Sing for me

In the last piece, I collected wedding songs. Reinhardswald it is called, named after the forest here in Germany that inspired many of the Brothers' Grimm fairy tales, and late in the piece Ryan came and asked me to find him some beautiful love songs.


Then Ben brought me a chainsaw and I went into the audience with a dictaphone to try to get people to sing for me.


After I'd collected 2 songs, I'd head back onstage and play them for Ryan, who'd hate the first and love the second. Then I'd dance around a bit with the chainsaw before chopping open the back wall to reveal a woods.




If this all sounds really weird, it's because it is. But scratch the surface and there's a logic in there. Ryan played the anti-hero of his own private fairy tale, searching for completion, answers, a happy ending. My character was sympathetic, willing to do something destructive in order to get something positive. As for the audience, just like in any fairy tale, they were essential. In order to get to the reinhardswald - the woods of imagination - we needed to finish the story. And to finish the story we needed love.

Practically speaking, it was hella hard. First of all, have you ever turned on a chainsaw? I had a lesson out in the theater yard with the prop guys one day, and yet I still always ended up with bruises on my thigh from the kick-back. And the songs? No one wanted to sing for me. It was an act of coercion each time.

Luckily, I often found people I knew in the audience, and over the course of 10 performances saved many of their songs. After the last show, we dancers added some of our own, and here they are. The video clip is from a rehearsal of the last section of the piece before we went on stage...

...and if you watch till the end you'll catch a sneak preview of catcher, our new piece premiering March 5th in the opera house.