Summary: Tiring day! Train a dozen Arabic actors and students; see Aviva's company perform
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We're humbled by how tiring we find it to not be in control of basic things: when and what we eat, when and where we sleep. We ended the day close to midnight and utterly spent.
I have only 20 min. of power left on my computer, so I'll try to keep this short. (Ha!) Our workshop at the Arabic Cultural Center was chaotic but successful in terms of our primary goal: to interest participants enough that a core group wants to continue and form an ongoing Playback group. Amazing (read more and see photos)
to think that we may have played a key role in starting the first two Arab-Israeli Playback companies! We just had to be willing to put ourselves out there: to be willing instruments of Dorit's dreams and fulfill the role she needed. This session was quite different from Thursdays, in that 9 of the dozen participants were teenage acting students, beautiful and eager and lively although far less skillful (in both listening and acting) than the adults. Until the last half hour, I didn't even know the adults present were professional actors! So the workshop design wasn't ideal... and translating into both Hebrew and Arabic was cumbersome with many different people wanting to translate... but what the hell. We made especially strong contact with the Artistic Director of the theatre and by the end he had clearly caught the vision of how powerful Playback can be.
After that, the obligatory delicious long lunch at our host restaurant... long drive to Tel Aviv in the back of Dorit's car, snoozing on Christopher's shoulder... tantalizingly brief recovery time in our apartment... then drive with Aviva to a performance of her Playback company at a beautiful little black box theatre. Most of the company members have performed together for 20 years! They were wonderfully skillful -- and the show itself seemed flat to us. Our private feeling about most of the stories offered was, "So what?" But our responses may have been tempered by fatigue: the show didn't even begin until nearly 9pm, and I could only catch every 5th word or so from the woman whispering translation for us. Of course, our driver got lost on the way home!
Glimpses from our training:
______
We're humbled by how tiring we find it to not be in control of basic things: when and what we eat, when and where we sleep. We ended the day close to midnight and utterly spent.
I have only 20 min. of power left on my computer, so I'll try to keep this short. (Ha!) Our workshop at the Arabic Cultural Center was chaotic but successful in terms of our primary goal: to interest participants enough that a core group wants to continue and form an ongoing Playback group. Amazing (read more and see photos)
to think that we may have played a key role in starting the first two Arab-Israeli Playback companies! We just had to be willing to put ourselves out there: to be willing instruments of Dorit's dreams and fulfill the role she needed. This session was quite different from Thursdays, in that 9 of the dozen participants were teenage acting students, beautiful and eager and lively although far less skillful (in both listening and acting) than the adults. Until the last half hour, I didn't even know the adults present were professional actors! So the workshop design wasn't ideal... and translating into both Hebrew and Arabic was cumbersome with many different people wanting to translate... but what the hell. We made especially strong contact with the Artistic Director of the theatre and by the end he had clearly caught the vision of how powerful Playback can be.
After that, the obligatory delicious long lunch at our host restaurant... long drive to Tel Aviv in the back of Dorit's car, snoozing on Christopher's shoulder... tantalizingly brief recovery time in our apartment... then drive with Aviva to a performance of her Playback company at a beautiful little black box theatre. Most of the company members have performed together for 20 years! They were wonderfully skillful -- and the show itself seemed flat to us. Our private feeling about most of the stories offered was, "So what?" But our responses may have been tempered by fatigue: the show didn't even begin until nearly 9pm, and I could only catch every 5th word or so from the woman whispering translation for us. Of course, our driver got lost on the way home!
Glimpses from our training:
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