Posts filed under 'General'
Hi everyone!
I’m Boris Wilke and member of the Prague Playhouse Meisner acting group. I blog about our class activities.
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Let me be short and concise today!
I am totally thrilled about Mark Wakeling’s return to Prague in a month. In case you haven’t heard of him: He is a teacher at the “Actor’s Temple” in London. He held a weekend-seminar in late November of 2009 for us Meisner students at the Prague Film School. (Click here to read about it!) Now he promised to be back from June 7 to 11.
The seminar last year rocked my soul. It helped me keep on keeping on at this difficult time, where none of my efforts at getting started as a professional actor really seem to succeed. His version of Meisner also kept me from dropping out of this class. I have been looking forward to his oncoming seminar ever Brian started to talk about it, i.e. at least four months.
If you can afford it and have the time, please register for the seminar!
Mark will try his best to confront you with the inner barriers you set up to protect yourself against intense feelings. He is relentless in a way. But since Meisner is about the truth, it is absolutely necessary to get rid of these blocks. Mr. Wakeling will get you at places you wouldn’t even have known existed. If you trust him at least a little bit, he will help you free quite a bit of the aspects you carefully held captive inside for so long. You will shine!
Meisner is about getting ready to play anything – no! to be able to live it under imaginary circumstances. If you dare use the technique to the extreme – which Mark will help you with – it will get you there.
Mr. Wakeling will give you a good kick in the butt that will let you fly in the right direction.
He will take Meisner’s image of “the pinch and the ouch!” in a totally new and really pinchey-ouchey direction.
And that is absolutely, mind-bogglingly exiting to me.
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General stuff:
Our acting class consists of some twelve new and not so new active members, who meet every Monday and Wednesday from 6.30 pm to about 9.30 at the Prague Film School. We do Meisner. And the Meisner-technique really rocks!
If you want to connect with your inmost feelings, expressing them freely in an acting environment and thus getting to know yourself better and better, feel free to join us! If you do, be prepared for some serious thrills!
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About the author:
I am Boris Wilke, a German expat in Prague.
I am a writer at large and have been studying Meisner since January 2008. If any of you know of any kind of acting work that befits a laddish, tall 41-year-old, please leave a note!
May 5th, 2010
Monday is the start of a new semester for the Meisner Class, as well as the new advanced acting class (scene study), which is a continuation of the work which is being done in the Meisner class. If you’re interested in joining the Meisner class, please send an email or come to audit the class. The new Meisner class will run every Monday and Wednesday 18:30-21:30 from May 3rd to August 11th.
New students are always welcome!
May 3rd, 2010
Mark Wakeling, the founder of the Actor’s Temple in London, will be returning to Prague June 7th to the 11th for what is sure to be another extremely motivating and informative workshop. Mark has been a strong supporter of what the Playhouse has been doing in terms of training and has very generously agreed to come and do this 5 day workshop for a fraction of what it would cost in London.
Workshop participants will pay just 5 000 Kc for the 5 days. Observers are welcome to join for 100 Kc per day. If you are interested in signing up for either the workshop or to come as an observer, please get in touch with me via email. There is limited space available, so don’t delay! If you have wondered about acting or what actors do to prepare, you don’t want to miss this. This is training that you won’t get anywhere else in Prague!
May 3rd, 2010
Well, folks, the 2010 Expats.cz and Prague.tv Playwriting Contest is behind us now. As I said at the Awards Ceremony, it simply would not have happened without all of the folks that donated their time to acting or directing, working behind the scenes and out with the public, to the folks that came to see it and voted for the winner of the audience award. The sponsors really came through in a big way as well and helped us with everything from a place to play, to advertising, to props, to prizes for the participants.
There are simply too many people to thank, but I want everyone to know that there is no way that any of this would happen without you!
Without further ado, I would like to congratulate Cohen Ambrose, who won the jury prize for Best Play for his piece “Hole in the Wall”. The award was based on the revised script and not the realization of the play. Julek Neumann and company won the audience award for Josh Kaston’s play “The Great Indoors”. The judging was fierce and the three finalists were really really close. Any one of the plays could have won the final prize. We are really indebted to all of the writers who submitted their work to the contest and hope that whether you won or not, you take the opportunity to push your work to the next level.
After the break, I just wanted to put down a few words about why we do the contest in the first place: why it was started and whether we will continue to do it.
Over the past four years I have been involved with the Playwriting Contest (first with the Prague Post and now with Expats.cz and Prague.tv), I have been amazed at the dedication and creativity of the writers. The contest itself came about after a discussion following the 24 hour play festival with Anne McDonough. She mentioned that there were tons of writers in Prague who were yearning to get their work out there into the public. There was some discussion as to whether that was still true (this was back in 2006) or whether the idea was a holdover from the mid-90s.
I didn’t think much of it until talking with my then-girlfriend who worked at the Prague Post about doing something that would really be an anchor in the Prague artistic community. She was looking for an opportunity for the Prague Post to get involved in the community, something that would bring it front and center within the expat calendar. So we hatched a plan: the Prague Post would do the organization and marketing of a contest and we (the Prague Playhouse) would take care of the production and artistic end. The whole goal from both sides was getting people involved.
The response was fantastic. Writers opened up their drawers, dusted off that old copy of the play they were working on and got to work. Quite a few folks who had always wanted to write a play but never had a reason sat down and put something on paper. A lot of the submissions were obviously green attempts. Quite a few of them had a germ of something but didn’t have the dramatic or theatrical bent that would make them good theater, and some of them were obviously written by people who knew exactly what they were doing. We opened up the eligibility to people from all over the world as long as they had lived in the Czech Republic at some point. And we got a lot of submissions.
That first year, the best thing about the contest for me was going around and meeting with writers. They were people that were in the community, they were a part of the community, but I, who had been in the acting/producing side of things for a few years at that point, had no idea that they were there. The writers had something to shoot for. It was a fantastic feeling when Rich Byrne, who would eventually win the contest, came over from Washington, D.C. to take part in the process. He has been a strong supporter ever since and a very strong voice for the writers community. He has repeatedly said that the cash prize was nice, but that the real benefit to him as a writer was being able to work with a director and actors on his script, was watching the script take shape on the stage and being there when an audience takes it in and makes it their own.
And every subsequent year has been like that. The real pleasure in doing this work is watching a dispirit group of artists come together and work to bring a local writer’s words to life and to watch what that process does to the writer. Sure there are disappointments along the way. There are arguments and there is drama. There is always a moment when the whole project is teetering on the edge of collapse. But we push through it and make it work.
The contest has not been without criticism. The first year, the judging process was not perfect and the work that went into the plays during rehearsal was not recognized: a change that we made in subsequent years. Often the winner of the audience award, which is voted on by the attendees, is different to the play that wins the jury prize, which is based solely on the written script. This leads to surprise in the audience when a play that they didn’t like wins the big prize. But, again, as I said on Tuesday night after the contest: the biggest prize is that the work is produced.
So. What is going to happen next year? I’m not sure. We are talking about changing the format of the contest so that instead of three half-hour plays, we produce only one full length play. The half-hour format is problematic as plays of that length don’t have much of a possibility to go on to other venues. We are also concerned as the number of writers submitting is going down. Whether that is due to writers not wanting to write and submit when they feel the process is not fair or whether they blew their wad on one year and don’t have another play, we need to have enough submissions to make the contest viable. We would also like the quality of the submitted plays to be improving over time. We love that there are first time playwrights that submit and we want to encourage that, but we also want to foster authors to use better dramatic structure, more imaginative situations, more truthful dialog, more expressiveness of themselves. In short, if the contest is to continue, we want it to be a way for the authors who submit to really work on their writing and use it as a tool to learn and improve.
We are having a meeting soon to talk about the future season and what changes need to happen. I will let you know the outcome!
April 1st, 2010
If you’ve been holding out on coming to the 2010 Expats.cz and Prague.tv Playwriting Contest performances, your last chance is Tuesday, March 30th at 18:30. We moved the time up an hour to make room for the Awards Ceremony and after party which you’re invited to. There will be free food and drink thanks to Troja Catering!
There are tickets still available, but I would highly recommend ordering beforehand online (you can pay for them at the door) as it is likely to sell out.
The show is at Divadlo Ponec (Husitska 24a in Prague 3).
Tickets for the final night are 280 Kc general / 250 Kc students and seniors.
March 29th, 2010
The 2010 Expats.cz and Prague.tv Playwriting Contest continues tonight! There are still tickets available, so get yourself down to Divadlo Ponec (Husitska 24) by 19:30 to join in this celebration of local writers. If you’re not available tonight, you still have 2 more chances: Saturday night at 19:30 (tickets for this are going fast, so book now!) and Tuesday night, which includes the closing night awards ceremony and party catered by Troja Catering. Both shows will be really well attended, so don’t be lazy about getting tickets!
I have to say that I am really proud of all of the participants in this year’s contest. We have really seen a lot of growth in the contest since the beginning 4 years ago. There have been challenges, sure, but they have been overcome and the result is a wonderful testament to local artists creating theater. Come out and support it!
March 24th, 2010
Buy your tickets now! Order them online.
There are four shows and each night you are going to see all three finalist plays. Show lasts approximately two hours including an intermission. At the end of the show audience is asked to vote for their favorite play.
Shows take place in:
Divadlo Ponec (map)
Husitská 24a
130 00 Praha 3
222 543 449
Sun 21 Mar, 2010 @ 19:30
Wed 24 Mar, 2010 @ 19:30
Sat 27 Mar, 2010 @ 19:30
Tue 30 Mar, 2010 @ 18:30, award ceremony and closing party following
General admission for Mar 21-27 is 220 Kč, students and seniors 200 Kč.
General admission for Mar 30 is 280 Kč, students and seniors 250 Kč; price of the ticket includes drinks and buffet.
To learn more about the contest, finalist plays and participants go to www.playwritingcontest.cz
March 7th, 2010
Hi everyone!
I’m Boris Wilke and member of the Prague Playhouse Meisner acting group. I blog about our class activities.
***************
Rambo was very boring, really; so was the Terminator. They might have blown up a lot of things. They might have acted tough. They were always in control. But they were quite predictable. Those two guys had thrown their inner child into the deepest dungeon inside of them and let it languish there.
I strongly believe that art is letting the inner child roam freely.
The Meisner technique itself is not art. But it might help you become an artist.
Some people mistake a Meisner exercise for a Rambo-like hurt-fest of lashing out and yelling at their partner, i.e. of being beastly and heartless. They’d rather hurt other people than get hurt by colliding with the truth. The truth only really hurts, if it differs from one’s preconceived notion of self. When the emperor was told he was naked, he must have felt horrible as well.
Other people remain stone-faced and start to bolt into themselves, I mean their stone-faced fortress, as soon as their counterpart displays any type of feeling other than stone-facedness itself. They switch to boring Terminator-like “I-couldn’t-care-less”-mode as soon as they are confronted with the consequences of being truthful and in the moment: a reaction on the part of their partner they have no control over.
An experience similar to the following one that an unwitting patient had with his truly awfully truthful doctor, might be, what these stone-faces loathe. It boils down to this:
Patient: “What was it, that you said about star-signs the last time I consulted you?”
Doctor: “I talked about cancer, mister! YOU got cancer!”
The stone-faces of this world rather risk getting cancer by suppressing the truth than to face it, I dare-say.
When the two partners in a Meisner exercise really are ready for the truth, they will react strongly to it, though. It might make them scream and fume with rage, like Rambo. Or their face will turn gray and stone-like for a moment, like the Terminator. But they will take the truth in rather than switch to boring “I-am-offended-now”-mode immediately or to dismiss it by making it bounce off of their stone-faced façade. The truth, if ingested fully, will rummage around your insides and hit something out of you so fast, you won’t be able to control it.
The inner child is very small and vulnerable. To allow it to roam free, as I mentioned in the beginning, is an act of faith: faith in your partner that he will be truthful rather than hurtful and faith in yourself that you will be able to take it when the truth hurts.
That’s all there is to the Meisner technique, really.
And that’s all I have to say today.
**********************
General stuff:
Our acting class consists of some twelve new and not so new active members, who meet every Monday and Wednesday from 6.30 pm to about 9.30 at the Prague Film School. We do Meisner. And the Meisner-technique really rocks!
If you want to connect with your inmost feelings, expressing them freely in an acting environment and thus getting to know yourself better and better, feel free to join us! If you do, be prepared for some serious thrills!
There will be no class from the second week of February on until the end of the month. It will resume in March!
+++
About the author:
I am Boris Wilke, a German expat in Prague.
I am a writer at large and have been studying Meisner since January 2008. If any of you know of any kind of acting work that befits a laddish, tall 41-year-old, please leave a note!
February 4th, 2010
Hi everyone!
I’m Boris Wilke and member of the Prague Playhouse Meisner acting group. I blog about our class activities.
***************
This blog entry is closely related to my last one on keeping face. Brian has been telling us repeatedly to let go off control. The reaction to one’s respective partner should come “like hiccups”, involuntarily, instinctually.
Meisner’s main credo was “fuck polite”.
Politeness always gets in my way! Let’s say, the person in front of me smells from their mouth. See?! I’m being polite again! I wanted to say: If they stink from their mouth, I fail to tell them, for example. I suppress my instinct. Shame on me!
As an interesting note aside: “To stink from one’s mouth” is the direct, i.e. German, way to say it. The cowardly polite Anglos talk about “bad breath” or “mouth odor”. That sucks! In the English language there seem to be either euphemisms or four-letter-expletives. Where is the zone of truthful naming it, nailing it – so to speak – in between those two extremes?
“You have bad breath…” “I have bad breath?” “You have bad breath…” That’s as boring as a cold potato! Go get yourselves a life, people!
It is: “You reek from your mouth like a cow out of its ass!” Where is the fuck, the shit, the damn, the cunt, huh? None of that! And still, this is painfully truthful!
God! That gets me going!
Why are we like this?
I, for one, know that I am absolutely scared of total defeat. And total defeat is a possibility if one “drops one’s bowels onto the stage”. In the past people have been sneering at me, belittling me, pointing their finger at me laughing because of my openness. They called me naive, immature, nasty, weird. They deemed themselves superior and took it out on me by ignoring me, bad-mouthing me, excluding me, cursing me, even hitting me.
The worst thing was, when they let me feel like a weirdo.
I got to nurture my inferiority complexes big time.
I still knew, deep inside, that they sensed somehow I was giving them a gift: my true self. I gave them my heart. But instead of being happy and thankful about it, they dropped it on the floor and trampled on it, just because what was not to be, could not be. And love simply was not an option for them. So they destroyed it, even before it really reached them.
They made me feel like shit – asocial, useless, deranged, ugly, geeky, clumsy – even presumptuous!
Most of those fuckers, I would refuse to touch even with a ten-foot-pole. But they mistook my love for a fumbling pass.
And then I closed myself off. I kept my gob smack shut and pretended to play along. I smiled and went through the moves as well as I was able to. I started to hold back – and later ration – the love I had to give.
I know, some of you will react to my liberal and free – yes: liberated! – use of the word love by putting me down like this: “How dare he say he was loving! He thinks he’s better than us – what does he call us? – «fuckers»?”
But I am talking about my past. This hell started in kindergarten. If this applies to you – yes! – then shame on you for letting innocent, lovely people run into your ready and open knives – for subjecting them to social suicide, just because they were being bold enough – no! They simply dared – to be themselves!!! You let them suffer for their refusal to play by the rules of make believe and cheapskate charades that kids and certainly teenagers create around themselves to spread fear and misery. And all that, because you were even more scared of showing your true colors than we were.
Why?
I have been asking myself this so many times: What do people have to hide that they think they’d rather die than tell us? In class of late, we have been hearing stories like: “My step-mother laughed at my singing in public. I used to love singing. But I’ve hated my voice ever since and never sung out loud again!” or: “Just a few days after my arrival at our new home, my uncle and my father drove with me to a soccer field. And I was supposed to train with the local kids. They were playing in a way that reminded me of urban warfare – so tough! I was scared stiff and refused to get out of the car. But instead of understanding me, my elders were disappointed with me and made me feel like a total loser! They were actually ashamed of me and let me suffer for it, too!”
These stories are lovely in that they talk about true anguish and failure. They make the people who tell them human and amiable. All Tarantino-style bragadero bullshit you hear from so many people “in the business” is just so bloody lame. Yeah, Warren Beatty had sex with over 12,000 women – or was it inflatable dolls?
Who cares? Thinking about it: What do stories like this tell us about their creators? Why did they have to go to such extremes? How wretched must they be, really? Poor things!
True stories about what we feel deeply about – oftentimes it is shame and defeat – are harder to tell than those overblown success stories from the media. But the more of these truly intimate tales we hear the more we come to realize that what we thought was unique in us and dreadfully shameful, is commonplace among our peers. Even murder and incest are aspects of the human condition everybody has to deal with in some way.
Telling these stories is therapy without a therapist – self-healing, so to speak.
So what keeps us from letting go off control? It’s ancient events, the memories of which we buried deep inside, thinking if we ever unearth them we will die of embarrassment and/or shame.
How will we be able to “spill our guts”, as Brian calls it, though, if we get spooked by these ghosts from the distant past? They are just figments of our imagination, really. But they will keep on haunting us, if we don’t finally address them by dragging them out in the open and facing them in broad daylight. What seems like powerful wraiths while rummaging around in the bowels of our subconscious will turn out to be a puny puff of fog fading faster into the air and with way less smell than a real fart you let.
I have seen so many class members give in to self-generated fear. They refused to go back to class due to their reluctance to lift up their carpets and chase those pesky little ghosts from the past out. I am afraid that to this day they keep them roaming inside like gas moving up and down one’s intestines. A simple fart can give you a bad bout of colic, you know? I’m sure even the Queen of England has been told time and again by her doctors to rather create a stir among her subjects by breaking wind than keeping the little buggers inside.
And I think while it would be nice of us to expose our shit from the past to the scrutinizing light of day in class, we are free to use other ways to do it. Therapy is an option. But that takes time and money. Writing a journal about it is free and quite powerful – for the ones who can relate to that. Meditation is fine; so is yoga – even sport! Talking to one’s best friend can do the trick as well.
But done it must be! The sooner we realize that, the better off we are, i.e. the faster we can let ourselves go, the more truthful and in the moment we become. Remember: Meisner training is getting us prepared to act. And to me acting is the best thing in the world!
Yes, we can become instinctual. Yes, our reactions can leap out of us like a cough or a hiccup: wild, loud and ugly! That really is beautiful – and true!
We just have to let go off control.
So let’s do it! Just do it!
**********************
General stuff:
Our acting class consists of some twelve new and not so new active members, who meet every Monday and Wednesday from 6.30 pm to about 9.30 at the Prague Film School. We do Meisner. And the Meisner-technique really rocks!
If you want to connect with your inmost feelings, expressing them freely in an acting environment and thus getting to know yourself better and better, feel free to join us! If you do, be prepared for some serious thrills!
There will be no class from the second week of February on until the end of the month. It will resume in March!
+++
About the author:
I am Boris Wilke, a German expat in Prague.
I am a writer at large and have been studying Meisner since January 2008. If any of you know of any kind of acting work that befits a laddish, tall 41-year-old, please leave a note!
January 30th, 2010
Mind the Gap Films, an Irish TV production company, will be in central Prague to record the musical extravanganza,Halleluiah Broadway, on Feb 8th for American Public Television.
We would like to invite any members or friends of the Playhouse theatre who are fans of Musical Theatre to be part of our special invited audience on the evening.
In Halleluiah Broadway, we harness the emotional power of the songs that have so inspired millions of theatre goers and gather them all together in one feast of entertainment. This show is high on emotion with a true spiritual connection at its heart. We have selected the most uplifting and powerful songs from the great Broadway musicals and they will be sung in Church, accompanied by a full Orchestra and Choir.
Halleluiah Broadway will feature star performances from three featured soloists – the amazing Rodrick Dixon, formerly of Three Mo Tenors, the powerful soprano from the Chicago Symphony Alfreda Burke, and the marvellous Irish Tenor Anthony Kearns.
We will also feature as a special guest one of Broadway’s leading ladies – Linda Eder.
If you, or any friends of the Playhouse would like to be part of this very special evening then we would love to hear from you by Wednesday January 27th.
Email your name, contact phone number and the number of tickets you would like to: tickets@mindthegapfilms.com
Audience tickets are free of charge but strictly limited. If you apply and are successful, you will be contacted by a member of the production team with further details.
Please forward this to anyone you think might be interested and don’t hesitate to get in touch with me if you would like any further information!
January 24th, 2010
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