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.
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