OFF TO A BREAK

Ich Bloggy,

We are on break over Christmas for five days. We've been working together as a company for seven straight days. Phew. Yesterday was another solid day. The Mime Centrum classes were on holiday so we had the entire day in the studio to make. We began with a mash up of all the hardest Toi muscle based warmups we knew, plus some from the Dance School.

We are trying an exercise which I think is unexpectedly subtle and demanding. As we try it more and more I get the feeling it holds the work we are pursuing here in Berlin. The idea is to create tableaus in reaction to the audio recorded from the Berlin public. It is easy to do the task of image making, but I realise now we are not just chasing the completion of an image, we are trying to find a quality. It is so easy to become "epic". By this I mean we present the images like golden objects, like pretentious works of art-wank. We are researching Gob Squad and Dood Paard's medEia for this project and I think this is fantastic. These companies speak to the line between epic and casual. We will continue to chase this quality I hope.

 We moved on to the development of our storytelling exercises. We'd each been given the task to tell the story of the play from our character's perspective, involving five direct quotes from lines or stage directions. From there each actor has found their own set of languages and abstractions: Andrew and Jaci with turtle lights, Runa with toy-soldiers and human puppetry. Yesterday afternoon was spent developing the scenes, with focus on precision and purpose. What exactly are you doing with your body and voice in the space? Why are you doing it / what does it show about the story?

Now the job is to find three scenes that the company can drop into within these storytelling chapters. The scripts were due at five today.

Finishing the weeks work yesterday with Toi Whakaari E and Ngoi to mihi Runa's performance in Leonce and Lena. She is excited to learn the songs.

Tom.