Let's play

A few months ago I found two little books on performing and acting. I read them. That was a bit strange - if there is one thing I never ever liked then it was a stage, a theatre performance or, even worse: ROLEPLAY.

But things change, don't they?

So, I've been using roleplay as a very legitimate tool for some of the workshops and group work I've been doing.

While I was reading the little book on stage performance and acting I took note for my list of things I really, really have to do. Be on a stage and act, play, sing. Hm, singing... I'm still not convinced about, but the rest firmly made it onto my list.

The list also functions as 'Things I'm scared about but that's not a good enough excuse'.

Just as well that one of my friends is a film maker and video artist :)



So, while in California, we reappropriated a broken bbq to integrate properly into the camping community. But somehow our staged performances upset the integration. Just as well that ageing Hollywood Diva Glitzi had to leave after a short appearance. This was enough though to rattle one or two otherwise rather bored campers to come asking for her (and us) repeatedly over the next days. But we finally managed to scare them away.



The sunset picture wall doesn't quite make a stage but the camera is a very expensive and proper one and so was the boom (I can now validly add sound technician to my list of skills). And so appeared Ulla Wagner, 47, whose husband Woelfi promised her a honeymoon in California. But really only ever meant Kalifornien at the Baltic Sea. What on earth to do with your dreams after such a disappointment??? Well... dreams? They are for other people! Ulla and Woelfi have their very own California with a once new campervan.

Ulla and Glitzi left after the first evening...

Uncannily, our first proper interview was with someone who'd been coming to the camping site for 30 years, was in his 80s and while he told Ate behind the camera the good things, the sad things and broken dreams were for the sound technician standing to the left of him.

Become someone else in front of a film camera. Also: Tick.

The exhibition opens on 16 October at the Kunstraum Bethanien, Kreuzberg, Berlin. And I am soooo curious what she will do with 9 hrs of film, 800 stills, 10 interviews, lots of sea, sand and camping idyll.

The sea? That's next. How wonderful it was, and so close to the once new camping van.