I will never forget how frustrated I was after seeing my first show in German.
I was furious, annoyed, and completely submerged in stupid frustration. At the time when I was feeling frustrated, I wanted to undo my frustration but I couldn’t push it away. I thought I was the only one who didn’t understand what was going on but when I started talking to others about the show, I found out that I wasn’t the only one who was confused about the show that we watched. I can’t quite put my finger on why I was frustrated, but I think it has something to do with not understanding the context. I would have to say Christopher forced us to open our eyes and pushed us to step outside of our comfort zone from our first show. There are no words per say that can describe that night or even Berlin over all, except that you are pushed outside of your comfort zone constantly and forced to expand your mind and to be open to new knowledge. I couldn’t have done this by going to an American theater because there is no way I could have watched 18 shows in 21 days in America. I’ve never been mentally stimulated to think about theater so much in so little time. Also, seeing so many shows in German after Das Spiel Ist Aus showed me the point that Christopher was trying to prove: when watching a play, we should focus on the emotional rather than the literary context. As an actor, this is crucial for me to understand, but this also taught me how to watch theater- not that there is a right or wrong was, but I started building my taste by watching so many shows. I learned what I was more connected to- for instance, I saw so many amazing performances like Lars in Richard III, but I connected the most with Sesede from Mania.
Since I’ve left Berlin, Das Spiel Ist Aus has been seeping back into my thoughts more than I would have expected and I can’t help but to remember the opening scene and how beautiful it was. The lights went on and I found out I was sitting on the stage and that the actors were in the audience's seats and were stripped naked. Also, they were really confused looking which is how I felt from the moment they started speaking. My mind -used to following the literary context of a play- was overstimulated trying to follow the storyline… in German. It’s crazy that my mind knowing to try to just follow the story was trying to decode the emotional meaning behind what they were saying instead of just letting go of the words and allowing myself to follow what was happening on the stage visually. At some point, I became really tired during the show because my brain was exhausted. (This reaction to the show was also annoying me and I think it’s clear that I was very much in my head while watching this show.) I knew I was thinking too much during the show and I think this was the real reason why I was frustrated after the show. Because I was trying so hard to understand but I just didn’t, this forced me to just be when watching Woyzeck and that show was no problem to just not care about. I was just giving myself the chance to watch whatever came across my eyes (and I saw a lot) and I was also slowly getting used to the German language. I think that the fact that I was getting more used to the German language is crucial because their string of words’ rhythm is different from the English language. From my basic understanding of the German language, German morphology allows for shorter phrases to say the same thing as English because their words are longer because they combine words together to form a new word, which is a morphological rule we don’t have in English. Also, the German language uses cases heavily and don’t have a specific word order, whereas the English language does have a specific word order of subject-verb-object and no cases because it was lost during the Middle Ages. I think if I were thrown into seeing plays in Spanish, French, or Portuguese, I wouldn’t have been as surprised at first because I’m used to how the languages sound even if I don’t know how to speak them that well. So I guess I can diagnose my initial frustration during watching Das Spiel Ist Aus as culture shock. I quickly got over this though the more I heard the German language and grew accustomed to following the emotional storyline of a show the more I watched plays.
When watching Complexity of Belonging, I think one of the reasons why it impacted me so much is because I was just starting to follow the emotional storyline more than the literary storyline mixed with paying attention to acting and emotional life that I’ve been told to pay attention to since Basic and Intermediate Acting and never evolved to pay attention to anything else until Berlin. Because I was back in my comfort zone for a night and watching a show in English, I was watching an English language play with new eyes.
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