CG und BB

Posted on November 29, 2007
Filed Under Personal, Professional | Leave a Comment

This picture makes me very happy. I importuned a stranger to take it. She smiled and was very indulgent. The statue of Brecht is in a little park in front of the Berliner Ensemble at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm (where Threepenny premiered 80 years ago). Tickets for Threepenny are sold out until February, but my Berlin friend Uwe encouraged me to stand in line for a cancellation tomorrow. Wish me glück!

Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis Kirche

Posted on November 28, 2007
Filed Under Personal, Professional | Leave a Comment

Seen on a nighttime stroll around where I’m staying at the Bahnhof Zoo. I’m having too many adventures in Berlin to be able to write about them yet. Meeting colleagues new und alt, seeing classes, seeing young performers at the Singing Competition. Alles gut! Click on the picture to go to my Flickr page and see more images.

“Welcome to Berlin, Herr Bradshaw”

Posted on November 27, 2007
Filed Under Personal, Professional, School | Leave a Comment

I am abnormally excited to be arriving in Berlin. Sure, everything up til now has been great, but I can’t help thinking (and talking to myself in my pathetic baby-Deutsch) “Ich bin in Berlin! Es freut mich sehr!” This is the home of Brecht and Weill, the home of Grand Hotel Berlin, the setting of the musical Cabaret and Christopher Isherwood’s stories, a major center of artistic innovation that I’ve often read about and thought about, and I’m here! It feels good.

Thanks to my internet reconnaissance, I know to take the X-9 bus from Berlin Tegel airport to the Bahnhof Zoo. It’s cheap (2 euros, or about 3 bucks), frequent and quick. As we near the Zoo, I spot the “Universität der Künste Konzertsaal” (Concert Hall) and find myself thinking, “Is that the site of the singing contest?” Nah, that’d be too easy. But no, soon as I check in to my hotel (two blocks away), I walk back and find it is indeed the place I’m looking for. The entrance door actually leads me into the backstage area, where a singer and her pianist are waiting to go on. I am startled to realize that I know this pianist – he’s Philip Tillotson from the Bavarian Theater Academy in Munich – and though I can’t talk to him (he’s walking out onto the stage), the sight of him is yet another affirmation that I’m on familiar ground.

I’ve arrived in time for the last singer of the day, a young lady named Milicia Jovanovic. If she’s typical of the contestants, it must have been an exciting day. First she sings “Glitter and Be Gay,” with an over-the-top interpretation that includes extra high notes and a gag where she shatters a champagne glass with her voice. Then she does “Gimme Gimme” with just a splash of choreography, and her belt is as impressive as her soprano. And then she goes to the microphone and, without sounding winded at all, gives a gripping actor’s rendition of “Ne me quitte pas” (actually with German words) in authentic cabaret style. This girl was quite a package!

I rendezvous with Noelle Turner and Patti Martin from Essen, along with Michael Mills, their colleague, and two other teachers, Eleanor, a cheery Scot who teaches jazz vocal technique in Berlin, and Ascher, head of a private musical theater school in Osnabruck. I find a minute for me to re-introduce myself to Philip Tillotson from Munich, who I met when we did the MTEA conference in Cardiff a couple years ago. Over snacks, we talk about plans for the evening, and I decide it’d be great to see a show. Most of the theaters are dark on Tuesday nights, as it turns out, but Patti recommends a production of Cabaret that’s playing nearby at a place called Bar Jeder Vernunft. Attend a performance of a musical that takes place in a Berlin nightclub in a Berlin nightclub? It’s too good to pass up.

The theater is a short walk from the hotel, and Patti’s directions get me there easily. The hall is a colorful echt-Berlin antique nightclub, with food and drinks served before the show. The place is packed full, mostly upper-middle-class Germans of (oops!) my age – they seem like an older generation in their sportcoats and Euro-specs, and I don’t identify with them at all. Instead, I’m drawn to the sprinkling of urban hipster types also in the room. Who are these people, I wonder, and what’s drawn them to this production?

My reaction to the production itself is mixed. The music director and the band are terrific – piano, trombone, violin (doubling mandolin and – get this – musical saw!), upright bass/tuba and drumset. The cast is decent, with a few standouts, including Peter Kock (who is on the faculty of the Musical program at the UdK) as Herr Schulz. The staging is follows Sam Mendes’ concept, setting the whole show in the Klub; I find that approach doesn’t serve the domestic scenes (Cliff-Sally, Schneider-Schulz) well at all, and the sets for those scenes are dismayingly cheesy. Great scenic effect to open and close the play, though – a train, puffing smoke, makes a loop around the front of the circular stage, revealing the compartment where Cliff Bradshaw sits. I know the play well enough to recite the English dialog in my head, even though it’s done in German. And though my attention starts to wander during the long first act, I perk up when I notice the crowd’s reaction to the first appearance of a swastika. It suddenly occurs to me – if this seems like a controversial musical in the US, it’s got to be a far more disturbing piece in Germany. What must they think? How does this blend of musical comedy gaiety and grim history go down with the French wines and the desserts the crowd is enjoying?

Now for the kicker of the evening – and bless you hardy readers who’ve hung in this long. I realize this post is a marathon even by Chazzyverse standards. At the intermission, the cast and band do a bit of planned mingling with the audience. The actress who plays Fräulein Kost sidles over and invites me to dance; she tries to talk to me in German, but realizes that’s hopeless and switches to English after a moment. I tell her that, just like Cliff Bradshaw, this is my first night in Berlin, and that, just like Cliff Bradshaw, I’m from Pennsylvania. She welcomes me to Berlin and tells me I’ll have a wonderful time here, and kisses me on the cheek before going backstage for Act II. I think I will – and am – having a wonderful time. In the lobby, I pick up a flyer for the Berliner Ensemble and it turns out they’re doing – wait for it – Threepenny Opera at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the place where it premiered 80 years ago, later this week. Does it get any better than this? It many mean eating cheap Chinese food and brats from the street vendors to stretch my budget, but I’m going to feed my soul with a couple fine shows while I’m here!

Farewell to Sweden

Posted on November 27, 2007
Filed Under Personal, Professional, School | Leave a Comment

Tues November 27. Day 10. Sunny Swedish morning, cold and clear. Good for a brisk walkabout. I make my way through boulevards and cobbled streets, then spot a long staircase leading to a tower perched atop a battlement: the Skanska Crown. 200 steps later, I stand puffing at the tower, and get a panoramic view of the city. I’m plenty warm under my bulky turtleneck and thinsulate gloves now. Down again, I wend thru a quaint cobbled market street and turn into the main University area before making my way back to the Artisten building of the Universitet for one more brief chat with Derek Barnes and Sven Eric Dahlberg before returning to my hotel.

I figure there’ll be plenty of time to take the airport bus, but when I get to the terminal, I find out that there’s a limited number of buses and the one timed to my flight has left already. No problem: I head for the taxi queue. Of course, this being a well-organized country, there’s a machine that prints out your number in the taxi queue, plus a smiling attendant to tell you how the system works. The driver and I speed out into the countryside, and it takes us about half an hour til we arrive at Gothenburg City Airport, a very small facility indeed. The only food there is a cafeteria – quiche not bad, with free salad and coffee – and the check-in for the flight takes all of five minutes. Our flight boards early and leaves early, and with a strong tailwind, we’re in Berlin a half hour ahead of schedule. The sky is clear and from the window of the plane I see a birds-eye view of Northern European geography. As we descend into Berlin, I am surprised to see wind farms – arrangements of ultra-modern windmills in the fields outside the city.

Danish Delights

Posted on November 25, 2007
Filed Under Personal, Professional, School | Leave a Comment

(Apologies to those who find these posts too long and insufficiently bloggy. I’ve tried to post some pictures for those habitués of the Chazzyverse with shorter attention spans.)

Spent the day Saturday with Soren Moller, Rektor (Principal) of the Danish Musical Theatre Academy. Soren joined the school as a singing teacher at the time of the school’s inception six years ago, but took the reins as principal several years ago and is guiding the school toward a remarkable future.

Det Danskemusicalakademi, the only school of its kind in Denmark, has only 32 students enrolled in its three-year course. The program is remarkable for its rigor: the students work 30+ hours a week for about 40 weeks of the year, forgoing the long holidays which are more characteristic of university life. The school is an independent institution, not affiliated with any university, and does not offer any academic coursework in general studies; instead, it seeks to provide a comprehensive and intensive preparation for a life on the professional musical stage. Its graduates are employed in productions in Denmark and throughout the region. What is more, the school is poised to take several steps in the coming years that are sure to bring it greater international visibility, as it attains recognition and funding from the Danish government as a national professional academy and prepares to launch a new works program that will bring writers and composers to Fredericia on an ongoing basis to work with students, alumni and professional musical theatre artists.

The facilities at the Musicalakademi would be the envy of administrators at many institutions in the US and UK. An abundance of classrooms, theaters, studios, practice rooms and even a recording studio are located in a renovated industrial building by the waterfront in Fredericia. The town itself offers little in the way of a professional musical theater scene, but this is an advantage for the students, who immerse themselves in their studies without the distractions which students at other schools experience. Not that they never see shows – the second year students take a 10-day binge trip to NYC, and major cities like Copenhagen and Hamburg are only an hour or two away.

Wonderful to be in a place where everything simply works. On Sunday morning, my laundry done by hotel, checkout a breeze, taxi arrives as scheduled at 9:30am, I hand him a voucher for payment, wave the keyfob Soren gave me over the scanner and I’m in. Like I’ve done this every day. The students at the Akademi are terrific (especially the third years), the pianist first rate, the entire day a smashing experience marred only by a scratchy throat that results in my sounding increasingly hoarse as the day wears on. At lunch I log onto their computer (OSX Leopard with Danish-language menus – weird but familiar) and print out my boarding pass for tonight’s flight. At the appointed hour after leaving the school, a taxi pulls up as schedule, voucher pays the bill, train pulls up on schedule, business class seat awaits me in quiet car on otherwise full train. Everything smooth as glass. Please let it continue thus.

The students at the Akademi seemed eager and responsive to the work I offered. After a few minutes introductory chat, they plunged into warmup with face cards and then the mirror canon. Lots of gusto, strong tones, committed bodies. Although they’d never heard of the Alexander technique, they had (all in all) great alignment, though a few were inclined to use more effort than needed.

Through the day, we alternated group exercises and individual songs, so that the time never got tedious. Between each group exercise, I’d work with two or three individuals. We did “Here I am,” with me coaching them on experiencing each repeated phrase as a new event. Even though the music of the accompaniment is steady (like a river of triplets), I encouraged them to attack each repetition as if it was a new, fresh moment. They got it almost right away. Later, we did a rock version of the Mirror Canon, then a version where we alternated imitation and interaction (pinch and ouch). Then I introduced face-space-body-partner, and used that in the MC.

Interesting discussion when one of the students asked, “Some of my teachers say that ‘less is more.’ Do you agree?” I had to say that I thought that, often, less is less and more is more, and that I was in favor of abundance, an abundance of behavior. I encouraged them to create lots of options so that they could pick and choose the best ones. We talked about the inner critic and the ways that impulses get self-censored. They seemed to feel heartened and a bit liberated by the combination of talk and activity. After our discussion of abundance in behavior, we did the last of the exercises, the eight-part “More and More” going through the entire cycle of Laban effort actions. They plunged into the work with abandon, embracing the notion that one can successfully work from the outside-in to create a variety of emotional experiences. As usual, many students had questions about summer courses and postgrad work in the US, and one said, “If there’s a demand for it, I’m sure that it will be offered.” I think he’s right.

Tonight, on to Gothenburg and a visit to the program at GU tomorrow!

keep looking »

CG und BB

Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis Kirche

“Welcome to Berlin, Herr Bradshaw”

Farewell to Sweden

Danish Delights

Recently

Categories

Archives

Recently Written

Blogroll

Find It

Admin

Design