Workshop in Berlin II

The two week-workshop I just gave together with singer and actor Christina M. Lagao as part of the 'Herbstcamp' of the Deutsches Theater was an interesting challenge; requiring me to frame my research into musicality in (the) theatre in a pedagogical context for a heterogeneous group of Berlin students between 13 and 25 years old. There were two key premises to the workshop (based on the overall theme "What do we need?" for al 6 workshops that ran parallel and were later presented together to an audience of about 250 at the Deutsches Theater on Sunday,16th October: on the one hand it was about reclaiming music as a common language which we all speak and which is not subject to record deals, talent shows, managers, producers or powerful PA systems. On the other hand, it was also about exploring the theatrical in making music; experimenting with ways of performing our multiple and multifaceted relationships with music.
All of our participants were asked to name one song they would take with them to a desert island (the eponymous BBC radio show had inspired us). This selection of songs – from inspirational to fun, from suited for dancing to chilling, from topical to mainstream – formed a basis, a rough material that we transformed into live music.
There was also a strong sense of what Christopher Small calls "musicking" there to guide our devising process: the ways in which we engage with music and participate in its creation and meaning making when we hum along to our ipods, dance in all sorts of ways to it, create it with nervously drumming fingers on our suitcases, zips, velcro flaps etc.
The desert island theme and the essentialist question "What do we need?" had suggested travelling as a theme for the overall 25-minute performance, which concluded our workshop: armed only with a suitcase and few travel items and carry-on instruments (two guitars and a clarinet) our group created a promenade performance through some of the transitional spaces a theatre offers: the front steps, they foyers and the bar; all of which invite only a fleeting presence.
The performance explored various moments of musicking and of different functions music has for us - individually and as a group, integrating and excluding others, and as a means to what Tia DeNora calls “musically composed identities” (2000, 68). When used for example as a stimulant or relaxant, a motivational or pace-making device music even becomes, again according to DeNora a “prosthetic technology of the body” (2000, 102).

The musicality of this workshop and presentation, I would argue, manifested itself in using music as a primary material for devising a theatrical performance, but also as a key focus for the individual acting and the group interaction on stage; we worked extensively on rhythm, timbre and on sensitising ourselves to layered structures: a collective 'music' of small actions, sounds and gestures, where the importance was on recognising how much or how little everyone has to contribute to a simultaneity of 10 performances, which are meant to create an interesting and varied musico-theatrical texture. Anecdotally, this also became manifest, when after carefully shaping and crafting little scenes or numbers we only introduced a small story that gave our performers more concrete situations and motivation on the last day of the workshop: much work on theatre starts with this: narrative, characters, situations, conflicts. We worked much more abstractly on musical scenarios and loosely draped a few narrative hints around these scenarios at the end. This changed, we believed, the focus and experience for the performers quite significantly and hopefully added a new leaf to their accumulating experiences on the stage.

You can see a video-podcast of the Herbstcamp as a whole here.