Joan of Arc fights Talbot in HENRY VI PART 1. (photo from the Arts Desk review).
I've seen five plays in the last eight days. Three of them were written by Shakespeare, one by a new favorite playwright of mine, David Greig. I get really excited about Shakespeare, and the Globe Theatre in London is producing all 37 plays in the canon this spring, but in 37 different languages by 37 different theatre companies from around the world. So I was lucky enough to catch an amazing ensemble-based, slick production of HENRY VI PART 1 in Serbian (remember I said that I loved Serbia - this show is the icing on the cake!). I also saw a very intense Albanian production of HENRY VI PART 2. And last night, I was so lucky to get a ticket to see acclaimed Belarus Free Theatre do the best production of KING LEAR I have ever seen! It was so innovative, economical and haunting. What an amazing company. The David Greig piece I saw at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival is the musical, devilish STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART: five actor/musicians in a pub with their instruments and the story of an academic who seduces the devil to escape hell. Amazing. There's so much good stuff going on - my only complaint is that I can't see it all!
My spring break was more epic than your spring break. 3 weeks, 10 countries, 20 cities, 8 passport stamps and 1 visa. I had an amazing time, and managed to come back with smoker's cough, even though I don't smoke. Below are some photos I took on the journey:
I began in Berlin.
Moved down to Munich - thank you Alexi for the use of your gorgeous apartment!
Took a day trip to Neuschwanstein (the Disney castle), Linderhoff and Oberammergau where it was snowing!
In Salzburg, where the hills are totally alive with the sound of music :)
Landed in Imperial Vienna where I ate my weight in sausage and cake.
In Bratislava.
In Budapest: their Parliament is just ASKING to be photographed!
Possibly my favorite stop on the whole trip: Lake Bled in Slovenia. A small lake in the Slovenian Alps, with an island in the middle, on which sits a little old church. Peaceful and serene.
Enjoying Lake Bled, and my rum-flavored ice cream.
On I went to Ljubljana, home of the famous Dragon Bridge - which is a lot smaller than I had thought! (Because every picture is from this angle...sly).
From Ljubljana to Zagreb, where every building is the same "I-can't-believe-it's-not-butter" yellow color. This is the National Theatre :)
And then onto Split, Mediterranean paradise and retirement home of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. He picked an awesome spot. From here, I joined up with a tour to take me overland to Istanbul!
From Split, we drove to Mostar in Bosnia.
And then onto beautiful Sarajevo.
In Sarajevo there was also lots of cake, and INTENSE coffee.
Then we went to Belgrade. I LOVED Serbia, I will write a later post about just how much!
This is the National Theatre of Serbia, in Belgrade. Remember it, there will be a quiz later.
We all became obsessed with this Serbian cheese spread. Mmm.
After Belgrade we went to Nis, one of the other Serbian cities that NATO bombed towards the end of the Balkan conflict.
Then it was on to Sofia, where we went to a gypsy dinner party.
From Sofia we went to Plovdiv, named after Alexander the Great's father - that's how old the town is!
And from Plovdiv, we drove to one of my favorite cities in the world: Istanbul.
It was an intense, exhausting, amazing trip and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Side note: the reason I'm wearing the EXACT same outfit in every picture is because I packed very light. My only luggage for this trip was a backpack - a school backpack. I should write a book :).
We're an amazing writing team - amazing! I love these two. And yes, that's Obama in the background. We know what's up.
Well, it's Spring Break already. This term I began a play, teamed up with two awesome writing partners to write two one-acts, created an installation piece, performed a lot, took a mask workshop, did a devising workshop with Complicite...the list goes on. I'm very grateful. And now: I'm packing up for a three-week back-packing trip through Central Europe! I fly into Berlin, and then by trains and and couch-surfing will wind my way down to Croatia, where I'll meet up with a tour that's going through Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria and into Turkey. I couldn't be more excited. Happy Spring Break everyone! Don't do anything I wouldn't do...
It has been quite the month of Russian literature. For our end-of-term voice project, we all fell in love with Pushkin's bad boy, Eugene Onegin, the RADA 3rd year BA students are currently performing THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, and this past Saturday, I sat in awe at the Barbican watching Complicite's THE MASTER AND MARGARITA. The devil, physical theatre and CGI? It doesn't get any better. Well, actually it does, because all day Saturday and Sunday I was taking a devising workshop with the Assistant Director of Complicite and one of the company members. So my weekend was filled with theatre games, devising pieces from THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, then seeing the show, lectures from Simon McBurney and lattes on the Barbican "lake." It was glorious.
From Scene and Heard's website.
Last Friday, I had the privilege to attend a Scene and Heard show. Scene and Heard is a company that teaches playwriting to London children, and then stages those plays with professional actors, directors and designers. One of my professors had directed one of the plays, and so several of my fellow MA's went. And I must say, I haven't laughed that hard in so long. The plays were on a variety of topics: friendship, doing the right thing, etc, but the characters were so imaginative. There was a butcher's knife named Pointy Struggles who just wanted to cut wedding cake. There was a monkey in love with two brothers: a fungal sneeze and a flu cough - and she couldn't decide which one to choose. There was a traffic light terrified to turn red because the last time he did, he was hit by a double-decker bus. Those of us on the playwrighting track hoped that maybe one day, we would be able to write characters as funny and creative as this group of 10 year olds. It was inspiring.
I joined AFTRA! I'm really excited to kick my voiceover career into high gear :) Look out airwaves!
From the National Theatre's website.
I must start out by saying that I LOVE going to the National Theatre. The location is gorgeous, and on a nice day, everybody is out on the Southbank, sitting in cafes, sitting at the river, wandering in and out of the various art spaces. And I can walk there from where I live. It's perfect. Which is exactly what I did yesterday - walked down to the National to see their co-production with DV8 Physical Theatre, titled CAN WE TALK ABOUT THIS? The show confronts our Western tendency to be as politically correct as possible, and postulates that perhaps we are actually limiting free speech and healthy debate in our rigid political correctness. The text was verbatim, taken from interviews and news sources discussing the relationship between the West and Islam, but the performance was highly physical. As a lover of using verbatim technique in political theatre, I was entranced as the actors/acrobats scaled walls, used each other as jungle gyms and hopped around while speaking these charged political statements. It was fascinating to watch and I'm still thinking about it today. Most verbatim theatre tends to be naturalistic, in order to "recreate the interview" exactly, so the lines between actor and real person are blurred. This was not naturalistic at all, but just as powerful.
I joined British Equity! It's very exciting, and I'm very honored. In other news, I have bangs! Or as they say here: I have a fringe!
Feelin' like Betty Page.
Publicity photo for Paper Birds' THIRSTY.
Last night I trekked down to Wimbledon to check out Paper Birds Theatre Company's devised, physical, verbatim (three of my favorite words) theatre piece, THIRSTY. The company had set up a "drunk" hotline a year ago, to research why we (particularly young women) love to drink so much. It was a celebration as much as a cautionary tale, with live music, amazing physical story-telling, audience participation
Cardiff Castle, you can see the stadium in the background.
Last week I went to Wales for a day. It was a fly-by-the-seat of my pants, fairly last minute day trip to Cardiff. In the 8 hours that I spent there, I went to the castle (which was used as an air raid shelter during WWII), the waterfront, and several pubs/cafes. It was a lovely, low-key adventure with the girls.
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