Thursday, May 15, 2014

Theater, Bikes

Here's a little something something I wrote last Monday, but due to a faulty internet connection and extreme busyness I haven't been able to put down until today: ....



Up at 7:30 on a Monday. Haven't had a moment's rest in the last two days. Saturday was the day of variety: It began with a dance workshop with the kids at Morus who we are all tutoring.  Then we moved on from there to a public reading of Brecht at an event called "Reading against forgetting" (Lesen Gegen Das Vergessen). "Reading Against Forgetting", as I understand it, was set up to commemorate the "bad" or "degenerate" books that were banned by the Nazi regime. Unfortunately we did not have a ton of time to stay. We got there at 3:30, we were up to read at 4pm, and then at 5pm we had a show to catch (a production of Peter Pan!) at the theater. So we did the reading, got the applause, and rushed to go see Peter Pan, which was incredible. But not even that was the end of our day. Because at 10pm, myself and Tony and Tristan had another theater piece to catch, called "Murmel Murmel." All told it added up to about 4 hours of visual art. Both pieces were wild, strange, and sadly impossible to explain, because so much emphasis was on the visual component of the pieces. But I will try. In "Murmel Murmel" the actors only ever said a single word, "Murmel," which they surely repeated many thousands of times, while performing a lot of different kinds of physical comedy. It was entertaining and broad, or so I thought. But Peter Pan was my favorite. The music was incredible. The set and acting were incredible. Here is a picture:



And Tinkerbell was simply the greatest thing. She had a really scary kind of jealousy against Wendy (Peter Pan's love interest, for those who have forgotten the story)--& she even shoots her out of the sky at one point! She also had this manic, twitchy energy. All the other actors moved more methodically, in control of themselves. Not Tinkerbell, though.

If Saturday was a day of variety, then Sunday was a day of endurance. 9 hour bike ride, from the outskirts to the interior of Berlin. And a picnic in between. The picnic was delicious. The biking, however, might need another word to describe it. I was lucky to talk to some of the kids from Morus who joined us on the tour (and some adults too!). Finally, after the bike-ride, we cooked up our first family dinner, everyone together at the table. Or at least--the boys cooked for themselves, and the girls cooked for themselves. Then to bed.

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