Hey Newtown! Merry Christmas I love you!

So you'll be waking up soon and opening your presents. Mine won't get there in time, soz about it! I thought I give you a double blog as a present!

A couple of things I meant to give you earlier. Here's us walking to the Mime Centrum, the castle is called Bethanien:

Looking at photos like this make me very, very content with my decision to travel to Berlin for secondment. It is an amazing place to be making work.

We rehearse looking out the windows just under the bell tower. Wowzers.

Another thing I wanted to tell you... we went to an Ernst Busch show! It was around one third of the fourth year class and holy mother... they had massive chops.

First some facts about Ernst Busch we have learnt:

Over 2,000 people apply
Each class has 20 people
It is a 4 year course
It costs around 1,000 New Zealand dollars a year
Travel to and from the school is paid for by the government
Each student gets 1.5 hours of one on one voice coaching per week
Every student will graduate with a job
A job for them means a 2 year contract with an ensemble
Ensembles cast these students in 10 to 12 shows per year

So that's that.

The show we watched was called Leonce and Lena and Runa was playing the lead lady, Lena.

Man, Newtown, I talked about wanting to be precise in my work. These guys destroyed me.

The dude in white plays Leonce. He has a monologue to start the piece, it is around ten minutes long. At about half way through he took a single step forward, and I realised to myself... He has had me on the edge of my seat, laughing with my eyes wide open like an exited little kid, with a language I don't understand, in a story I don't know, for around five minutes.

And he didn't even move from the spot.

But he was working so hard! The extremity he was finding was jaw-dropping. The entire company were on peak form. The guy in yellow above jumped like that approximately twenty times while speaking a lengthy text, and we heard every syllable. Just the stamina. It was a bizarre show. I loved every second. A company launching into a piece.

Merry Christmas, Tom.

Christmas Eve

I miss you Newtown,

I haven't spoken to you for ages. I've been so so so busy. So now the cool thing is I can send you a really long blog about what I've been doing. Hey Newtown, how come you don't write back?

Anyways, we have been slamming it as a company. For three mornings this week we've been in on the Mime Centrum classes. Day one, 'Suzuki Method, Yoga and Viewpoints' with Aleksandar Acev. We were collectively stoked and simultaneously sore and happy. Day two, 'Corporeal Mime' with a classic dude, Oliver Pollak invoking similar powers to our own Tom McCrory;

"accidents happen, bad things can happen, so we smile and we wait for the accidents"

Day three, 'Voice in the Body' with Fredericke Schroeder. These classes kicked us into a massive work ethic for our making in the afternoons...

which went like this.

On the Monday we grouped at Willem's house. We had each downloaded a soundscape track Thomas Press had sent us the night before and put it on our ipods. The task this afternoon was to travel on the U7 train from Sudstern towards Rathaus Spandau listening to the track and recording any moments that we noticed. We then got back to Willem's house and recreated moments from this journey. We were interested in how the mundane is transformed into the surreal.

"For it to be mundane, nothing can be mimed" says Holly.

Tuesday after a massive movement session we really took the piece into Berlin. Whereas the day before we had been unseen observers of Berlin life, we now set out with dictaphones and ipods to harvest the voice of Berlin's biggest Weinachsmakt (Christmas Market). One team was to record Berliners listening to our monologues and re-voicing them. The other was a more simple interview exercise, to interview people about the themes of Chekhov and record their thoughts. Sometimes its really hard to just walk up and talk to strangers. This quote from Gob Squad helps:

"We are interested in you, and we will try to get something out of you. Sometimes it can be a little embarrassing, but we are embarrassing."

From this I get the vibe that they are all entrenched in the necessity of their pieces. They are embarrassed, the audience are embarrassed, but that is not the point. The point is the material, what comes from the interaction. We found an amazing lady. Her name was Heidi. We didn't track her down through the crowds and pursue the interview, we just rocked up to a table with our Gluhwein and fell into a conversation. She would flow from giving incredibly intimate stories from her life into musical numbers.

Later that day we tripped to a station called Rathaus Schoneburg. The idea was to bring the characters we had been working on together with our observation and experience in the space and make a short scene individually. It felt stale. I don't know why, Newtown, maybe the cold, maybe we were restricted by the mundane we had been researching. Jaci's was the only work to break the rhythm of the space and bring the surreal to the mundane.

For the next two days we developed from the task of telling the story of our character. Experimenting with the role and quality of a storyteller and the contrast between telling the story and performing a scene. Mines going well. I am being pushed by Holly and Willem to find other notes other than where I am comfortable and be precise and conscious about what I am doing with my body and voice. These are two points I was hoping to work on during secondment so I'm stoked.

Now its Christmas Eve and the fridge is full of food and a little christmas tree is on the table.

Miss you Newtown, Tom.

Jamming it out, Kreuzberg style

Sup Newtown,

We have settled in to our studio home away from Toi. It is the Mime Centrum within the massive castle in Kreuzberg, southwest Berlin. One tram, two U-Bahn stops and a little walk from our warm as apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. I'll show you a photo of the outside tomorrow. As well as, hopefully, some squatter camps we walk past on the way there! But for now, here is the awesome foyer:

And Transistor Collective walking up the stairwell to our Studio space, squatters occupied this castle for years until The Man threatened to knock the building down. Hence, the graffiti:

Here is us in a discussion circle:

And the view from our Studio, thats a skateboard ramp constructed in the courtyard of the castle, juxtapositions like this are what make Berlin kick-ass:

The past two days have been really energising. We are working as a company of seven actors (Ben, who joins us after a year traveling after being in Long Cloud Youth Theatre with Willem, us four Toi students as well as Florian and Runa from Ernst Busch), Thomas Press our sound designer and the directing team of Willem and Holly. 

Yesterday we worked with game and improv in the morning. Mr. Hit, epic length Space Jump and Maui Matau. In the afternoon we shared images and short scenes from our research. It was interesting to see that there was a strong flavour to the Toi Whakaari offers: distinctly physical and abstracted.

In the afternoon a Laboratory Playground was constructed for us by Thomas, Holly and Willem. It looked like this:

This playground seeded our company with postdramatic thoughts that began to feed into today.

Todays session was full of Laban and Brecht. We are exploring the Chekhovian worlds through many methodologies leading up until Christmas. After the marathon of exploring each effort with simultaneous care and extremity, for Willem is making sure we don't lock down an effort as an emotion, we explored our characters' monologues from each state. After this we had ten minutes to make a scene in our play group, mine being Three Sisters, with Florian and Runa. We were to explore the following things: the distance between the actor and the character, the role of the storyteller in relation to the audience, a moment or idea from our play and the discoveries we had made from today's Laban work. Actually, at the time, Newtown, it didn't seem so daunting, but looking back the results were very fruitful considering the dramaturgical juggling act posed to us. We are getting closer to the treatment, or at least approach to the work we want to employ.

Here are some pics from the day: 

I'm going to sleep. But your probably just waking up, Newtown. Crazy. I'll skype you soon.

Love, Tom.

3 Days Down

Wowzers Newtown,

Lovely to talk again! So after two and a half full days of non-stop travel we've been living it up, shopping, theatre-going and drinking in Berlin!

Last night we saw a soon-to-be member of our Transistor Collective theatre company, Florian, performing in his show, Die unheimliche Wiederkehr des Arthur Craven. (The Uncanny Return of Arthur Craven)

The show was almost entirely in German and was performed in an old cabaret hall with the audience space was encircled by market style stalls and a bar. Willem and I were talking after the show, he has also seen Florian in his Ernst Busch production of Troilus and Cressida, and something that stuck him is the precision Florian has been trained to have. The character was quite anarchic and shocking but the "sloppiness" was calculated and heavily crafted. We also talked to Florian, who had just finished the sixth season of this piece. He mentioned how the show was originally crafted for a smaller space. You know the townhall, Newtown? It was about that size, and I think the first few seasons were in spaces more like BATS or a Toi Whakaari studio. It felt like he was busting up against the distance created by the elevated stage. Arthur Craven would pound down the stairs to enter the audience space but it would feel contrived and unnatural, and it remained two separate spaces. There were great moments. The band members doubling as extras offered loads of chemistry. At one point they refused to play as Arthur Craven enters Barcelona. "Wo ist mein MARIACHI MUSIK?". This leads to discussions about the band not being paid and a discussion on what theatre is. 

All in all a solid first Berlin theatre experience. Plus it was followed by a hip-hop / mask performance:

... one song was called, "Stop the music, and shit on the dance floor" and thats all I have to say about that.

Love you, Newtown.

Tom.

Got to go.

This is it, Newtown. Here comes the train. Its time to go. Are you ok? You look all sad and rainy. I don't mean to leave you like this, but Berlin is waiting... Don't be like that, Newtown. Give us a hug.

I've packed all my warmest clothes, ready to devise theatre in minus twenty degrees.  I'll send you blogs all the time while I'm away.

Plans have sky-rocketed since we last spoke. Willem has been epic with preparation. He has discovered a training institution inside a castle called Mime Centrum where we can train in for two hours every morning, ranging from viewpoints and biomechanics to LeCocq styles. We will be constructing our exploration of 'waiting' across five settings: a studio in the Mime Centrum, a low-tech studio in suburban Spandau, the public trains of Berlin, a black box called Brotfabrik and the Ernst Busch Dramatic Academy.

Epic.

Have a nice summer, Newtown. All good if we crash on your couch when we get back?


Much Love, Tom.



ps. here are the things I was talking about.

Training centre in a castle:
http://www.mimecentrum.de/index_en.htm

Suburban, brutalist Spandau:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandau_(locality)

Underground trains in Berlin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_U-Bahn

Black box theatre:
http://www.brotfabrikberlin.de/

Ernst Busch:
http://www.hfs-berlin.de/