Sorry blog, its been a while and a lot has happened. We have been busy.
4 days in Spandau working site specific.
We left you with the notion that we were going to work with the space, challenging as it would be. Bright colours, planets on the wall, windows that look out on the street, three separate compartments, 'a little stage'.
We focused on how we can tell the first act of THE SEAGULL in this space. Konstantin's play would be performed in the 'other' room, a place we would never reveal but only hint to with sound. The audience of our showing is invited to have a peak in the private space of a green room in which a group of performers/artists & hangers on gear themselves up for the big event, the premiere of Konstantin's masterpiece.
Creating compositions and material, adapting the script (scenes and characters) and discovering the space and its opportunities/limits as we went along. It reminded me a lot of two site specific piece I made before - DELICATES (in a laundrette) and ANTIGONE (at an abandoned beach site) - and how to work WITH the space and not AGAINST the space.
The biggest change from our previous showing was how to go from direct address and acknowledging the audience throughout, to using them as a voyeur/a fly on the wall, creating a fourth wall. In this site specific chapter of ICH WARTE (around 40 minutes) it was exciting to witness how this concept resulted in a very special and unique chance to get a feel of a very sacred moment of the artist's life - very much in line whith what the first act of THE SEAGULL is about.
Filmic and naturalistic, but how to work sometimes against the rhythm of a space, how to incorporate a surreal/abstract language that highlights moments surrounded by the mundane. To magnify its beauty, to expose secrets, hidden layers? We found several ways of doing so. Sequences where the performers were in silence and slowly picked up on each other gestures, making it part of their own activities (hands, feet, breath). The framing device of Masha, unnoticed and ignored by everyone else, but a constant reference point for the audience. Masha exploring the space with the audience at the start, secretly rehearsing Konstantin's play, staying in touch with the audience whilst other characters are not aware of our presence, inviting the audience to look through the window out to the street where the future events of THE SEAGULL are played out (in abstracted images; Thomas carrying a paper seagull, Nina rehearsing her lines and creating a little stage next to a tree, Konstantin hanging himself with a scarf at the pedestrian crossing lights, Tai embodying arrival & goodbye, Ben working with a summer picnic in the Berlin cold).
Sound was very much also part of this surreal language and the illusion of somewhere else. Thomas Press created in another room the atmosphere (with distortions) of a large theatre where Arkadina, Trigorin and their entourage arrive and create pressure/influence on the events in the green room. Some strong moments when the performers go 'on stage', the play is happening and Konstantin is listening to his creation from the green room (and ultimately hears how this is sabotaged by his own mother). Thomas showed his expertise in creating a beautiful dream sound sequence with quotes out of act 2, 3 and 4, which was accompanied by the horror montage happening on the street. You can listen to this in one of our previous posts.
We work fast. The collective has rigour and does not feel precious about adapting, enriching or even throwing away. We keep ourselves on task.
Again we had a nice intimate audience to play with, this time the second language factor became a big barrier in our way of staging the event. A lot of text, and then we noticed how an audience needs to work from their brain to comprehend this all. Hard to get them fully relating to the work, images/visual language works better. A simple image of Masha standing on the chellar staircase told so much more than a whole dialogue of a Chekhov scene. Other questions, how to expose yourself in the space, rather than hiding in it? Creating individual patterns and movements in the space, choreography and mapping the traffic was our first stage in creating this work.
It was a rough piece, asking us to refine and investigate further from the first audience encounter. I think we slowly warmed up to the genre of sitcom mixed with David Lynch surrealist techniques, that is where I would like to push the work further. Maybe even throwing away all text, or starting from silence and only incorporating text when we really need to.
But we have to go. We have to go 'back' to Berlin, to the black box. And some exciting plans have been crockpotted for our last adventure of the project.
Willem
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