In the morning the actors were again in a class at the mime centre, while Holly and Willem and I figured out our plan of attack for the afternoon.
The actors came out of the class buzzing, apparently it was a really awesome class. Not sure what it was, but at one point it might have involved lying on the ground and pedalling with their legs? (perhaps someone can elaborate...)
Our plan for the afternoon was to go out into the streets of Berlin and engage with members of the public using Chekhov text. We figured that a Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) would be the best place to try this, as people at markets generally aren't in a big rush to get anywhere. We also hoped that some people might have had a mulled wine or two and be more open to strange New Zealanders chatting to them!
We split the actors up into two groups.
Group 1: Tai and Andrew had an ipod with 5 tracks on it. The 5 tracks were a combination of recordings of the Chekhov monologues the actors have been working with, and text from the Anne Bogart play "Small Lives, Big Dreams"- which is a play that uses text from several Chekhov plays to smash together Chekhov characters. The monologues were recorded with gaps between each line of text, so that someone listening to the track could repeat each line back after hearing it. With a dictaphone and an ipod Andrew and Tai would approach people, have a bit of a chat with them then ask if they would be interested in listening to the ipod and repeating back each sentence as they heard it. Using the dictaphone they recorded the text as the member of the public spoke it.
Our thinking (inspired by Gob Squad's use of 'filters') behind recording members of the public speaking Chekhov text was that non-actors wouldn't try to 'perform' the text, that the reading would be more honest in this way. Feeding the lines to the person one by one meant that the reader had no idea of where the text was going, so couldn't try to express what they might have thought it was "about". A couple of the recordings start off with the reader laughing as they repeat the text, enjoying the novelty of the situation, and then a beautiful thing happens where they start listening to what the words are saying and discovering the text, at which point they drop right into the meaning of what they are saying - but without 'acting' it!
We are interested in exploring how Chekhov exists in our current space and time so Group 2: Jackie, Tom and Ben were armed with a list of questions that Willem had sourced from Chekov plays, questions such as "Do you believe in love at first sight?", "Are you talented?", "Do you love nature more than you love people?". They would approach people and ask them the questions and record the responses. They also had great success with approaching pairs and getting them to ask each other the questions.
After a few cold starts both groups figured out ways to successfully identify promising 'targets' and how to approach them.
After about an hour and a half the groups came back with 5 recordings each.
Jackie, Ben and Tom met a fantastic German woman who was quite pissed, and very happy to chat away and sing!. I will post the audio file soon, but the basic summary of the conversation was that she was there with her friend that she'd known for years and years who hated his wife and she hated her husband. She had just left (been fired from?) a job recently and was drowning her sorrows I think! She liked singing a lot, and visited rest homes to sing to people there, "For the love!". She sang a lot....
Here is a picture of Jackie, Tom and Ben and their new friends
Some really exciting recordings and I am interesting to see how we integrate this outside material into a studio space.
TP
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