Saturday, January 14, 2012

ERNST BUSCH & END OF THE PROJECT

Saturday afternoon at my house. A nice Berlin, winter sunshine going through the apartment. Time for some reflection on a big week and an amazing month.

We have been reshaping and refining our piece throughout this week. Trial and error.

What we have: a storytelling of THE SEAGULL by Anton Chekhov, told and facilitated by six performers. They sit next to each other on chairs, swopping and exchanging the roles of Konstantin, Nina, Arkadina and Trigorin. Carried and connected by a chorus framework, orginally written by Thomas Eason (inspired by the company Dood Paard). The audience is invited in the space, the performers warm them up for the event, they ask questions. And then the next stage, in which the community is guided through the major scenes of THE SEAGULL. The performers play with, honour and inhabit the dramatic situations, as well as operating as an ever-present chorus. The company invites the audience to participate by giving them a voice in scenes and characters. The performers include verbatim stories in fragments of THE SEAGULL. Man play women, women play men. Chekhov in Berlin. Storytelling happening in the present moment. A co-creation of audience and the collective. 

After our two showings at the Brotfabrik, we moved again, for the final time, to the Heinz studio of drama school Ernst Busch. The home of our company member Runa Schaefer. Runa, a fourth year acting student at the school, showed us around. Lots of studio spaces for rehearsals and classes, voice rooms where students meet with their individual voice tutors, a library, movement spaces, male and female locker rooms, an impressive costume room, a canteen area that serves warm meals and a foyer showcasing pictures of the final year acting students of the school. In one hallway, auditionees for the next year intake were waiting to do their monologues, song and poem for the panel. Apparantly this happens every thursday for a half year. Around 2000 people try out to get into the school.

So here were are. Thursday, 12 February. A grungy, old building, located in the former east Berlin (DDR). The school trained many of the most famous and renowned actors in the German speaking region. You can feel a history of hard work. It is an honour to get the chance of performing here and to leave a little mark in this environment.

After the generous warm up of Runa's voice tutor, we were ready to meet the audience at 4pm. Nervous but also excited to share our work, we had a room full of teachers and first and second year students of the school.

I sat as an audience member in the back of the space and experienced how quickly this gathering became a warm encounter. Ease, elegance, playfullness and generosity in the room. For me it was exciting to witness how the 'natural' strength of the company to connect was showcased next to strong precision, rigour, craft, leadership and focus. Charm can never be an excuse to hide or not taking risks.

Investing in the two territories meant that the collective created trust in the room, which was essential for the audience participation and involvement to work.

I became interested in how the whole community can learn from each other by setting up an honest 'game'. I realized how we have created a set structure with performance variables that are dependant on the actual encounter between collective and audience. One being that at the start performers would ask questions ('What is your favourite writer?' ' What was it like to perform a play at your primary school?') and the audience's answers would be put in the monologues of the various characters at different points throughout the showing. This worked very well, and created an instant relationship between the story and the community in the room. How could we design more of these variables?

The audience was with us, slowly a dialogue and conversation started to manifest itself in the space. I do not think people were thinking about judging us anymore, thinking in terms of good or bad acting, but just related to what was happening around them.

The forum touched on various research topics of our workshop and gave an insight in the training a lot of us had at Toi Whakaari. The task of finding Chekhov in Berlin (and the different stages of doing so), the inspiration from company models Dood Paard & Gob Squad in our process, the performer as facilitator and storyteller, the journey of an event, building of a community by audience participation, and collaboration from different cultural perspectives. The audience was very responsive and there was a true discussion. Even when people questioned our approach of warming the audience & inviting audience participation, these people did feel like they cared about what they experienced. A good thing.

It is important for us to consider in what context a company meets an audience and how to design the right opening according to this situation. In the Brotfabrik we met a group of people who were strangers to each other, here at Ernst Busch we encountered a group that was already a community in itself. The opening is then foremost geared to making us part of the community. What this means for the actual event is then less about connecting them as strangers, but instead letting the community see each other in a different way. I think this happened as well. All of a sudden, students spoke the Chekhov texts through the filter of a headphone instead of having 'to act' on a big stage in front of their peers. People started to engage with each other with different eyes. More as human beings and less within the role of a student actor (and the expectations attached to this).

We did a mihi for the lovely Runa and sang for the school. And that was it. Around 6pm we ended our adventure at Ernst Busch.

All of us were buzzing afterwards. We actually did leave a mark in this place. We celebrated the warmth of our collective, using the story of THE SEAGULL as a TOOL to connect and relate to an existing community. I had never felt the power of doing that with a classic text to such a degree.

Yesterday we came together for our debrief. It highlighted again how we all have shifted in terms of our thinking and experiences of performance, community and audience participation. I am still reflecting and making sense of a rollercoaster month, but am sure that this all will seed into my future work. Like it will with many others of the collective.

Thanks collaborators for working and learning with you.

Willem
(BUT I AM 72)

ERNST BUSCH SHOWING


Transistor Collective...


Voice warm up before the showing with Runa's voice teacher from Ernst Busch...



The showing...









Wednesday, January 11, 2012

MORNING AFTER BROTFABRIK

2 days to make a one hour show
Means learning a lot of lines
Dood Paard
Chorus storytelling of THE SEAGULL
Thomas Eason finds a writing voice
Intelligent and moving
Flapping in the wind
Runa is still confused
But happy
Performer - Performer - Audience relationship
Storyteller always present, also in the dramatic context
Especially in 'intense' moments
Microphones
Character and gender swopping
Andrew, Ben and Tom play Arkadina at the same time
Jaci knows how to be with an audience
Ben feels maternal when rubbing his belly
Casting ourselves, the space and the audience
Warming the audience as part of the event
Real people
Three audience members helping us to tell the story
(they do not ACT ACT ACT ACT ACT)
Ingo is Trigorin, Tai is Nina and gives him a medaillon
Nina is not acting yet
I have never acted in a play of that description
Tonight second night
4pm start - LEARNING THE LINES to play with rhythm
Incorporating verbatim stories
Our last days together
Our days are passing
Not over yet
Was tired
Now ready

Willem

(SOME PHOTOS, by Christian Haase)








SPANDAU = THOMAS PRESS' SOUND PLAYGROUND

Sorry blog, its been a while and a lot has happened. We have been busy.

4 days in Spandau working site specific.

We left you with the notion that we were going to work with the space, challenging as it would be. Bright colours, planets on the wall, windows that look out on the street, three separate compartments, 'a little stage'.

We focused on how we can tell the first act of THE SEAGULL in this space. Konstantin's play would be performed in the 'other' room, a place we would never reveal but only hint to with sound. The audience of our showing is invited to have a peak in the private space of a green room in which a group of performers/artists & hangers on gear themselves up for the big event, the premiere of Konstantin's masterpiece.

Creating compositions and material, adapting the script (scenes and characters) and discovering the space and its opportunities/limits as we went along. It reminded me a lot of two site specific piece I made before - DELICATES (in a laundrette) and ANTIGONE (at an abandoned beach site) - and how to work WITH the space and not AGAINST the space.

The biggest change from our previous showing was how to go from direct address and acknowledging the audience throughout, to using them as a voyeur/a fly on the wall, creating a fourth wall. In this site specific chapter of ICH WARTE (around 40 minutes) it was exciting to witness how this concept resulted in a very special and unique chance to get a feel of a very sacred moment of the artist's life - very much in line whith what the first act of THE SEAGULL is about.

Filmic and naturalistic, but how to work sometimes against the rhythm of a space, how to incorporate a surreal/abstract language that highlights moments surrounded by the mundane. To magnify its beauty, to expose secrets, hidden layers? We found several ways of doing so. Sequences where the performers were in silence and slowly picked up on each other gestures, making it part of their own activities (hands, feet, breath). The framing device of Masha, unnoticed and ignored by everyone else, but a constant reference point for the audience. Masha exploring the space with the audience at the start, secretly rehearsing Konstantin's play, staying in touch with the audience whilst other characters are not aware of our presence, inviting the audience to look through the window out to the street where the future events of THE SEAGULL are played out (in abstracted images; Thomas carrying a paper seagull, Nina rehearsing her lines and creating a little stage next to a tree, Konstantin hanging himself with a scarf at the pedestrian crossing lights, Tai embodying arrival & goodbye, Ben working with a summer picnic in the Berlin cold).

Sound was very much also part of this surreal language and the illusion of somewhere else. Thomas Press created in another room the atmosphere (with distortions) of a large theatre where Arkadina, Trigorin and their entourage arrive and create pressure/influence on the events in the green room. Some strong moments when the performers go 'on stage', the play is happening and Konstantin is listening to his creation from the green room (and ultimately hears how this is sabotaged by his own mother). Thomas showed his expertise in creating a beautiful dream sound sequence with quotes out of act 2, 3 and 4, which was accompanied by the horror montage happening on the street. You can listen to this in one of our previous posts.

We work fast. The collective has rigour and does not feel precious about adapting, enriching or even throwing away. We keep ourselves on task.

Again we had a nice intimate audience to play with, this time the second language factor became a big barrier in our way of staging the event. A lot of text, and then we noticed how an audience needs to work from their brain to comprehend this all. Hard to get them fully relating to the work, images/visual language works better. A simple image of Masha standing on the chellar staircase told so much more than a whole dialogue of a Chekhov scene. Other questions, how to expose yourself in the space, rather than hiding in it? Creating individual patterns and movements in the space, choreography and mapping the traffic was our first stage in creating this work.

It was a rough piece, asking us to refine and investigate further from the first audience encounter. I think we slowly warmed up to the genre of sitcom mixed with David Lynch surrealist techniques, that is where I would like to push the work further. Maybe even throwing away all text, or starting from silence and only incorporating text when we really need to.

But we have to go. We have to go 'back' to Berlin, to the black box. And some exciting plans have been crockpotted for our last adventure of the project.

Willem

Sunday, January 8, 2012

4th January SPANDAU

10:37: Play reading of the seagull commenced. 
12:11: Seagull play down 
5 minute break 
12:16: Discussion around themes and characters. Boom! Structure, scenes and casting for next week’s performance down. And manage to discuss what to do with Fridays showing that can bring elements of what we learnt from our last showing while aiding us toward the future. Ladies and gentlemen we are on fire! 
1:10: Lunch time. Discover eftpos is impossible to find in Berlin, manage to stand in poo. 
2:00: Lunch time over the contagious Runa joins us. Note: very impressed with our progress. 
2-5: Using long form improv we look at creating the space as a green room we create some scenes and get the script. Spandau here we come.
Colourful is sexy

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Masha's Dream of the Seagull

Link to audio excerpt from Transistor Collective workshop presentation in Spandau Friday 6th January

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

AUDIENCE ACCOUNT, ANNA HARCOURT

Ich Warte Showing Eins- The Viewer’s View
The Transistor Collective’s first showing of work was a tasty fruit salad. We were shown small chunks of the fruits of their labours, roughly chopped and recently tossed together.  It was fresh, strange and some bits were quite delicious.
 It was first and foremost an experiment, by no means a smooth finished piece of theatre. We were presented with shorts moments from the plays of Chekov, interspersed with comment from the actors, sound recordings and video projections. It ranged from Uncle Vanya’s Sonya (played by Tai Berdinner-Blades) tearing up a hot chocolate with the desperation of unrequited love, to Tom Eason’s beautiful deconstructed movement sequence exploring the character of Adrej from Three Sisters, to the hysterical laughter of Runa Schaefer  and Florian Steffens playing Masha and Vershinin, also from Three Sisters.
Despite the quality of the acting, the strongest and most provoking moments for me were those where the actors stood back from performance and instead became facilitators. For example, the work began with a sound recording of people (clearly not professional actors) in a busy street repeating lines of Chekov. It was later revealed that these were recordings that the Collective had made in the Berlin Weinnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) with random passers-by. The actors, guided by sound design guru Thomas Press had recorded lines of dialogue and asked strangers to listen to them on an ipod and repeat what they heard. I was struck by how honest and moving these lines were when performed by obvious non-actors. Delivered without pretension, without ‘character’, with stumbles and mistakes and against the background noise of the market, the meaning of the lines shone through in an unexpectedly strong way.
This was shortly followed by the actors Andrew Paterson and Jaci Gwaliasi repeating this exercise, this time with two audience members. Jaci and Andrew described their struggle with  finding authenticity with the characters Nina and Konstantin when rehearsing scenes from Chekov’s The Seagull. They demonstrated techniques they had used in rehearsal such as isolating their bodies from the text, and told us how these techniques had fallen short. They then invited two audience members onstage and gave them the ipods with the dialogue recordings.  Watching these two audience members sitting on the floor repeating lines while Jaci and Andrew stood onstage, in character but not acting the character was a really beautiful moment of theatre. If they were searching for authenticity, they found it when they stripped away set, lights, blocking, characters and finally actors.
So, in the end we were not shown a play, we were played with. It was an exciting, theatrical experiment and I was glad to have been not just a witness but a part of it.  I have no idea where the group will travel in the days before their next showing, but I have no doubt that they will continue to challenge themselves and us.

3RD JANUARY: IN BRUTAL SPANDAU

Today we had our first day after our three day break around New Years. We ended on the 30th December with a showing opening up lots of potential (see the audience account of Anna Harcourt). What was exciting for me was that we tested a whole 'crockpot' of performance styles, challenged ourselves to make the performer more visible rahter than the character and the dramatic context of the various Chekhov plays. How the audience became actively involved in the creation of the action on stage and became a responsible player in the room. How fiction and reality were seperated and started to blur without noticing it. Done with elegance and ease.

A great example of this was the work of Ben Crawford who invited verbatim stories from the audience and made this part of his portrayal and text of Astrov, the doctor in Uncle Vanya. A riveting moment was where he seamlessly incorporated audience responses as part of his Astrov monologue. The community in the room witnessed the sourcing of his material and the attentive audience member could see how he as a performer included this in his performance. Chekhov in Berlin happened in front of us. A strong sense of audience involvement and ownership.
Another element of the showing that 'screamed' for more was the exciting task of Jaci Gwaliasi and Andrew Paterson to find the most authentic voices/players for Konstantin and Nina in the Seagull, and asking the support from the audience in doing so. Without the 'barrier' of knowledge of the text, character and the play, two audience members were armed with head phones and asked to simply repeat the lines they heard through Ipods. Through this language of filtering audience members succeeded to bring authenticity and purity on the floor. There was 'no acting'. They dropped into the meaning of the the words, rather than creating meaning first. Jaci and Andrew were facilitators rather than actors, and their job as performers concentrated on how to let the audience 'win', how to make them look incredibly good. A beautiful act of generosity and gifting.

We have two more weeks of our investigation in how to find Chekhov in Berlin. We are working now for four days in a found space in Spandau, after we go to the black box theatres of the Brotfabrik and Ernst Busch (the Berlin drama school).  

We need to kill some babies.

What excites us the most at this moment:

How can we work the reality of the present community into the fiction of Chekhov by the means that were highlighted in the pieces of Andrew & Jaci and Ben? How to gather verbatim material (linked to the themes of Chekhov) as part of the theatre event, let the audience step in as performers of our work and how can this all be translated into the staging of scenes done by us as a collective? There is an exciting element of risk and precision required from all of us if we truely commit to this. The actor as the facilitator and the performer needing to focus foremost on the communication and relationship to the audience in order to learn from them and collaborate with them. What we have learned from companies of Dood Paard and Gob Squad is the importance of an active task in this meeting of audience and company. How can we make the audience shareholder in this task and make them responsible?

Three plays is too much, so we are going for the Seagull.

In Spandau we want to use our work to prepare us for the above questions, which we can then execute in the black box theatre spaces. The space in Spandau is a challenge, however it gives us opportunities for using three seperate dimensions (the outside/the street, the green room, and the illiusion of a grand theatre). Framing those spaces and referring to the actual act of creating new forms with our group of young theatre artists. Thomas Press as our multimedia director will have a great time with connecting and linking the dimensions.

Till next time blog,
Willem

RECORDINGS OF THE PUBLIC SPEAKING CHEKHOV; A CENTRAL ELEMENT OF OUR RESEARCH



"It is perhaps a stupid cliche, but I always fall for it, that the 'real' person has something that connects us all. Something weirdly innocent."

"I don't speak; rather things are spoken through me. Or rather, I am spoken and I initially carry neither the responsibility for what is said, nor can I establish direct and unmediated feelings towards what is said, because I don't know how the text I am hearing develops, nor can I influence it. In this way, lives, texts and narratives can be made audible, free from any psychology and pathos and their essence and authorship cannot be accounted for. The technique of mediated speech takes the replacement and dissolution of individuality and identity, as is often the case in Gob Squad's way of performing, to extremes."

From Gob Squad Reader

NOTHING COMPARES TO YOU, PART OF TAI'S WORK IN THE FIRST SHOWING OF ICH WARTE


(and yes sung by Tai)

DAY OF THE SHOWING: I'M MR BLOG

Wir hatten nur vier Stunden Zeit, um noch die letzten Dinge zu erarbeiten und unseren ersten und einzigen Durchlauf zu probieren.

Nach einem kurzen Warm-up (wo ich „Mr. Hit“ gelernt habe), hat Willem uns unbemerkt in die erste Aufgabe geleitet. Jaci und Andrew sollten versuchen Bilder zu entwickeln, welche die Situation ihrer Figuren widerspiegeln und wir sollten als Ensemble versuchen ihnen so unterstützend wie nur irgend möglich zur Seite zu stehen. Dabei entstanden Bilder wie: Nina und Konstantin, welche sich Rücken an Rücken zu stützen versuchen, sich aber nur gegenseitig wegdrücken. Der Flugversuch, wie Superman. Die beiden Bestien, die aufeinander einstürzen wollen, aber mit aller Kraft zurück gehalten werden. Das Schattenspiel mit zwei sich bewegenden Lampen, welche Ben anstrahlen, der wiederum Sätze nachspricht...

Der Sinn des ganzen war, dem Publikum einen Prozess der Szenen-Erschließung zu zeigen, in welchem wir durch überdramatisieren scheitern, um sie daraufhin um Hilfe zu bitten. Wir wollten die Leute so weit integrieren, dass sie Texte, welche nur sie allein durch Kopfhörer hören, laut für alle wiederholen. Vor allem wollten wir niemanden bloßstellen und dachten, wenn wir vorher scheitern kann das nur ein Erfolg und ein gutes Gefühl für den Freiwilligen sein.
Als wir also die Szenen die wir gerade erst gefunden hatten reproduzierten, aber so getan haben, als würden wir das in genau diesem Moment entwickeln, haben wir uns sehr schlecht gefühlt, weil wir uns selbst und dem Publikum etwas vormachen wollten. Also haben wir beschlossen, diese Idee wieder zu verwerfen.
Es war bereits 12 Uhr und wir hatten nur noch zwei Stunden den Raum zur Verfügung.
Wir wollten uns auch nicht als schlechte Schauspieler darstellen, um das als Ausrede zu nehmen die Hilfe des Publikums anzufordern.

Schlussendlich haben wir entschieden unsere Versuche rückwirkend zu erzählen, mit ein paar gezeigten Beispielen, damit das Publikum erfährt was wir alles ausprobiert haben, dass wir jedoch unser Ziel nur mithilfe des Zuschauers erreichen können.

Eine Menge ungeklärter Fragen standen im Raum, aber uns lief die Zeit davon. Also haben wir nach einer kurzen technischen Besprechung die erste und einzige Durchlaufprobe riskiert.
Es wurde noch mal einiges gestrichen und hin und her gebaut und so trafen wir uns eine Stunde vor Beginn wieder im hallenden Bewegungsraum.
Ben hatte noch eine halbe Stunde vorher die Idee, Sätze die er als Antworten vom Publikum bekommt, in seinen Monolog einzubauen.
Wir waren verwirrt, aber unglaublich gespannt wie und ob das alles mit Zuschauern funktioniert. Es war ein Experiment!

Wir waren mehr als überrascht so viele Menschen bei uns begrüßen zu dürfen! Wir hatten schon keine Sitzkissen mehr und es kamen immer noch Leute! Der Raum war voll! Das hatten wir nicht erwartet!

Es grüßt herzlichst,
the virgin from the stars, like a lion,
Runa

If you do not understand German, please use GOOGLE TRANSLATE: http://translate.google.com/ (very postdramatic).