By Maria Shaplin
Sooooo I went to Berlin and the Prague Quadrennial. It was totally rad! I received the 2015 Independence Fellowship in the Arts to attend both the PQ and the TBA Festival. Berlin was a sweet side-trip. I will report on that second leg of my fellowship after it completes in late September- this installment is (sort of) dedicated to The PQ. It’s also dedicated to getting out there and seeing the world. We need to sharpen our design tools. We need new design tools. We need to retire our old and overused design tools. We need new perspectives. Great art does not play it safe. Every artist in Philly should apply to this fellowship, I can’t stress that enough. Here’s the first few sentences from their website:
“The Independence Foundation Fellowships in the Arts is an opportunity for exceptional artists to take a key step forward in their professional development. Artists are encouraged to be creative in discovering the best possible way to expand their artistic horizons. There are no set boundaries for what is possible or what types of projects might be funded.”
Dedicated to professional development? Encouraged to be creative? No set boundaries? AAAAaahhhhh! Yes please. So far my fellowship is fulfilling all of that; giving me concentrated doses of world-class performance and visual art to activate my brain and keep me in conversation with international performance makers. Not that my brain was in danger of atrophy or anything, but an artist cannot exist on Shakespeare alone. A lighting designer cannot exist on L201 (a color) alone. A set designer can’t exist on 4×8 (standard) platforms alone, a sound designer on stock sound effects alone. Actually, we can and do, but that sucks. We have been machete-ing our way though paperwork and poverty for years, blazing these artistic paths so that we could kill predictability and monotony… And then we look down and our tools are really old, tired, blunt, and boring. Our tools have become our leash. Tangent: here’s my soapbox, where I am preaching to myself, but also to any colleague who is bored or tired of making art:
If making theater feels like an endless slog of task-fulfillment, regurgitation or superficially-minute variations on the same themes, maybe you (I) should stop doing it for a hot second, inject your brain with mind-expanding international art, and get re-acquainted with your (my) core artistic values. Then charge full steam ahead making shit again with those values in mind, and see how awesome your art can be. It can be really, really awesome dudes.
So this fellowship has given me these built-in pit stops to re-fuel. For me, absorbing other people’s amazing work is a great way to get stoked about our medium. Seeing hot weird jams reminds me that I also love to make hot weird jams! I share hot weird core values with other performance makers all over the world! Oh, my core values: experimentation, storytelling, catharsis, wonder, boldness, relevancy, risk, and as much as possible, fun! Wooooooot! So with these in mind, I head to Berlin and Prague.
I’ve opted out of the basic reportage for this blog post. Too many awesome things happened, and it would feel like watching a slide show of your friend’s vacation to Hawaii… “And here’s where I rode dolphins and suddenly realized that dolphins are my spirit animal…” Even if it’s really exciting its boring cause you weren’t there. But I will give you a bullet list of cool stuff that may help explain some of the pictures. You can also read my entire blog HERE, if you are interested.
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BEARPIT KARAOKE in Berlin. HERE. Karaoke in a Roman-style amphitheatre. Beer and street food. When the singers are really bad, the audience is so generous and boosts their confidence. Watch people fulfill their dreams of singing in front of thousands of people. All you have to do is raise your hand.
ROBERT WILSON’s FAUST I-II. HERE. Berliner Ensemble at the Brecht Theater. Box seats. I had only ever seen Wilson’s work in photographs and youtube videos. Seeing it in person was a dream come true. The first 45 minutes were a dazzling spectacle. Images and color. TABLEAU VIVANT EXTRAORDENAIRE. Slowly but surely the show fell apart. It was a beautiful disaster to behold. Life list kinda shit. Design sploosh.
BERLIN ON BIKES. Beer gardens, architecture, art, Turkish market, the wall, grafitti, tiny immersive theater pieces all over the place… a culture of people who don’t understand personal space, and take bicycles right-of-way very seriously. You have to do it.
THE PRAGUE QUADRENNIAL. All the programming is rad. Tons of stuff that’s off-program, secret, or accidental. Stumbling upon receptions. Tribes of bizarrely-costumed performers laying down in the street or discarding handfuls of rhinestones in the gutter. Designers: put this in your calendars for 2019. I know it’s far away, but you won’t regret it.
ONE DRAWING A DAY. An exercise I did with Lisi. Draw something every day and you will not be disappointed. Change up the exercises- draw from life, from your imagination, change styles- all of it is time well-spent. One drawing in the time it takes to get from point A to point B on the subway! I started drawing a little girl on the subway in Prague, and then she started drawing me! Her parents were very impressed.
SEEING PERFORMANCE IN MANY DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. Half of the theater I saw was in a different language and was not translated. This allows the viewer to evaluate the visual and aural storytelling. It invites confusion into your life! Super fun!!!!!!
TRAVELING IN GENERAL. Letting confusion wash over you. Relying on the kindness, expertise, and generosity of strangers. Stumbling into things. Taking risks. Giving yourself the distance from your regular life to appreciate and miss it.
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH SOME HEAVY-HITTERS. I attended workshops, lectures, talks and showings by some amazing theater makers. Hotel Pro Forma’s Kirsten Dehlhome, Marie Jirásková, Rimini Protokol’s Stefan Kaegi… oh, and NBD, Julie Taymor. Too many little gems of stories, questions and good advice to recount.
ALL THE THINGS AROUND YOU THAT AREN’T THEATER ALSO INFORM THE THEATER YOU MAKE. The theater you make is not unrelated to the kind of life you lead. Eating, drinking, music, politics, predilections, fears, popcicles, nail polish, buttery toast in the morning and geo-political mayhem on the evening news. Its all in there. Get out there. No reason to be bored by your own art. Don’t phone it in. Find new tools. Sharpen them. Re-invest in your values and let the huge world of art inspire you. Develop and expand.