Patrick and I have just started to settle in to making some structural changes, rethinking the piece based on our performances last August and on the fact that we’ll be using a very different venue this time (a rehearsal room instead of an apartment). I enjoy the audition process we’ve come up with for the piece; it always gets me back into Pessoa’s work and words. The problem is, it always makes me want to work with EVERY actor who comes down the pike…

One of my favorite things has to be how empowered most of the actors seem to feel by the auditions. We keep things very personal, informal, collaborative, and open. I guess that’s not something this city does well—just judging by actor comments here. Some people sound like they’ve been downright traumatized. That can’t be the best way to do this.

Two computers open, we’ve discovered we can angle it so that Patrick is in both frames, but I’m in just one, and Christina’s in the other. It looks like Patrick is in two places at once. Maybe parallel realities.

When Eva and Frank sign on from Eva’s apartment in Berlin (Veit, with his broken-down vehicle, is marooned somewhere between Berlin and Hamburg, on the road, off our map), their live video joins ours on the twin laptop screens. They chuckle at our doubled Patrick.

Eva picks up an e-reader. She hands it off to the left of her video frame. I reach off and out of my frame, out of Eva’s sight, off of Eva’s radar, into the empty air of the living room a virtual void: one we’ve imagined and created between us. A void we hold together in our minds. In the void, Eva hands me what she’s holding. I pull it back into my frame, into Frank and Eva’s sight: a book. Eva’s hand, too, pulls out of the void, reappears: the e-book, handed off to me, is gone. In some way we have touched.

There is something imagined in every relationship. Many things, in the beginning. Fewer down the road, but the unreal, assumed, manufactured always has a role to play.

This was last Saturday. We talked about our in-person meeting coming up in May, speeding towards us with a speed we simultaneously anticipated and experience the approach of with a silly sort of surprise. We brainstorm and plan, reaching our hands into the void that we hold between us, this uncharted expanse of unknown dimension. We are conjuring it, this thing, this space, this conjunction between us, so it feels in a way appropriate that we begin to discuss a project about maps. Mapping. Not a physical place, but ourselves: what is a map of me as an artist and human? When I lay that map over Patrick’s and Christina’s, what is this new space, and is this what we call Yinzerspielen? And what happens when that map is overlaid with the map of Turbo Pascal?

Can these maps tell us what we’re doing? Can they help us see what we don’t know?

NEXT SESSION  for #NETTEN: DEAL-BREAKERS.

In our next google-hangout date between Yinzer and Turbo Pascal (fourth, but second with a theme), we explored 2 main things:

1) what worked about the role play adventure

2) what were our deal-breakers for collaborators

For 1) We discovered that there is a difference between collaboration and collective. They are similar but not equal. And I continue to like “expose to collaboration”, as an idea. We talked about filling in the gaps (when we did not know something about the other group) with how we did that by using our own work, and even our personal wishes for our respective collectives. Wishes. (I like the idea of Yinzer having a WISH LIST – rather than goals or priorities – wishes sound bigger, better, bolder).

For 2) it began as what we do not appreciate in the rehearsal room. I had put together a short list of deal-breakers, but quickly I realized that my list was a little lopsided (I did not like them anymore). I was trying to edit as we moved forward, but kept tripping up. The great thing was that eventually the exercise naturally turned positive: what we wanted in the rehearsal room, in our collaborators and how each collective had learned to work together.

Some wishes that came up:

Smart collaborators (or more engaged intellectually)
Role-less projects, things get fluid so don’t get lost in a box
A group that can get on the same wavelength during a project
Articulate collaborators: what you want and don’t want, know it.
Flexible collaborators: have opinions but allow others to take and reshape those.
Ownershiplessness: once an idea is put into the room, it is now the rooms and no longer your own.
In that vein: No idea is precious, but respect every thought.

For the piece, we simultaneously read 3 texts from which we had redacted certain identifying words, asking audience members to listen closely and each remember 3 words that jumped out at them, that grabbed them emotionally. Here’s the list they generated:

• Think
• Unthinkable
• Redacted (x2)
• Charisma
• Sequester
• Terror
• Facilities
• Pennsylvania
• Extracted
• Novel
• Domestic
• Separation
• Item
• Education
• Community
• Program
• They
• East
• Coast
• Controversy
• Spoke
• Thursday
• Afternoon
• Resolution
• Carcinogen
• New Jersey
• Region
• Output
• Tone
• Deep
• Drilling
• Revival
• Engine
• Comma
• Houston
• New England
• Fifteen cents
• Charisma
• Foreign
• Cancer
• Refineries
• Environment
• Jobs
• Health

(Surprisingly, we had only 2 smartasses who included “redacted” in their list.)

Take those same 3 articles and put them through an automated tag-cloud generator (based on numerical word popularity) and you get this:

I think it’s fun to compare.

Read the texts yourself by [clicking here]; what words stick out to you?

ABSTRACT: This text results from being caught in a course of events that, as an urban anthropologist, I simply could not neglect. Inspiration for this work came from the prospect that a satellite performance of the 2012 Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) would take place in my backyard. The text speaks about the process by which I got involved in the observation of the preparations and realization of a performance entitled “Everywhere is a Home”. I thus intend to show how my roles multiplied and transformed, as well as how my relationship to the yard, both emotional and intellectual, changed from one day to another. In the end, I try to reconsider the experiences with the UNLISTED, a group of graduate students from the University of Arts in Belgrade comprising this artistic project, who succeeded in turning my backyard into an anthropological field site.

The full text is available in English or Serbian by clicking the links in the righthand column of the abstract page.

Starting in January, we embarked on a journey with Berlin-based theater collective Turbo Pascal to find some answers to that question. I met Eva Plischke, one of Turbo Pascal’s founding members, and became familiar with the group’s work at the 2011 Theatertreffen in Berlin. Turbo Pascal and Yinzerspielen have several points of intersection: Both are collectives of three theater artists who work fluidly within and beyond the collective. Both regularly invite a wider range of artists to collaborate on individual projects. Both are interested in work that explores issues of space/place, from the very public to the deeply intimate and private. Because of these commonalities, we see a high likelihood of compatibility between our ensembles; but we started this journey as strangers.

So we’re sort of coming at this like a blind date, or a match made by OkCupid. (We’ve also considered thinking of ourselves as “sister cities”; we’ll see where that metaphor takes us.) Through email, monthly Skype and Google+ Hangouts, and collectively-devised exercises, we’re exploring our apparent compatibility and seeing where it leads us.

Our first meeting (actually, more like a pre-meeting, a chance to connect and hear one anothers’ voices for the first time and discuss mutual project goals) was at the beginning of February; a video-less Skype call with Eva and Veit, it led to a discussion about dreams (the focus of the current Turbo Pascal production), how each of our ensembles had initially formed, and, mostly, logistics.

Skyping with Eva and Veit from Pittsburgh: Feb. 2, 2012

We met “for real” last Sunday and had set ourselves the task of roleplaying. Basing our characterizations almost solely on Internet research, Yinzerspielen “played” Turbo Pascal and Turbo Pascal “played” Yinzerspielen. We took turns, with one group at bat as the roleplayer and the other firing questions. From my perspective at least, the goal here was not to quiz one another on our internet sleuthing, but to:

:: introduce playfulness into the getting-to-know-you process

:: figure out what the picture we, Yinzerspielen, as a collective, puts out there to people who don’t know us personally/haven’t seen our work

:: see where the holes or oddnesses in that picture are

As we began to play, other nuances of the game emerged, ones I hadn’t expected. When we took on the role of Turbo Pascal (with me as Frank, Christina as Veit, and Patrick as Eva), we were instantly confronted with major gaps in what we knew about the ensemble we were playing. Some questions (“What would you say was your most successful production that incorporated audience interaction, or can you give an example of one, and the way this worked?”) we were able to answer, while I’m sure not in any way “correctly,” at least with a pretty solid basis in reality: we had limiting parameters (the performances described and catalogued on the Turbo Pascal website), and we used those as a framework to build our answers. Answers like this were productive for the interviewers in the sense that we were using the material of our knowledge about them but ultimately producing something out of that material that isn’t necessarily what they’d have produced.

However, other questions (“Are you all friends? How important is friendship to collaboration?’) would have utterly stumped a robot programmed to build responses only out of our limited database of Turbo Pascal-related knowledge. In these cases, we had to mix in a healthy helping of our own thoughts and experiences as a collective to coherently respond. And this revealed things to the interviewers, not about themselves, but about the real ensemble behind the roleplay.

The particular questions interviewers chose to ask, too, revealed important information. “I hear you guys are the academic, nerdy ensemble; how do you feel about that?” Turbo Pascal asked us-as-Turbo-Pascal; “You guys say you’re interested in projects that are very local, but you also work internationally; are those interests in conflict or do you see them as compatible?” we asked them-as-Yinzerspielen. What we’re interested in about ourselves reveals how we think of ourselves, what questions we’re commonly called on to answer, and where we sense our weaknesses residing.

In playing us, Eva, Veit, and Frank became a Yinzerspielen that talked with excitement about technology and new media, performances and performance experiences created/produced online; about the idea of a label, the name of the collective as a label and the potential problematics in that (are we a commodity? Isn’t a label that we export and use to market ourselves awfully capitalistic?). We borrowed one of the questions they’d asked us, “Where do you see yourselves in 8 years?” and I loved their response: A Yinzerspielen embassy, maybe one in 12 different countries. An ambassador for each. A library, open-source, attached to each embassy as we continue to build our plays and research. A room in each embassy that’s open 24/7, connected to each of the other embassies by live video feed; anyone can go into this room at any time, to see who else is there, to connect with the other embassies (or not, as the case may be). I don’t quite know how to explain this, but our Americanness seemed more obvious to me, in their portrayal, than I’d expected–not out of anything that they were purposefully doing, but in the way that this imaginary Yinzerspielen, this ghost ensemble, seemed to work and exist.

So far our apparent compatibility does seem to translate into an actual one. The meeting was fun and playful, and the format–structuring it around a game or exercise–was working for all of us.

CHALLENGES

Some thoughts I’ve got about the ongoing challenges of this project.

:: Project ownership. Yinzerspielen was the primary (really, the sole) initiator. We approached Turbo Pascal with this long-distance friendship pitch; we are the ones answerable to the Network of Ensemble Theaters for the grant-funded portion of the project. We started with a project proposal that had Turbo Pascal’s stamp of approval but not collaborative input, but have been aware from the beginning that if we don’t develop mutual ownership here, that will run counter to the very spirit of our project. We were shy, even tentative about first emails, wanting to be clear that our project proposal is ultimately just a guideline, that we want to end up with a project that is both achievable and interesting/helpful/productive for both collectives. We didn’t want to come on too strong.

:: Time (zones). Germany is 6 hours ahead of us here in NYC. Eva spends much of her time in Hamburg doing academic work. Veit and Frank are deep in the throes of rehearsals for an upcoming Berlin premiere. Yinzerspielen is working on #galleryplay and Unlisted: Second Steel, cramming our own schedules, and we can’t seem to stay in one place either. When we talked on Sunday we were spread across 5 cities: D.C., Chicago, NYC, Berlin, Hamburg. Scheduling our meetings is, suffice it to say, a bear.

:: Technology. In some ways this has been surprisingly smooth; but there are always bumps and we’re relying particularly heavily on it for this project. Most notably, we discovered after our meeting on Sunday that our screencasts–all 3 of them (Christina, me, Frank)–recorded no sound. We’d planned to have video records of all our meetings, and I’m already feeling the loss of having no sound for this first roleplay in writing this post on it.

This project is made possible, in part, through a grant from the Network of Ensemble Theater’s Touring & Exchange Network (NET/TEN), supported by lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

My point in mentioning representation here is to now connect it to Yinzerspielen’s NET/TEN project with Turbo Pascal and our Google+ Hangout on Sunday. What was so wonderful about this conversation was that it allowed for both groups to have an interaction in which we were completely aware of the process of ‘taking shape’. Through a role play exercise in which Yinzer pretended to be Turbo Pascal and Turbo Pascal pretended to be Yinzer, both companies had the opportunity to see itself through its own reflection. ‘I’m looking at you, but you are me.’ The filter of the other company, of Turbo Pascal, is still present, distorting Yinzerspielen’s reflection to some extent, but nevertheless, the image reflected remains the same- it is Yinzerspielen’s. ‘I’m looking at you, but you are me.’

This opportunity is open to Pittsburgh-based professionals and/or emerging scholars from the fields of architecture, urban planning, anthropology, sociology, public policy and other disciplines within the humanities (no background in the arts necessary).

For more information on eligibility, timeline, and how to apply, please see our Call for Proposals (click the link for the PDF). You can also request the CFP by emailing christina@yinzerspielen.org. Questions welcome!

PROPOSALS ARE DUE ON MARCH 8, 2013. Final decisions will be announced by March 15.

Want to know more about what a performance curator does? Here are some thoughts from Christina Kruise, one of the curators for UNLISTED: Twice in a Lifetime (Belgrade, September 2012):

What is a Performance Curator Part 1 (Christina) from Yinzerspielen on Vimeo.