AUDIENCE ACCOUNT, ANNA HARCOURT

Ich Warte Showing Eins- The Viewer’s View

The Transistor Collective’s first showing of work was a tasty fruit salad. We were shown small chunks of the fruits of their labours, roughly chopped and recently tossed together.  It was fresh, strange and some bits were quite delicious.

 It was first and foremost an experiment, by no means a smooth finished piece of theatre. We were presented with shorts moments from the plays of Chekov, interspersed with comment from the actors, sound recordings and video projections. It ranged from Uncle Vanya’s Sonya (played by Tai Berdinner-Blades) tearing up a hot chocolate with the desperation of unrequited love, to Tom Eason’s beautiful deconstructed movement sequence exploring the character of Adrej from Three Sisters, to the hysterical laughter of Runa Schaefer  and Florian Steffens playing Masha and Vershinin, also from Three Sisters.

Despite the quality of the acting, the strongest and most provoking moments for me were those where the actors stood back from performance and instead became facilitators. For example, the work began with a sound recording of people (clearly not professional actors) in a busy street repeating lines of Chekov. It was later revealed that these were recordings that the Collective had made in the Berlin Weinnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) with random passers-by. The actors, guided by sound design guru Thomas Press had recorded lines of dialogue and asked strangers to listen to them on an ipod and repeat what they heard. I was struck by how honest and moving these lines were when performed by obvious non-actors. Delivered without pretension, without ‘character’, with stumbles and mistakes and against the background noise of the market, the meaning of the lines shone through in an unexpectedly strong way.

This was shortly followed by the actors Andrew Paterson and Jaci Gwaliasi repeating this exercise, this time with two audience members. Jaci and Andrew described their struggle with  finding authenticity with the characters Nina and Konstantin when rehearsing scenes from Chekov’s The Seagull. They demonstrated techniques they had used in rehearsal such as isolating their bodies from the text, and told us how these techniques had fallen short. They then invited two audience members onstage and gave them the ipods with the dialogue recordings.  Watching these two audience members sitting on the floor repeating lines while Jaci and Andrew stood onstage, in character but not acting the character was a really beautiful moment of theatre. If they were searching for authenticity, they found it when they stripped away set, lights, blocking, characters and finally actors.

So, in the end we were not shown a play, we were played with. It was an exciting, theatrical experiment and I was glad to have been not just a witness but a part of it.  I have no idea where the group will travel in the days before their next showing, but I have no doubt that they will continue to challenge themselves and us.