Uncommon Sponsor...

Our gal Holly (DaPoPo Academy) works at Uncommon Grounds, a coffee house with a few locations in Halifax. She's usually serving up yummy locally roasted fair-trade coffee at the Argyle Street location, but occasionally gets over to South Park. ANYWAY, Uncommon Grounds is now a sponsoring business member of our Flight Club. Thanks for your support! Argyle Street, by the way, is a great place to run into lots of members of the theatre community, with Neptune across the Street ( Zuppa Theatre opens "Poor Boy" at The Studio on Feb 10th!) and OneLight Theatre's offices overhead. Yay, art!

Flippin' a Thank You...

Thank you to everyone who helped make our Mancake Pancake Brunch a fun and delicious time yesterday. Especially the eaters who played their roles exceptionally well, the DaPoPoli who pitched in to help at the last minute, the Angry Kitty-Kats for sharing their original music, Graeme Parkhill for sourcing some of the food, Hugo Dann for spreading the word, and Planet Organic for taking care of the vegans. An extra-special BIG thank you to Doug Melanson (yay! Doug!) and Menz Bar who generously hosted this fundraiser and made us feel welcome yet again.

Ready, Baristas?

In preparation for the teen-friendly Café DaPoPo event at the Good Food Emporium on February 2nd, the Berlin-bound bunch is preparing all-Canadian fare. This will be a first chance to try some of the poems, monologues and scenes submitted for the Potsdam Café (thanks PARC!) – a kind of Dress Rehearsal. 

Writers who have submitted their work include DaPoPo old-timers Amanda Jernigan, Steph Berntson and Steve Cloutier, as well as Jenny Munday, Natasha MacLellan, Karen Bassett, Colleen Wagner, Pam Calabrese MacLean, Josh McDonald, Michael Melski, Marshall Button and Allen Cole. 

museum FLUXUS+

Sometimes the most familiar is the most peculiar. 

I feel this way about the Café. Selecting photo-images to send to the Fluxus-Museum to use for publicity demonstrates this to me. How to represent the Café in an image. It's like choosing a picture of yourself, perhaps: you never see yourself as others see you. How to capture the essence of an interactive and highly unusual performance like the Café? 

The audience is right there...

... asking, ordering, allowing, anticipating, hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling, tasting (!), witnessing the event. 

How do you capture such a complex experience in a single lifeless image? 

The ideal photo record would have to communicate 1) a particular performance, 2) an audience witnessing it, 3) the performance space and 4) the unconventional actor-audience relationship.

 

How do you supply enough information to sufficiently define a theatrical experiment? How do you catalogue, display and advertise a non-commodity? 

Sometimes the most familiar is the most peculiar. 

"Eat your borscht!"

Saturday's session culminated with the ultimate question: What is our show going to be?
Trying to find the "meat" in the iceberg is a challenge. Trying to grab all the threads we've scattered and tie them together into something with movement, characters, plot, honesty…

Our mission for this week:
1) Build ideas from the titles we tossed out on Saturday. Among them were “The Last Carrot Standing”, “4x6-earth”, “Empty Mind” and “Katze Kotze”.
2) Craft characters around the names we created.
3) Represent a form of dramatic structure.

I’ve realized that inspiration strikes at the strangest times. Lately, ideas have occurred to me whenever I reach for the shampoo, or watch my mother make omelettes.
I hope everyone has a successfully creative week.

“Grenzenlose Freiheit”…

Ali & Ali; Ali & Ali

Saturday session with the Academy folk. Garry and I were met at the staircase by the three gals who inadvertently had dressed similarly and looked like they were about to do a production number from a musical. Later that same day, Aaron discovered he could sing.

Newly written scenes based on last week's improvisations read around the table. Three different authors, three different voices but one central character. The search for truth and personal relevance. The "oooh" moments. Mediating scenographic challenges.

Time spent with investigation of scenes from plays by Canadian authors, including the collectively-created 1837: The Farmers Revolt: A Play by Rick Salutin; The Duchess a.k.a. Wallis Simpson by Linda Griffiths; The Adventures of Ali & Ali & the Axes of Evil: A Divertment by Marcus Youssef, Guillermo Verdecchia and Camyar Chai. The Academy folk put shape to the scenes, showing them to each other to discover the different structures and approaches to storytelling based in variants in the creative processes. Possibilities.

So much work has been done gathering materials, trying many things. The way to tell the story - what is desired/what is not - is emerging. What the story is... still slightly elusive. The "stuff" is there. Working collectively is a wonderful conundrum. How much do you offer, how much do you impose? What if you are uninspired? How do you keep going til the inspiration strikes?

The flint, the stone, the thatch. Strike and strike and strike. A spark. A flicker. Nothing. Strike, strike, strike ... multiple sparks. A flicker, fan it! More fuel... will it become a fire?

Pancakes!

fundraiser for the berlin project

hosted by menz bar

all-you-can-eat Pancakes

syrup sausage & coffee

$10 at the door

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

2182 Gottingen Street

meet the berlin project ensemble

enjoy live entertainment by dapopo & friends

specials on mimosas, caesars and spiked coffee

It's Official!

Excitement! We're on the websites in Germany ...

FEZ-Berlin: Just Say It Program
use page box or arrows at bottom of page to jump to pages 18 & 19

Theaterforum Kreuzberg: DaPoPo Shows Listing
click 'spielplan' at the top, then 'Februar' on the left side and scroll down to
FR 20.02. 20.00 Gastspiel DaPoPo Theatre Company Halifax, Kanada

Wunderbar! - A fabulous day

Goodness gracious. I can't even describe the fabulousness of my day.

German lessons, working with Ali, Holly and Aaron, (And of course Kim and GaRRy) has made for a hilarious day. Also, I can't believe I just figured out why people were saying "performing at the Fates"! And the reason is: because they're saying FEZ! Not Fates (as in Greek mythology Fates) It took me far too long to realize that FEZ is also not a word, and the Z is therefore not an "s" sound, but a "ts" sort of sound.

Fun times, SUCH good food (ah yes, the food!).

German Lesson # 5

"Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt." 

nouns: der Kopf - head; der Fuß - foot; die Liebe - love

verbs: auf ... eingestellt sein - to be tuned in to, to be in the mood for

Lights...

Today we ventured out to Theatre Arts Guild where Austin Reade gave us an introductory workshop on lighting design and operation. Bill VanGorder and Joe O'Brien were there to lend a hand as well.

It's been years since I performed at TAG and the facility is even more amazing now with an expanded lobby, rehearsal room, kitchen and new seating forms. They're gearing up for their next show, Oklahoma! The stage was empty but for some carpentry tools, but Austin had kept the lighting in situ from the previous show.

He talked through some of the basic elements of designs, walked us through basic equipment and then let the Academy group get their hands dirty on the board, creating and running lighting cues. End result, four young performers eager to learn more and at least a couple who want to have a kick at designing for the Four Actors/Apocalpse shows for Berlin. yay!

Thanks very much Austin, Bill, Joe and TAG!

After the lighting session, we noshed at Subway, where Aaron and Garry got existential over the cookies, I spilled milk on Holly twice and Ali and Sophie maintained the decorum. The day continued with another exploration session for the show at the FEZ - building a choreographed piece as an ensemble with no other parameter but build it, you have 30 minutes, go. Discussion of strong characters and issues that had emerged from prior work last weekend. Intensive interview of one of the characters (channelled by Ali) in the hotseat.

My Icarus...

During the original work on Apocalypse, we were working on the idea of Icarus as Everyman, an iconic character representing you and me as we try to work our way out of the labyrinth that is our world today. What is the truth, who do we believe, why are we trapped and confused, and is there a different way?

Over Christmas, I saw a TV news story about Stephen McPhee, a little boy with autism whose concern over homeless kids sparked the development of a program which supports the distribution of backpacks filled with toys and gifts to families in homeless shelters. The first year, his family worked hard to get fifteen backpacks together. The next year he told his mother he wanted to do 150. She tried to mediate his expectations, pointing out that they had worked so hard the previous year and still only had fifteen done. He said to her, "Mummy, you have to dream out loud!"

That little boy, in that moment, is my Icarus. My Icarus is faith - not necessarily a religious faith, but an essential faith in ourselves and our world. Stephen's statement may be dismissed by the world-weary as childish optimism, but I think it represents an absolute belief in the possible. We all start with such a faith as children, at a time and place in our existence before we are taught what is all wrong, what can't be fixed, what isn't possible. Through our lives, layers of "no" and "can't" are added. Our lightness is burdened by experience. Our faith in the possibility of possibilities is weighed down, or even obiliterated. Icarus falls into the sea. End of story.

Or is it?

This year, Stephen McPhee's charity - Stephen's Backpacks Society -will distribute about 1,000 backpacks.