First-Person: Iris Lapid on the return of MAP

Pencil Shavings and the Fat Vogue...then Phaedra
by Iris Lapid

Although I have been out of school for two and a half years now, I think I will always associate September with new Beginnings. Something about the smell of pencil shavings and the extra big edition of Vogue always fills me with anticipation. Well, It's officially autumn, I've turned the heat on in my apartment, and MAP is back in rehearsal! 

Last season The MAP Project fused Theatre with Reality TV to bring a monthly episodic serial to MainLine Theatre's Mini-Main. Throughout the eight episode arc, Season One followed the lives of three Montreal actors and their crass alter ego personas. MAP, however,  has long been known more for its form than its content. The project began several years ago when we decided to introduce a camera into our social gatherings; the genesis of the project was taking verbatim scripts from our lives and finding ways to stage them. 

The Sunday Read: Part V - Iris Lapid on MAP

Part V: January, 2012

The clown in me

by Iris Lapid

I recently finished Clown 2, a workshop taught by Francine Cote in which we developed our own unique clown through emotional state and physical gesture. The goal of Clown 1 was to open up and let what already exists within us come out, and in Clown 2 we worked at accepting it and developing it. Clown is all about discovering what you personally have a lot of, and then finding a way to let people laugh at that. I, for one, had a lot of difficulty understanding this concept in the first workshop because I had all sorts of ideas about what I wanted to play or how I wanted to be seen, without being able to simply let out what was already inside myself.