, pies, a mattress. You had to be there to really understand what I’m trying to say. Anyway, I laughed very hard and thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to sit and watch very talented and imaginative actors in a cool venue.

I’ve been very fortunate to be in this theater class that has offered me so many unique opportunities here in Granada. This week our theater class was visited by an actor and teacher of a clown class here in the city. One of the workers here at IES bought red, squeaky clown noses for all of us and we spent about two hours with Alex doing acting exercises that he does with his group of payazos (payazo is the Spanish word for clown). We were all so embarrassed because each of us had to do each of the activities, which involved doing improve in front of the whole class, but we all laughed so much and really had fun. The picture of me rocking the red nose was during a game he called dancing musical chairs. We had to dance around and when the music stopped find a chair. The person who lost (which that round was me) had to make some sort of sad noise, pound on his chest and yell like Tarzan and then stand in front of the class and do something. For my big moment I told the broken pencil lead joke Clare taught me years ago and fortunately all but two people laughed really hard, which kept me in the game. Of the two people who didn’t laugh one didn’t speak English (Alex, our instructor, is from Brazil) and someone who didn’t get it. But to her credit, and mine, or maybe Clare’s, when she understood she laughed pretty hard too. At the very end of class Alex taught us the song that his students sing at the end of every class and we had a blast belting it out. It goes like this "Sale el sol por la manana, por la manana sale el sol, sale el sol por la manana y por la noche salgo yo". We loved it.

All of our classes are winding down so we have a ton of work the next couple days to prepare for the end of the semester. But for my flamenco class I think the most stressful part of this week is our dance performance on Thursday. Granted our choreographed dance is short and very basic, but we just finished learning it last week. So last night we all met at Maria’s dance studio to practice with our live musicians, I know, no pressure right. Actually it was great and for whatever reason really helped us get our act together and it’ll be so neat to dance to live music in a theater for all the other IES students Thursday night.
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