oh vienna...
The circus has moved on, the bucolic delights of the Volkbuhne and it's heavily subsidised bar and canteen have been replaced with the more austere Halle G in the Museum Quartier.
Today, which was supposed to be a day off, I have spent bucketting around Viennese thrift shops in a old VW van trying to find cheap wooden chairs. We brought eighteen of them over from the UK, enough to do the whole run, but they ended up all being used in Berlin. I should perhaps try to explain, at one point in the action of the piece, a man dressed as a caveman brings on a chair, which he then worships briefly, it is then snatched away by another performer dressed as a viking who saws it up with an electric jigsaw. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to try and explain.
Our designer, who is also one of the performers, has decided that he needs a suit of armour, and not a fake one. Given that he spends much of the performance running around naked, I'm not sure how much mileage this idea actually has. I've done a little research, and arrived at the conclusion, that with the aid of a couple of skilled armourers, he could be suited up in about 20 minutes, I suspect that the suit of armour will end up in the back of the truck, along with the bouncy castle.
It has been quite pleasant pottering about in Vienna, I last did a show here in 1994 at the Kunstlerhaus, and wandered down there today to refresh my memory. I have a number of pleasant memories of doing stuff here, some of which could not be recounted here. I even found the flower bed into which I leaped on discovering a tram bearing down on me, only to sink up to my knees in muddy water.
We get in tomorrow, and hopefully won't have to work too late, the theatre is very modern and well equipped, the staff are very keen and friendly (unlike the Pompidou Centre apparently*), for some reason naked brits throwing stuff around appeals to the Viennese psyche. This years Wien Festwoch posters feature either an image of Mozart rolling his eyes in disgust or one of Freud, rather classy really.
*our last tour date.
bad to wurst, part zwei
I arrived at the Volksbuhne in a slightly fragile state, the usual combination of not enough sleep and a little too much beer. Having brought the show in, I was leaning against a front of house stage ladder when my attention was caught by a piece of what appeared to be high density foam rubber propped against an electrical duct. It was only when I picked it up that I realised that it was in fact a six inch slab of decaying sausage meat. This did not rate as a pleasant early morning experience, and I can report that it is still there three days later.
Travelling up from Rotterdam it was hard to ignore the vast numbers of wind turbines, from my 31st floor eyrie I can see at least 60-70 depending on the weather. There doesn't seem to be the same amount of animosity over here, perhaps because they are mostly built on industrial sites, the sea front at Rotterdam being a very good example. I know they won't save the planet, but I do find them rather lovely.
Oh, and for those who care/note these things, today is the first birthday of Way out West, all together now....
things are going from bad to wurst
Here I am in a rather damp Berlin, sitting in my hotel room on the 31st floor overlooking Alexander Platz. The start of the tour has been uneventful, we loaded the truck on Saturday and headed for the Rotterdam ferry. We seemed to load an impossible amount of toot, from vacuum cleaners to wardrobes, sofas and site lighting. Even so, when it was all on, there was a big lacuna at the rear of the truck; I know I have plans to visit Cite Europe on the return leg, but there was space for several hundred cases of beer (I don't intend buying several hundred cases of beer, so don't ask). My quizzical eyebrow earned me the response '
Oh, that's alright, we'll put the bouncy castle on,' and so we did. As what we had already loaded looked like the aftermath of a dodgy car-boot sale, I suppose a bouncy castle is not that surprising.
'A
t what point in the show is this used?' I asked innocently.
'
Oh it's not,' came the reply, '
we've just put it on in case we want to use it.'
It turns out that it was bought for, and cut from a previous production, and has subsequently been making non-appearances at major arts venues all over Europe ever since.
Still, if we run out of money, we can always set it up by the side of the road, and put the begging bowl out.
More exciting stories from the touring world in a day or so.
something's going on... Warning: contains street photographs
As I may have already indicated, the condition of the road outside my house is somewhat akin to a Baghdad cart track; 20 or 30 years of seemingly random excavation, collapsing drains and the introduction of ill-constructed speed bumps have produced a surface that resembles the surface of the moon. Now we have a new addition, in various places (mainly where the surface is smooth enough to take it) there are foot high yellow letters stating:
Do Not Park Here 15/5/06.
I don't believe that they are going to work on the road for a minute, as the only genuine option would be to plane it off and start again, and if they are patching holes why haven't they identified the worst ones? It's an indictment of the free-thinking attitude of the council, that they feel it is necessary to post a no-parking notice in the middle of the road.
I'll keep you posted, but until then here are some more pictures of the adventure playground:
Mmm...nice.
Update 17/05/06
Well, what can I say, subsequent investigations have revealed yellow scribbles all over the place. There has been a small patch put on the road, but other than that, nothing has happened.
fake, fake, fake...
I may already have mentioned that one of the few listed corrugated iron buildings in existence (The Tin Chapel, built for Lady Byron's charity school in the 1860's or thereabouts) was recently demolished to make way for a luxury housing developement. Work is proceeding with little alacrity on these faux domestic revival monstrosities, but my attention has been struck by the disparity between the claims made by the advertising notices (nothing so vulgar as a hoarding, just an A0 artists impression and a blurb), and what is actually being constructed.
They claim to be offering a traditional house built to the highest standards and finishes, as the flagship building is made of stirling board (the cheapest form of plywood) and faced with brick and other 'traditional' materials like tiles. The roof is of synthetic slate, in a row of houses with pantiles, and the architecture owes nothing to the local styles, which, given the eclecticism of our housing stock, is something of an achievement. My favourite, though, is that I noticed on the artists impression that the two houses I have been being rude about both had chimneys (I may have fantasised about the curls of smoke). As the relevant walls are both effectively timber frame, with a brick cladding, there is no way of incorporating a chimney stack without substantial numbers of bricks, and a bricky who can do more than lay straight courses.
The roof is now on, but, much to my surprise, when the nottingham correspondent and I walked past the other night, there was a plywood former, and two bona fide chimneystacks being constructed. ON THE BLOODY GROUND! So I assume these will be hoisted up and glued onto the tiling somehow, and some unfortunate yuppy muppet will think he's bought a real house for his £450K until the night when he gets a bit pissed and falls heavily against the wall, at which point a) he will make a sizeable dent and discover it is made of cardboard toilet roll tubes, or b) there will be a grinding noise and the chimney stack will fly past the square bay window (wrong!) and embed itself in his 4 x 4*. I look forward to that moment with malicious pleasure.
*given the appalling condition of the roads in Ealing, I am beginning to come round to the idea of a 4 x 4, after all, the council bought one for the man who's in charge of street maintenance.
pinkbell
I have previously blogged about the gardens propensity for delivering pink versions* of normally straight coloured flowers, this year it has offered the pinkbell.
This month is apparently going to be the bloggiversary (not my word), of Way out West, as is my wont with important dates (birthdays, mothers day, weddings and funerals), I will be safely somewhere else, in this case Berlin. For the next month I'm off doing a tour which will take me around some of my favourite european cities, and one new one. Hopefully I will be able to report in from time to time, unlike previous jolly jaunts this one is only going into huge theatres (Volksbuhne in Berlin, Pompidou Centre in Paris etc), so I am hoping for fabulous facilities and unlimited internet access.
Last week I was down in Southampton FC, doing the second part of the ESSO sandwich and pasty conference, the near suicidal boredom of it all was only alleviated by watching ships unloading sand at the adjacent cement terminal. The football clubs' entire IT system had failed, and they didn't seem too concerned to sort it out, which left us all twiddling our thumbs and occasionally refreshing our network lists in the faint hope that they would eventually get it going again. At least at Old Trafford they weren't promising and not delivering, they simple didn't offer any facilities at all. The Coffee Nation machine was right down the other end of the room, which made it impossible for us to get our caffeine fix during the workshop turnarounds, so you can imagine how grumpy we were by the end of it all.
*
http://lx999.blogspot.com/2005/12/unbearable-pinkness-of-being-in-ealing.html
