Day 7 - Somebody hit the lights...

What is your favourite thing about Christmas?

Is it the little green triangles in Quality Street? Is it the way that last year the whole family ("all 22 of them"), gathered to eat around a table where the odd chair sizes meant that Granny couldn't reach her plate of pigs in blankets? 

Do you love singing Christmas songs in October? And are you of the opinion that Frozen is the best Christmas film ever? (evidently, the person who said that as the last session had never experienced the fabness that is Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone)

How do we express ourselves opinions like these to an audience? It is narrating or engaging in a conversation where we do all the talking? Simon did some great training exercises at the last session. 

The last session was mostly used as a way for the group to learn how to engage with an audience. Rather than just reading lines and returning to resting-resty-face for the rest of the performance, the group have to learn to always be engaged with the audience even when not directly having lines to read.

Day 6 - "Let's go from your line, Leon"

So the blog post about last week's session is finally here. I have no excuses, I've just been a busy little bee (the stars also aligned and it was my 21st birthday this Saturday!). With another gravitational orbit around the sun in the bag, I'd like to begin by mentioning that we were joined at the last session by Dr Victoria Nesfield, a research fellow at the University of Leeds, and also Dave Murray, a musician at the Leeds College of Music who is currently creating a musical piece to accompany the production. Together with Stuart Taberner, Victoria has written the conference exhibition panels and has done extensive research for the project, in collaboration with other academics internationally to create content.
After explaining to the group her own role within the project, Thomas asked Victoria, "will be be asked questions on our thoughts after the show?" I know that I'd like to see the group answer questions based on the focus material of the exhibition in relation to the performance piece.

I'd like to know what they really felt and thought about the content that has been covered.
For example:

• What has been learnt about Nazi persecution of the Jews? (Is there anything you didn't know before?)
• What was your favourite part of the performance and can you imagining it happening in real life?
• What do you think the passport puppets really represent?
• How can we learn from the experience of presenting a historical piece? (e.g. Acting can be a process of understanding)

If Anthony repeated the scenario from Day 1 where he asked the group "should a memorial be brutal or beautiful?", I wonder whether the group's opinions would change. Perhaps it can be deduced that most of the young people would now say, "memorials can be brutal and beautiful at the same time. We presented something brutal with the intention of making it beautiful". 

Do we give more worth to objects that are beautiful, or just to things that make a big impact? 

Apart from jobs I've had in the past directing students for a project in Ulm, Germany, I've never had experience directing anything of this scale. Okay, 'Falling to our knees' may only be 15 minutes long but there is a huge amount of text and ideas to work through in a really tight space of time. It needs to have a high impact on the audience, flitting between brutal and beautiful scenes of memorialising.

Rehearsals seem to be going well. The group are focussed on the text except for a few moments of excitement during the warm-up games (I'm looking at you, Jonah!). Lyle and Alfie have been working on their duologue as Rudi and Horst, two young boys who reach a conflict between life as a Jewish victim and life as a by-stander. For tonight it's time I stepped up to my role as Assistant Director and work through their lines with them, just Lyle and Alfie.

Day 5 - If you love someone who is guilty, do you become entangled in their guilt?

Last Monday's session was a BIG ONE. Jam-packed, even. After a rather silly and energetic start playing warm-up games, Simon got the group to focus on creating images. Not only did we rehearse a section in the play where these images would be later installed, but the group also thought about how perpetrators could have been anyone.

There's a brilliant book by Bernhard Schlink called Der Vorleser (The Reader), which was also adapted into a film. I urge you to either read the book or watch the film. It is a retrospective account from a middle-aged man reviewing his life as a young man at a stage in his life when he had an illicit relationship with a woman (whom he later found out had been an ex-Nazi worker). It is a novel about guilt, perpetrators and the fine line between perpetrator and victim. For instance, the protagonist could also have been a victim of the ex-Nazi worker's seduction. Above all, the quote with the most impact is, "was hätten Sie gemacht?" or "what would you have done?", when the ex-Nazi worker questions a court in a post-War trial where a group of Nazis perpetrators are being punished for their actions.


“If you love someone who is guilty, do you become entangled in their guilt? And can we choose who we love? It would be simple if the people who commit monstrous crimes were always monsters. But sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they are just ordinary people, our neighbours, our lovers, our teachers and our friends” (from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre – Operation Last Chance)


Texts like Der Vorleser often make the reader or viewer ask themselves questions. What if Nazis were just following orders, like dehumanised machines? What if normal, average people like you and I would have been too scared to resist Nazi persecution, out of fear of being branded as a Jew sympathiser? If pressure was being put on us by the government, and influences by the Nazi-indoctrinated education system were making our children question, "Daddy, why are you not saving our country like Elsie's daddy?", then surely we would have had no choice but to concede?

Lightbulb Moment...pun intended (ding ding)

The solution to last week's logistical nightmare of illuminating the stage to create a visual lightbulb memorial? A handheld, string-pulled, battery-operated lightbulb; donned by our very own Anthony. Isn't it jazzy!? (model not to scale, and not on Anthony's head for that matter, either)

Seriously though, when all the lights in Lawnswood's theatre had been turned off and passport puppets began to flit and dance around the test bulb like moths drawn to a flame, the effect was dreamlike and hypnotic. The test run was not without flaws, however it only makes me more excited for the finished product: the performance for the Transnational Holocaust Memorial on 26th and 27th January 2015. 

Below are some photos of our test run. Apologies for the poor quality; as usual I've been taking pictures using my phone.

As keen as ever to participate, Lyle is the first of the group to try out the lightbulb.

Perhaps an idea for staging would be that the young people hold the bulb further away from their face, so the audience doesn't see a modern version of the 'Mirror on the wall' from Snow White.

Although it can't really be transferred to computer screen in these stills, the movement of the passport puppet butterflies was spot on and I like how the light reflected onto the open pages.


The section might need to be slowed down slightly to show the audience that the puppets are actually zoomorphic passports in a portrayal of fluttering butterflies.

Next week, it's important to address that the group should not have their back's to the audience. Without realising it, one of the players stood in front of the light and completely blocked the image - as pictured below. Although it could be effective, the image was also too crowded but that is something we can work on in the next session.

Historical Accuracy in Drama Documentaries

I was doing a bit of googling today (because apparently 'to google' is a recognised verb now) and came across a really helpful BBC website on dramatising historical events.

It's been so useful having access to the exhibition panels for this conference; because even though I live, breathe and study German here at the University of Leeds, I've learned so much just from reading the exhibition content. That being said, just reading and taking notes on a subject does not particularly engage my brain as I am a kinaesthetic learner. Addressing texts with a view to putting events into a dramatic context really furthered my understanding of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and memorialising.

The problem with creating a historical drama, though, is making sure we don't mystify the past. There is a team of experts and academic staff working on the conference, who have provided extensive content and images. On this basis an accurate historical drama can be created.