Starting up again

August 18th. I can't believe this is only the 2nd full day in Schwedt. Each day feels like a week! Yesterday I had a really productive exchange with my collaborators Elizabeth Birmingham and Thomas Maucher with really great ideas being embodied. It's such a privilege to work with experienced performers who have choreography and teaching creds too. None of us are young, athletic dancers anymore but we can still capture the essence. One exercise: The childrens games we play that teach us to exclude and threaten others - very revealing. My favorite experiment was the work we did with Elizabeth's idea using crumpled paper. Unfortunately there is no internet yet at the Art school where we are working and I didn't have my camera. We worked from 11 to 2 or so and then, after grabbing my camera at the hotel, we were treated to a visit to Thomas' home - an old farm in a tiny village in the countryside. He and his wife have been working on restoring it for about 6 years. The original owner was forced off the land during the GDR days when Russia was in charge because he had spoken out against the socialistic system. That man was forbidden to come within 20 Km of his former home! Banished. In those days a lot of small farmers lost their land to the big communes. Those big communal farms have now become large conglomerates similar to the agri-business practices in the U.S. After a delicious meal of homemade bread, soup and cheeses from the local grocery (food prices are much lower here! Turns out U.S has the 3rd hightest food prices in the world), we were driven back along roads lined with apple trees (free for the picking, young trees planted recently to replace those cut down after re-unification when people no longer cherished them for the food they provided and considered them a nuisance with all the fruit on the roads). Tractors here are much smaller than what we see in Minnesota. Our last stop for the day was to see a rare house in Schwedt that survived WWII. We are considering it as a possible site for staging some scenes for the project. Today was also quite full. We started at noon, meeting another dancer who teaches here: Francesca Patrone. We talked with her about the work we had done the day before and then met three women from her class who had expressed interest in our project, ranging in age from 50 - 70. We were also joined by three young students, one of whom was in the workshop I did in 2018. All together there were 10 of us so we were able to try out a number of ideas. Francesca lead a warm up, Elizabeth gave an excercise for maintaining focus in performance, Thomas taught us the game we are calling Gates and I tried out some of the group tableaus inspired by the painting of the refugees I found on line. After a break to allow us to meet with the man (Norbert Hans?) who is organizing the Sounds of Schwedt festival for July of '23, we tried working with the words I pulled from The Good Immigrant book. Then EB and I took off practically running in the humid heat to the city hall where we had another meeting, this time with two ladies from the city government who work with youth programming. They gave us quite a number of contacts for people in the schools and at the theatre complex who may be able to help us recruit participants. And then we got rain! It was much needed and has cooled things down quite a bit. We found a nice Greek restaurant (where one is greeted with a shot of ouzo) and sat outside under the overhang while it poured rain. By the time we left it had stopped. By the way, there was a really big fish die off in the Ode recently and they finally figured out what happened. One of the Polish companies regularly deposits salt water in the river but with the low water levels there wasn't enough fresh water to dilute the salt for these fresh water river fish. Hopefully the river will recover after this rain but there are also algae blooms. Tomorrow I hope to post pictures to my facebook page. I left the camera by mistake (hope I'm never without it for the rest of the trip) in Thomas' car which we didn't discover in time for him to bring it today. I thought I'd left it at his house but then remembered taking pictures of the tractor we followed on the road for a bit. Also tomorrow: a visit to the new museum where the Synagogue once stood and another rehearsal at 5 pm.