Again on line, after a few days of empty prepaid sticks….Three days ago we had our first run: our first reality check with audience, most of them were people of steirische herbst, we showed a very rough proposition of what it can be. We had some songs, dances, acts. Some scenes seemed to work already very well, and also the rough structure in general made sense, but two things worked out quite alarming to me: first thing, my voice was still quite dominant in the total event, because I play the guide of the audience as a storyteller who takes them through the different phases in a journey. The voices of the others weren’t really heard in being in a group together, operating most in communal actions. And a second alarming fact: the only female performer in our crew struggled with her position to express something towards the dominance of the faun/boys band, boasting their sexual powers of having an erection and balls in a lot of songs and actions.

It felt as if I failed in my attempts to make a piece about a more balanced relationship between masculine and female energies within the bodies and minds of us all, and also my desire to have a non hierarchal collaboration seemed suddenly fake and pretentious, when I give myself such a dominant position towards the audience.

In the after talk everyone agreed that it was time to come out of the closet with their own engagement, that it was time to make songs alone, instead of making together everything. So far so good. But I felt  awkward and strange. As if I believed in something what I pushed too much to let it happen, and now i recognized that it didn’t happen. I had to go back to myself, stepped a little out of the group process, and tried to reconnect with the forest alone. I took time to find my own trajectory in the event, next to my role as guide. I hoped that also by redrawing myself from the group-process I would leave more space for the others to make something for themselves.

Now four days later, it seemed that we more on the right track again, every one is developing his own trajectory in the piece, individual songs are appearing and also the diversity in moving gets more profiled within a very lose composition of stretching time. It is funny to see, how much it helps to talk about everything thoroughly. I like always to hear everyone thinking out loud about what he or she experiences or thinks in the process, than immediately getting in discussion with each other about what to chose. Still I am founding out how to provide a way of working where everyones desire to do something is respected and also that there is a space for.

Oppositions are: how to give space and time for the landscape when we also must profile ourselves? And how to combine strong ideas about how to make theatre, with beliefs about   the healing aspect of a ritual in the forest.

Of course it has to do with a belief-system. I believe that the forest is my friend, a good listener and a great help in making the performance work. I worked already for a year with trees, and of course I am influenced by taking Ayuasca, this hallucinogen of the Amazon rain forest to see the trees as my sparring partner.  Others can think that such a belief is superficial, the forest can also be threatening, full of biting, blood sucking insects with diseases.

It would be beautiful when these different ideas about the forest can exit next to each other. Strangely enough I was never in crisis or despair in this production. I still feel it develops it by itself and every time we must rearrange ourselves, how to go on. And to be honest, i feel that i am too old to stress, i just must be creative with what is happening from moment to moment.

Sometimes making theatre starts with very fragile ideas, and how to keep this fragility alive instead of marginalized in the manifestations of these ideas.