Thursday, June 18th 12:30pm.
On the train from Berlin to Prague. PQ: day one. I have been in Berlin for the last four days visiting my good friend and frequent collaborator, the amazing set-designer, puppeteer, feminist performance artist and mime-in-training, Lisi Stößel. Greatest hits: Bear Pit Karaoke, Beer Garden sauerkraut, DDR Museum, listening to bizarre pro-Russian protesters in front of the Reichstag, the Turkish Market, picnic at Templehof Airport Park, ROBERT WILSON’S FAUST AT THE BERLINER ENSEMBLE, Rite of Passage: Border Crossing, an utterly confusing and awesome immersive theater game by Machina Ex, Späti Beer, great graffiti on the crumbling fragments of the Berlin Wall, riding bikes all over the city, enjoying German people’s disregard for personal space, and getting a massive tattoo of a falcon fighting a bat on my right thigh. Berlin is totally rad. Sad to leave. Lisi thinks this might be a Czech-built train. It looks like it would have been really gorgeous and modern in 1980. Smooth edges, plexi-glass and a sea-foam green + burgundy décor. We are drinking instant coffee and eating croissants with a salty pretzel-like exterior. We’re gonna be rolling up on Dresden pretty soon. So basically everything is right with the world, and I’m the luckiest artist on earth.
Performance Notes: FAUST
We stood in line for an hour to try to get last minute tickets, and it worked. We got INCREDIBLE box seats for $35. We had a velvet handrail to rest our elbows, and enough privacy so that Lisi could whisper in my ear and explain what was going on, the show being in German. The first hour was stunning- I felt stunned. To finally see Wilson’s design in person- the living, breathing, musical, synth-orchestrated, 3D version. Still so static and at times bloodless, but fierce and energized underneath the stark white german-expressionist mask. The way Robert Wilson arrives at a tableau- he manages to make it feel like a magic trick, or a slow moving night train that suddenly emerges from a tunnel onto a surreal landscape- a hyper-color planet floating in space. His color palate was incredibly satisfying. The cold blue key lights. A bar of florescent footlights facing the audience was always illuminated- serving as blinders for scene-change machinery, and also compositionally grounded each setting. Suddenly a flash a red that makes your eyes sing. The eye-popping use of a lime green to communicate that characters were under the influence of drugs. I felt arrested. Mephisto was Brilliant. Hanging out in the cantina drinking wine before the show, we rub elbows with the actors, already mic’ed, in full makeup and full costume, eating sandwiches and french fries. Its not just the show itself- the whole experience around the show was amazing. Immediately all the photos of his other shows- I could see all of them in 3D. One of the scenes looked so much like Einstein- the scaffolding and floating spirals of bulbs…. His aesthetic is so singular. The second act was much harder to follow, and it seemed to us like they had either run out of tech time, or the that this act was not given nearly enough time in its conception.
Performance Notes: Rite of Passage
We arrive at the venue and are warned that the show is not in English and it might be hard for us to understand. Undaunted, we enter. Our bags are taken, and we are photographed and given a passport with our new identity. The passport has lots of blank pages for stamps. Some of us are given fake money- everyone has different amounts. I have none! Not a good sign. We stand around looking at some fake maps and reading fake wikipedia pages about our countries. I almost ask for a pen to take notes, but feel shy so I don’t. First mistake! We are then called in through a door, and spin into a chaotic scene. They intake 6 new people every 15 minutes, so we see lots of audience members who seem like they have been there a while. The whole room is a maze of cubicles decorated to look like different offices and locations. There is a soldier swearing at a news broadcast, a sleazy drug dealer sizing up every person who enters, a no-nonsense matronly work officer who seems purposely unhelpful. A casino owner who is eager to take your money. We learn that the first order of business is to get a health inspection. We wait in line and the world swirls around us. We listen to gossip. We learn that the doctor won’t even see us until we fill out a form, we can’t fill out the form until we get a pen. A pen costs more money than we have, and is only available at a store that is not open. We negotiate a black-market transaction, pooling our money with other immigrants. The person who finally gets the pen is distracted and runs away with it. Someone else finally gives us a pen because they feel bad for us. We fill out the forms but are so distracted while doing it, that we both forget to fill out certain sections. We hope the doctor takes pity on us and we head into his office. ON and ON with the un-navigable bureaucracy! The doctor asks us to strip. His wastebasket and all of his cabinets are filled with condoms. He closes his office for the day before he even looks at our forms, but tells us to meet him in the bar for a drink. He sings us a love some in German and then slinks back into the night. Back to square one. So the show goes on and on like this. It fluctuates between being hilarious and poignant, and exhausting and frustrating. A few of the actors speak English, but even when we can understand them, their guidance is unhelpful. Our proudest moment was in the work house where we unscrewed nuts off of bolts for money, which we never actually spent. We finally got two stamps in our passports because another audience member stole the stamps… but by that time the world was disintegrating. We left happy and exhausted.