Friday, March 12, 2004

Odin 7. Grotowski room, dreamlord, dragons

This post was added later, backdated to when it was written.
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I am living in the Grotowski Room. It is the room Eugenio built for Grotowski to use when he visited. It is tiny, at the top of a flight of golden stairs, across from Eugenio's office. It is a sunken room, into which one steps steeply down, with white walls, a small desk, a skylight, and a bed tucked under the eaves. I open the skylight, look out onto snow and pink buds, and breathe icy air.

The theatre has a tiny dryer, so most people dry their clothes -- and costumes -- on the hot water pipes by the music room. I gazed at Iben's Itsi Bitsi costume there for long minutes. The entire performance is embodied in that costume. Yet at the same time, it's just a light piece of white cotton with red piping, hanging in the hall.

There are two refrigerators in our kitchen. Each person keeps their food in a plastic box in the fridge with their name on it. The whole counter is butcher-block-topped, so 20 people can make tea and lunch at once.

In Denmark there is no one Happy Birthdaysong; there are several. We sing one or many, and drink to the birthday person who has provided the lunch.

It is a theatre monastery. As plain, unremarkable, rare.

Each actor is a buddha, the director is a buddha, and when they are working in the room, it's a single buddha mind. The whole room responds to the slightest change in energy. In some phases, the director says what to do. In other phases, the actors and technicians and director move in their own orbits, preparing and working individually. At times, the director and actors and technicians sit in a circle, gazing at the empty stage, as if listening for the play to speak. Whoever hears it first, says something, or stands up and moves or sings, to demonstrate. No one speaks unless the spirit moves them to. Sometimes we are silent for a long time.

This theatre, like all Grotowski-lineage theatres, is grounded in daily physical and vocal training. "A fall of one centimeter is still a fall" says Roberta, moving in ultra-slow-motion from standing to lying down. These actors can do the precise wailing of Peking opera, the ululations of a Balinese shaman, the vibrating groan of a Tibetan monk.

Work starts at the theatre at 8:00. The schedule is:
Staff - 8-5, Mon-Fri, though some come in on Sundays too
Actors - 8-10, individual training
10-4 rehearsal
4-on, one's own work for the theatre
Tuesdays at 8:15-9:15am, all-company meeting
"Murrrrrr-deh, murrrrrrr-deh," cries Roberta through the halls on Tuesday mornings, sounding like a cheerful Lady Macbeth.

I have edited the website, two papers, and a plaque, and translated a long poem from Danish to English, then retranslated it to make it singable. Working for the theatre feels like cleaning it; when I serve it, I belong.

I brought with me a laptop, Wacom tablet, printer, and current-converter. I write and draw, and watch the DVD, About A Boy, in my room. There is a resonance between its theme -- "Two people is not enough" -- and the Odin.

Usually I have a steady sense of purpose; but my purpose has always been, to get to a place like this. Now that I'm here, I feel only white silence. "I am dreamless in the house of the dreamlord," I wrote Eugenio last week. Which is ironic, since I, too, am a dreamlord.

But a baby one, my wings still furled, crouched contentedly in the weir from which great dragons come and go. Sigrid, who has done the company's finances for years, is one such dragon. Ulrik, an actor in the company for years, now the liaison with the town, is another. Even the apprentices are dragons, wheeling on the winds of the Odin, bathed in sunlight and flame.

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