Last show in Linz

In a few hours we will play our last show, which is at the same time the last show of this year's Schäxpir festival. It's been a busy week, and we've had lots of fun, both with the shows and in between the shows.
This is our week in pictures.

Autographs

Brass band after the rain

Beautification

The man in the moon

Tomorrow we all go home and then NIE's summer break starts. We will be back at work at the end of July, to get ready for Edinburgh in August.

Ssssscchhhhäxpirrrrrr

We're back on the Schönbrunn in Linz, and this time it is boiling hot.
Last time we kept complaining about how cold it got on the boat, now we're complaining about the heat. But the complaints are not real: we're all happy to be back on board. I think we have the best venue in the whole Schäxpir festival.

Together with some helping hands from the festival we turned the boat back into hours, moved all the furniture, raised our flags and did a run through of the show.

Yesterday we played our first to shows, to two very lively audiences. We're sold out for the entire festival, so all three performances we played so far (two yesterday, one this morning) were very full.

It's been great to hang out with old friends from other companies, and some of us have already had a chance to go and see other performances.

Apart from the very exciting and very full schedule of Schäxpir, Linz09 has also added to the fun by mounting a ferris wheel on top of a carpark in the middle of town.

We checked it out last night and re-checked it out this afternoon. The ferris wheel is scary: it goes faster than you'd expect it to go and it rocks a fair amount. But it's great fun.

Last night I went with Mago.

We could almost touch the towers of the Ursulinenhof

Today we took Nora up there, slightly against her will...

Spring has sprung

Bob made it off the ship after being stuck there for two hours.
And we finally got some sunshine in Linz.

So Colombo and I went on the Linz City Express, the little yellow train that does a 30 minute tour of historical Linz. We took the English-guide-carriage (well, American-guide), and found out that Friedrich III died from eating too much watermelon.

I don't know if it's true, but I thought it was a nice anecdote.

We're down to our last three show now, and it's gone incredibly fast. After that I will have three weeks off, while some of the others are rehearsing in Stuttgart and Denmark.

And could someone please explain to me what I'm supposed to do here?

Cliffhanger...

At the moment Bob is locked in on the ship. We finished the show and all went home, but he stayed behind to play some guitar. The man on duty apparently took off and locked everything up.
So far I haven't been able to reach Mr. Hoffmann, who's the boss of the boat.


And in the meanwhile the team of B61 start today in Berlin. They'll spend a week exploring the wall and the stories of the wall. They're in charge of writing their end of the blog, so watch this space.

Scary business

Today, as we were about to play the music before the show, we saw a police van pull up at the other side of the Danube. Several men jumped out and ran towards the water. We could see something floating downriver, but didn't dare to think it was a person. As 'it' approached the police men and was pulled out, it was quite clear 'it' was a man.
How did he fall into the Danube? And how long had he been in?

He was standing up when they pulled him back onto land, so that was good at least. A few minutes after they'd pulled him out the ambulance arrived.

It was another very cold day in Linz today, and being in the Danube instead of on the Danube doesn't really bear thinking about...

Our Austrian TV appearance

First job of the day

One of the things I really enjoy is arriving on the boat in the morning and going straight to the top deck to raise the flags. We have to lower them and take them off every night in case a strong wind would wreck them, or blow them off, or destroy them. It's one of my favourite jobs in this show, because it's a very clear sign that we're on board, and getting ready to play.

These are some things I found on the internet today:

here you can listen to a radio interview, where Alex gets German dubbing.

here is some kind of review from Volksblatt, which is actually more a detailed description.

here is a review from the Oberösterreichishe Nachrichten.

I don't know how long these will stay online, so try them out now.


Last night we had the official premiere, with guests from Linz09, Schäxpir, the ÖGEG (the boat people) and OberÖsterreich.

The most fantastic moment in the show was when Bob tries to enter from outside through a door and pretends the door is locked. Mr. Hoffman, the man who runs the boat, got up immediately, took his keys out and started walking towards the door. We managed to explain him very quietly that it wasn't locked, that Bob was just pretending. But we were all impressed by how ready he was to help us out.
(During the party he even helped me and Colombo to take the flags down).

Afterwards there was a party on the boat, which started with kids dancing to Austrian accordion music and continued with Alex being taught the shoe-slapping dance by Julius, the culture minister of Upper Austria. Both Nora and Alex tried to follow and copy Julius' moves, but the man is quite an agile shoe-slapper, so they were both exhausted at the end.

First premiere

This morning we played our premiere for children. Tonight we will play a premiere for adults and children. It will be very full on board tonight, with 15 more people than usual.
We put up some custome made flags, so the boat feels more ours.

warming up before the show (click on the photo to see the fantastic view better)

anticipation in the Red Salon

greetings from a double bass

Armand

the pirates who sing in dutch

where is captain Larsson?

Austrian television

Our dress rehearsal today was visited by the ORF, the Austrian television. Tomorrow at 7pm they will broadcast a small bit of it.
We had 50 children in today, which is quite close to what the numbers will be from tomorrow (our limit is 60), but in addition we had a tv camera attached to a sound person, and two photographers. Every now and then they got in the way a bit, but the audience didn't seem to mind that much and I think it's better to get them all at the same time (though maybe it's harder for them as they have to make sure not to photograph or film each other).

In the middle of the show there was a snow storm. Spring seems to have skipped Linz and we've gone back to winter here. Apparently it will get even colder...

Trial run with audience

This morning we did a run through with a class of 25 children. It was great fun. Afterwards we talked to them and they said they'd really enjoyed it. They also said we all had very cool accents. But I think Bob was definitely their favourite. We now have the problem that Bob's German is getting too good...

unwanted guests

more trouble

discover the ship

going up

marie-louise

on the deck

the tiger in the pirate's den

posting a letter to a mermaid

the trumpet-monster

will it fit?

In addition to all the performance photographs, I also found this, which is one of the press photographs from our first week on the ship, when we didn't have Magic Mago yet.

Was ist los?

Today we did a stagger through with a small audience consisting of Schäxpir and Linz09 people.
We planned to do it at 12.30, as there was some sort of event in one of the rooms on the ship until 12pm. As usual on our ship, the comings and goings of the guys who maintain it are never predictable.
So we had to start a little bit later.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the performances featured one or more mumbling old men, because so far there hasn't been a day of rehearsals where they didn't stumble into a scene, or shouted across the corridor, or decided to play a waltz through the speaker system.

It's clear to all of us that it is nearly impossible to regulate any of this in some way that has any kind of structure. They're there and they have things to do. Some of those things are loud, some of them go unnoticed. Some of them require the rooms we are in, some of them happen in the background.
But one thing's for sure: if you come and see the show, there will be at least one old man wandering around on board. You may meet him, you may not.

This one you will definitely meet:

And her as well:

And the most authentic pirate of them all will also be there every day:

Tomorrow we have a day off. The aim is to get our heads back in order after everyone has had a minor shake-up caused by too many languages at the same time.
But don't worry: we are all slowly gravitating towards German. None of us are accent-free: even the Swiss have their accent, and none of us speaks the Austrian version of the German language.
My favourite is Bob's German.

I haven't been able to take many photographs so far because I've constantly had an accordion hanging in front of me. But I'll try and give my camera to someone else during the next run and we'll see what happens.

The end of the show

Today we reached the end of the show. It's still quite unclear how long it will be, as it's very hard to tell how long it will take to move people around on the boat.
In the morning we started with a music rehearsal, and then we carried on from where we left off: the trumpet-monster.



We were a little bit limited today as we couldn't go on the deck. They were cleaning it because it had to be done before the frost comes back.
Personally I hope today's whether will stay and the frost will go somewhere else. This was the first time I had the chance to take a picture of our ship in the sun. And it looks a lot shinier in sunshine.



In the afternoon we got to the end of the stories, and not being able to get onto the deck brought us to an end that will be more surprising than it would have been outside (especially on rainy days).


I guess posting these pictures takes away the surprise, but I think you'll be surprised when you come on board anyway...


Most days we have lunch together on board. It's quicker than eating out and makes it easier to discuss rehearsals further.


What I forgot to write yesterday was that Kacka and I went to the costume department of the Landestheater. We had an appointment and 1pm and a lovely lady took us on a trip through a maze of a building. We went from a room with dresses to a room with suits and then on through a long corridor, up a different staircase, through some more doors into a room full of women's shoes, and on to another floor up to the room full of men's shoes and hats, and then back to the beginning to take another passage into another corridor onto another staircase to a room full of uniforms.
At one point I checked the time and saw it was 3pm. No wonder we were both tired and hungry. We got a lot of nice costumes and we didn't even have to carry them all to the boat: Alexander and Alfred picked them up for us this morning and delivered them to our Red Salon.

As time is ticking away, it's great that so many people are helping us with all those things none of us have time for.
Thank you, Schäxpir.

The Mighty Danube

After being side tracked into tipping paper, this is what I found on the door of the kitchen of the ship: no smoking - not filter cigarettes and not filterless cigarettes.



Yesterday we welcomed two new people onto our ship: Mago, a Swiss musician and Alexander, and Austrian assistant. In the evening we tried out some Austrian beers with Mago. The beer below was in very nice glasses but tasted quite boring. My favourite so far is Gösser, even though the beer served in most places is Zipfer.



This morning we laid out a series of map tracing the Danube. It's very long, and it took a lot of rearranging tables in order to get it all lined up properly. We probably moved the tables five times in the process. The Danube does not flow through Belgium, Czech Republic, Switzerland or the UK, but that doesn't really matter as after more than a week on board the Schönbrunn, we've all started to develop a very strong connection to this very long river.

The Danube starts in Donaueschingen in Germany...

... flows through Linz...

... and ends in the Danube Delta leading into the Black Sea.

Schönbrunner Perücken Tag

Today we played with wigs and explored some music. We also explored some wigs and played music.






This is the second time I end up with a wig with long red hair, and I think maybe I should grow my hair back and dye it red.

This is an old picture I found in one of the cabins.