Driving by numbers 20: Graz-Berlin

Distance: nine hundred and thirty six kilometres
Duration: twenty eight hours and twelve minutes
Idiot drivers: one.
Accidents: many.
Snow most of the way.

The actual driving was only eleven hours and twelve minutes, but added to that I waited by the side of the motorway (and nearly froze), I spent the night in Passau, visited four different garages in Passau, and found new bolts to put my wheel back on.
After all of that, I still have no clue what Passau looks like.
Very white, I'd say.

On the way I saw two cars slip but pull their car back into their own lane, I saw 5 cars stranded (3 of them badly damaged), I heard about many terrible crashes on the radio, had two slight slips myself, and saw lots and lots of snow. And a lot of trucks.

I also heard Lady Gaga on the radio 9 times and Dancing Queen twice.

And now I am home.

Stuck in Passau

In a perfect world, this post would have been called: driving by numbers: Graz-Berlin.

But I didn't make it to Berlin yet. I am in Passau.

One of my wheels came loose and I lost two bolts. 

I blame the man in Sweden who put the tyres on two weeks ago. Wouldn't you?

By the time the mechanic came to help me (it took him an hour and a half to arrive), the garage was already closed so I couldn't get those two bolts.

So I need to wait until tomorrow morning.

While I was waiting by the side of the motorway for the mechanic to come and fix the problem, I did this:

 

So the van is now a little less generic, and a little more NIE.

Everything Falls Apart at Spleen - Post 250

The get-in for Everything Falls Apart finished around 10pm, and as everything was set, we decided to have a later start the next day. 1.30pm would do - enough time for a music rehearsal, soundcheck and run through before Alex had to fly off back to the UK to prepare for a scratch performance of Sea Journey.

In the morning Iva, Anna, Alexander and I went for an international haircut. The ladies at the hairdresser were very nice, and once Anna's hair had been cut to the required length (I think she got about 20cm cut, if not more), and the kids were waiting for me and Iva, one of the ladies asked Iva if she could put some colour in Anna's hair, promising it would wash out with the first wash.
Iva agreed and shortly afterwards, Anna had some pink streaks in her hair. It was very cool, so Alexander wanted some colour too.
He got some blue.

 

I just got a trim, because I don't want my hair too short during winter.

In the afternoon, we went into TAO to rehearse EFA. It was great to come back to that show - the last time we did it was in September.
We made Beate run around a bit to pick up some stuff we broke/forgot/needed, and we were ready for the show.

Since TAO is a little bit narrower than the space we usually use, 80 people suddenly felt like a lot, but they found their way around and understood quite quickly that they could move to wherever they felt they would see best.

And then everything went very fast: we played, went to bed, got up, played again, packed up, had lunch, filled the van, got in cars/vans/trains.

Exit Graz...

My Life With the Dogs at Spleen

(the van arriving at the theatre - it has been 4 years since we were here last, and I had forgotten where to unload vans)

We got to the theatre at 9am and unloaded everything. TAO (Theater am Ortweinplatz) gave us a nice big room to put all of our stuff in. We went straight to work taking out the stage (we'd have to take out even more for Everything Falls Apart, so we thought we might as well start with the stage immediately).
Clemens and his colleagues were very fast and moved on to hanging lights and our enormous sodium lamp in no time. 

Tom went missing for about an hour - he didn't emerge from the train Beate was picking him up from, and while she searched the train for a sleeping actor, Iva phoned anyone she thought could have more information on Tom's whereabouts. Tom himself wasn't answering his phone, and after several tries we decided his battery must have run out.

Doom scenarios were constructed: did he forget to get off? If he did, where could he be? Bratislava? Further? Or did he miss the train altogether?
Four people confirmed he got on the train. Or at least left the theatre in Prague on time to make it onto the train.

An hour and a half later he walked into the theatre.
Due to reorganisation of the train he was on, there was a delay which made him miss his connection from Vienna to Graz. As simple as that. He used someone else's phone to reassure everyone we had succeeded in worrying, and then helped us with setting up for a run through.

The show in the evening was very full, and a lot of fun. The audience made them come back for five curtain calls. (Five!)

 

In the meanwhile Liz had arrived and we took her along to the festival centre for some food and drinks. (And a lot of praise from the people who had seen the show).

When we got back to the hotel, Unai arrived. He'd come from Vittoria to Graz via Palma de Mallorca.

The next morning (well, noon), we played a second show to mainly teenagers. It was great fun again.

This was our walk to the theatre:

 

After we finished, it was time for a lot of action. Kjell and I went for lunch while the others packed the set, and an hour later we swapped teams and I made Clemens and his colleagues take all of the seats out of the theatre.

Most of our shows are very simple and we generally don't ask for much, but with Everything Falls Apart it is quite a different story. But I think that after all of these years of being flexible and simple, we deserve to be more demanding now.
Clemens didn't seem to mind, he kept smiling and didn't ever call me a slave driver.

Driving by numbers 19: Berlin-Graz

Distance: nine hundred and thirty six kilometres
Duration: nine hours and seventeen minutes
Idiot drivers: none
Snow during the last 5 hours.

When I arrived in Graz, the Moberg family, Alex and Bob were already there. I got there at 6pm and after showing off my new van we headed to the festival hub to get some food. We met Ossi who had invited us there and whose theatre we were about to perform in. He was in great form.

Graz was covered in snow and cold. But the festival atmosphere made up for the cold. Colombo was there as well - Sgaramusch had performed the day before and he stayed behind to be in the jury of the Jungwild section of the festival.
Jungwild are young people who make theatre. Three of them would win a prize to help them develop their work further.

We had some drinks with old friends and new friends, and then headed back to the hotel to get some sleep after a long travel day and before some long festival days.

A great day in total darkness

Iva phoned me yesterday to discuss some future things, and while we were talking she said that the culture contact for the school we were going to today said we could have as much darkness as we wanted.
I said I'd have all of it.

For those of you who are not familiar with the kind of touring we are doing right now: we play in schools. Usually in gyms. And gyms usually have a strip of windows just below the ceiling. They are usually impossible to reach and sometimes there are no blinds.
Since it's harder to create the magic and illusion of theatre in broad daylight, we always ask schools to come up with something. Sometimes they stick black binliners along the windows, sometimes they attach an enormous tarpaulin to the roof.
But Norwegian sunlight is very bright, and it is never easy to make it pitchblack.

But some schools have gyms without windows. That's where we were today. The main thing the darkness does is make it easier for the children to focus. And to imagine they're not in their gym.


In the meanwhile Kjell is looking for a new van. If all goes well, I'll be driving a new van to Germany on Saturday, and from there I will take it to Graz in February. We will be bringing a lot of stuff to Graz, and all that stuff doesn't fit in our current van (which died a few months ago anyway, so that was no option).

The other recurring issue is the chairs for Everything Falls Apart. Due to lack of van-space, we've been buying them all over Europe.
Until....
Ikea stopped producing them. Iva then sourced a different type of chair for the shows we did in Czech Republic. They were quite similar, but not the same.
Today I found out that our trusted Oddvars are back in stock. So I'll pick up a few extra on the way to Graz.

Everything Falls Apart in The Waldviertel

We just went to Szene Bunte Wähne, which is one of my favourite festivals. It's in a place called Horn, a small town in the Waldviertel of Austria. One of the great things about it is the place we perform in: an old barn that comes with a voluntary fireman who has the most amazing white beard. He's there every year and looks after the space and the bar.

The other great thing about it is that international delegates from across the world travel down to this small town to see international theatre, so you find yourself at the festival centre talking to people from Canada, Korea, Scotland, Liechtenstein and so on.
I always wonder what the people of Horn make of this sudden foreign invasion.

I did some time lapse photography in the barn.
This is our get-in.

This is the 10am show we played on Friday.

There was something very bizarre about our accommodation: every night when I got back, my bed hadn't been made. The others said theirs had been made. But I could see from the folded edge of the toilet paper that someone had been in the room. Every day they folded the toilet paper edge into a nice triangle, but for some reason unknown to me they would not make my bed. Why would that be?

At the moment we are in Prague for a company meeting - most of the NIE members are here so we can sit together and discuss our future plans of roaming the world.

Tomorrow we will play in La Fabrika, and then we move on to Jindrichuv Hradec. It's a very full week, but it's great to have the chance to play our newest show.

Travel by Numbers 15: Berlin - Horn

Distance: five hundred and ninety eight kilometres
Duration: ten hours and four minutes
Idiot Drivers: one, and one cyclist on the Czech motorway

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.