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The actors
Oct. 2nd, 2004 11:59 pmOne minute I'm in Japan, wearing flip flops, bathing in sentos, and it's 30 degrees. The next I'm back in Berlin, it's autumn and it's chilly. Leaves are falling, I'm wearing shoes and socks and a scarf, living alone in an empty apartment. It's my own apartment, apparently, though it seems, for the moment, huge, spartan, foreign.
I'm already attending rehearsals for the play I'll be working on over the next three months, 'Attempts On Her Life' by Martin Crimp, performed by students of the Hochschule fur Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch, Berlin. The play will be performed in German, but the cast is international; there are Hungarians, Romanians, Finns, an Italian, a Frenchwoman, some Germans, and me, the Scots musician. Later, we'll be joined by another musician, a Japanese woman called Kaori who, like me, doesn't speak German. Kaori and I will sit onstage with the actors each night, improvising sounds (rather than 'music' -- Crimp's dark satirical poetry is already musical enough). We'll be rather like the musicians in a kabuki performance, decorating the text, enhancing the dynamics of the sound made by the actors, adding excitement and colour. Overhead projectors will be projecting moving pictograms made of water and sand as we play.
My first impression is that this production is going to be very good. The actors seem excellent, and director Gergana is decisive, incisive. What really strikes me is how confident everyone is. I've never worked with drama students before, but my sister went to drama school in Glasgow with 'the Trainspotting generation' ('Begbie' was in her year) and when I'd meet her friends in pubs after productions they'd have the same baroque, super-ludic manner as the cast I'm now working with.
Actors are different from other people; they're charismatic and slick, individualistic yet collective, egomaniacs who seem oddly ego-free. They're never more themselves than when they're speaking in quotes, and they love long-running in-jokes. They seem very adult because they're playing all the time, and they make me feel like a child because I'm not. Because I've joined these rehearsals rather late, and because I don't speak German, I feel rather excluded from the noisy laughter that punctuates our rehearsal today, but I suspect that even if I'd been here from the start and spoke the language, I'd still feel left out. My sister's friends used to roll under the table whenever the name Patrick Swayze came up. You go along with it, you smile politely, but you have no idea why 'Patrick Swayze' is so hilarious.
Actors seem larger than life -- they're unfeasibly attractive, have resonant voices and manic gestures -- but they're also crack team-workers, very attuned to each other and ready to romp collectively. This cast often dissolves in laughter. I'll wonder what the joke is, then find that they're laughing because it's a stage direction in the script. Their laughs here are poltergeists, they belong to the director. The actors zoom between 'real' interaction and the bizarre, playful, poetic, multi-layered voicings of Crimp's text (there are no 'characters' in this play, just a lot of disembodied voices describing a woman who may or may not be dead) and I struggle to keep up, splashing about in my two copies of the script (one in English, one in German), scribbling notes about what sort of music should go where, smiling shyly.
The actors are not in the least bit bashful about interrupting the rehearsal to point out something funny. If a joke seems to be falling flat, instead of allowing themselves to seem crestfallen and snubbed, the actor will keep pushing the joke at the others, laughing harder and harder, until everybody joins in. Power and teamwork. Capitulation and communication. How to give in without making it look like you're giving in. How to say sorry without saying sorry. Saving face whilst wearing a mask.
If an actor makes a mistake everybody choruses 'Good morning!' in an affectionately teasing way. They're so good at this playful banter, which ultimately makes them invulnerable, allows them to assume roles and play constructively. I, on the other hand, blush when I'm asked my opinion. I can't achieve their team spirit, their invulnerability, and so I can't -- at least not yet -- play. In this context (and it reminds me of seminars at university, when I'd cringe with embarrassment when I had to read something out in front of a small group) I'm actually very shy and clumsy. I'm stuck in 'me'. It's both limiting and empowering.
I can deliver my own concerts without butterflies, but that's because I feel powerful and in control. Here, in this collaborative group situation, I'm nerve-wracked, and it's something to do with the contradiction between having to say what I really think, and the dynamics of power, very much vested in the director. We're collaborating, but we're also being directed. We're a team, but we're not all equal, and not all our contributions are equally acceptable. The trick that the actors pull off with such panache, and which I'm not so good at, is negotiating this contradiction: doing their charismatic, loud, proud, subtle performance thing on cue, within all the constraints of the direction and the script. Pouring their creativity into nuance and interpretation, but leaving the more substantial meanings to others. Being 'themselves' but also being smooth, likeable team players. I must say I admire them enormously for these skills, which, because of my strange alpha male / outsider status as a solo artist in total control of the little worlds I create, I've never learned.
(Click the photo to see a 10MB AVI clip of the rehearsal. The play opens on 16th November.)
I'm already attending rehearsals for the play I'll be working on over the next three months, 'Attempts On Her Life' by Martin Crimp, performed by students of the Hochschule fur Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch, Berlin. The play will be performed in German, but the cast is international; there are Hungarians, Romanians, Finns, an Italian, a Frenchwoman, some Germans, and me, the Scots musician. Later, we'll be joined by another musician, a Japanese woman called Kaori who, like me, doesn't speak German. Kaori and I will sit onstage with the actors each night, improvising sounds (rather than 'music' -- Crimp's dark satirical poetry is already musical enough). We'll be rather like the musicians in a kabuki performance, decorating the text, enhancing the dynamics of the sound made by the actors, adding excitement and colour. Overhead projectors will be projecting moving pictograms made of water and sand as we play.
My first impression is that this production is going to be very good. The actors seem excellent, and director Gergana is decisive, incisive. What really strikes me is how confident everyone is. I've never worked with drama students before, but my sister went to drama school in Glasgow with 'the Trainspotting generation' ('Begbie' was in her year) and when I'd meet her friends in pubs after productions they'd have the same baroque, super-ludic manner as the cast I'm now working with.
Actors are different from other people; they're charismatic and slick, individualistic yet collective, egomaniacs who seem oddly ego-free. They're never more themselves than when they're speaking in quotes, and they love long-running in-jokes. They seem very adult because they're playing all the time, and they make me feel like a child because I'm not. Because I've joined these rehearsals rather late, and because I don't speak German, I feel rather excluded from the noisy laughter that punctuates our rehearsal today, but I suspect that even if I'd been here from the start and spoke the language, I'd still feel left out. My sister's friends used to roll under the table whenever the name Patrick Swayze came up. You go along with it, you smile politely, but you have no idea why 'Patrick Swayze' is so hilarious.
Actors seem larger than life -- they're unfeasibly attractive, have resonant voices and manic gestures -- but they're also crack team-workers, very attuned to each other and ready to romp collectively. This cast often dissolves in laughter. I'll wonder what the joke is, then find that they're laughing because it's a stage direction in the script. Their laughs here are poltergeists, they belong to the director. The actors zoom between 'real' interaction and the bizarre, playful, poetic, multi-layered voicings of Crimp's text (there are no 'characters' in this play, just a lot of disembodied voices describing a woman who may or may not be dead) and I struggle to keep up, splashing about in my two copies of the script (one in English, one in German), scribbling notes about what sort of music should go where, smiling shyly.
The actors are not in the least bit bashful about interrupting the rehearsal to point out something funny. If a joke seems to be falling flat, instead of allowing themselves to seem crestfallen and snubbed, the actor will keep pushing the joke at the others, laughing harder and harder, until everybody joins in. Power and teamwork. Capitulation and communication. How to give in without making it look like you're giving in. How to say sorry without saying sorry. Saving face whilst wearing a mask.
If an actor makes a mistake everybody choruses 'Good morning!' in an affectionately teasing way. They're so good at this playful banter, which ultimately makes them invulnerable, allows them to assume roles and play constructively. I, on the other hand, blush when I'm asked my opinion. I can't achieve their team spirit, their invulnerability, and so I can't -- at least not yet -- play. In this context (and it reminds me of seminars at university, when I'd cringe with embarrassment when I had to read something out in front of a small group) I'm actually very shy and clumsy. I'm stuck in 'me'. It's both limiting and empowering.
I can deliver my own concerts without butterflies, but that's because I feel powerful and in control. Here, in this collaborative group situation, I'm nerve-wracked, and it's something to do with the contradiction between having to say what I really think, and the dynamics of power, very much vested in the director. We're collaborating, but we're also being directed. We're a team, but we're not all equal, and not all our contributions are equally acceptable. The trick that the actors pull off with such panache, and which I'm not so good at, is negotiating this contradiction: doing their charismatic, loud, proud, subtle performance thing on cue, within all the constraints of the direction and the script. Pouring their creativity into nuance and interpretation, but leaving the more substantial meanings to others. Being 'themselves' but also being smooth, likeable team players. I must say I admire them enormously for these skills, which, because of my strange alpha male / outsider status as a solo artist in total control of the little worlds I create, I've never learned.
(Click the photo to see a 10MB AVI clip of the rehearsal. The play opens on 16th November.)