THE PROJECT

TRANSISTOR COLLECTIVE
ICH WARTE
Chekhov, Berlin and Waiting
 
With this blog we want to keep you informed about our findings and keep you updated about the latest news concerning our project. Watch this space. 

Students of Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School (Wellington, New Zealand) and Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch (Berlin, Germany) work for a month together with Berlin based theatre makers Willem Wassenaar and Thomas Press on the project WARTEN. As a collective, TRANSISTOR THEATRE investigates in this project architecture, the plays of Anton Chekhov and the theme of waiting. Working with visceral sound elements, TRANSISTOR THEATRE puts Chekhov's characters, contexts and situations in the urban landscape of Berlin and amongst its citizens. 

ICH WARTE is in English and part of a series of presentations. Presentations of the performance research take place in a studio environment of the Mime Centrum in Kreuzberg, site specific in a house in Spandau and the public transport system of Berlin, and in a black box theatre of the Brotfabrik, Prenzlauerberg.

Chekhov's characters yearn for a better life. They express their inner hopes and dreams, but are crippled by their relationship to the past, present and future. In a territory of isolation and suspense, they seem incapable to move forward. They wait. The collective explores this space before the action and is particularly interested how this evolves in surreal experiences of time and place.

In this performance lab, the collective commits itself to perform Chekhov in a postdramatic, contemporary context. We ask ourselves the following questions:
* How can we as a collective test audience and performer relationships so the audience becomes invested, involved and responsible?
* How to create theatre as an event, rather than a conventional, rigid form that dictates the journey from beginning to end?
* How to work with the spectrum between the actor as a private person and the role he/she is playing? How to work from the idea of a performer rather than an actor and how to do this with classic texts by Chekhov? How to work with different techniques of storytelling for this to happen?
* How to work site specific and with the idea of dissapearing in an environment; letting the audience discover and find us?
* How can we achieve a more long term orientated focus in our work, rather than the instant hit, the instant satisfaction? How can we stretch an experience in order for the pay off to be extremely rewarding? How to go against our personal and cultural tendencies to consume and to please within a short amount of time? 

TRANSISTOR COLLECTIVE - ICH WARTE IS Tai Berdinner Blades, Andrew Paterson, Florian Steffens, Runa Schaefer, Ben Crawford, Thomas Eason, Thomas Press, Holly Chappell, Jaci Gwaliasi, Willem Wassenaar