Beautiful Berlin Day 3

Day 3 in Berlin, though a bit cold, was beautiful, so we decided to spend the afternoon outside at Sanssouci, a palace on the outskirts of the city.

It had a windmill. Awesome.

It is quite a brightly colored place

We found a nice spot for the picnic lunch we'd brought and set up camp.

Lots of cheeses, meats, breads, and fruit. yummmmm.

Most specifically, this:

Fresh goat cheese and raspberries on a soft baguette. Win.

And of course there was wine. And of course we forgot cups. And of course we're classy:

We were right near a pond. This duck was an asshole:

After we ate, we wandered around the gardens a bit

While the sun started to set...

We found statues to make friends with!

Katie and Athena became a bit too close...

In the center, there was a pedestal with no statue on it, so of course we had to create our own:

I don't really know what Fran and G. Ben are doing in the photo on the left. Clearly it's dramatic though. Also, G. Ben has a great arabesque.

After we were satisfied with our statuesque poses, we continued wandering to another building that's somehow part of the castle. Maybe I should know these things but we didn't take a formal tour...

It was pretty though. And deserted.

mmmm sunset and cool clouds :)

As it got dark we decided to leave, but had to battle the windmill to get past.

Facing the bus stop was the backside of the castle, with lots of pillars and stuff. It was cool in the dark

Time for more food! We spent the evening at a suuuuuper traditional german restaurant. It sort of felt like a classier, german-style cracker barrel.

And since the napkins were folded artfully, we had to play with them

LOOK AT MY DINNER! 4 or 5 different kind of meat, mushrooms, potatoes, and tangy sauce. So german. So delicious.

And for dessert, a small scoop of ice cream on a large pile of fruit soaked in either rum or vodka, don't remember which.

Hey, if you had consumed the whole bowl, you wouldn't remember either.

And to end this post with a smile, here are a couple of hedgehogs that were on the shelf next to our table.

I like them. I hope you do too :)

Berlin Continues...with Brunch.

Won't lie. Day two in Berlin meant brunch again, this time at the Fleury Cafe. Not nearly as epic though. Well, the food wasn't epic, though it was delicious.

The hot chocolate was a bit epic:

G. Ben takes a moment to experience the epic-ness of his hot chocolate:

It was a lovely french brunch out on the patio :)

Oh man that omelette was so good.

This bird kept visiting the table next to us to snack on butter! I had trouble catching him in the act, but there is evidence: butter on the beak!

Then, lots of walking around various neighborhoods. Berlin is FILLED with graffiti! (lots of new additions to my graffiti album on facebook soon)

Museum Island!

We didn't actually go in the museums on the island, but it's pretty none-the-less.

Right near the island there was a little artists market set up. G.Ben found this awesome stein with whiskers:

Francesca tried on hats:

So did Katie:

Then we found our way to a Tapas bar, but not for tapas. Just for wine.

We ordered a litre of wine, which was delivered in this sweet metal canister. Plehals will recognize the style - it's the same as the cups at the cabin!

I forgot to mention that at the artist's market, Francesca bought a fierce pair of long red leather gloves. So clearly she had to wear them while delicately drinking wine:

Next was possibly my favorite part of the trip. We had happend to pass a sign advertising a cello concert that evening, so we came back to hear it. It was in a beautiful candle-lit room (yes, those are candles on the chandelier) with an old piano. The cellist was BRILLIANT. It was really incredible to sit so close and listen to him play.


I will update this post once I uncover my program (or borrow Katie's) so I can include the cellist's name, and maybe some of the repertoire.

Unfortunately, my camera died before I could stealthily snap a photo of the cellist, but I did get a nice one of the wine and pretzel I enjoyed during the concert, of course :-P

Berlin Begins with Brunch

The title doesn't lie. The first thing we did in Berlin was find food. And it happend to be brunch.

And that brunch just happened to be at MorgenLand, the nine-time winner of the title "Best Brunch in Berlin". Lucky us, since we just picked a random restaurant and walked in off the street, not even knowing that brunch existed in Berlin.

It does. And it is epic:

No, I don't know who that guy is. I also don't know what all the dishes are, but I do know that there wasn't anything there that didn't taste good.

Oh, and there was more.

There were 2 other counters you can't see in these photos. One with sausages and chili and pasta, one with more fruit, crepes, and crepe toppings. Oh and hummus!

To my extreme excitement, one of the bowls in the photo above had rice pudding!! They didn't have cinnamon sugar to put in it, so I had to get creative with Cinnamon Toast Crunch:

WIN!

And what are those pretty wine glasses filled with something delicious, you ask? A lovely creamy-fluffy-champagney-mousse. yumtastic.

We went back for seconds. and thirds. and fourths. until we couldn't move. Little did we know this would be come a theme for the week...

After we regained mobility, we decided to walk the brunch off a bit, and headed to a palace in the middle of the city, though I don't remember it's name. It's pretty though :)

So is Francesca!

A nice walk through the park brought us around the grounds and right up to the palace:

A view from the other side, after the sun began to set:

Still too full from brunch, we skipped dinner and decided to get Hookah. When we walked in there were some communication difficulties, but it worked out in our favor, because they sat us in the back in an awesome tent with cushions and pillows!

Hookah, hot tea, and cold mojitos. mmmmm....

So relaxing :) The right way to start spring break!

(btw, Fran took this photo. In it are G. Ben, Me, Katie, and Mickey)

A Midwinter's Experiment

Way back in the fall, one of our professors made an off-handed comment about matching actor energies with character energies, and used an example of casting one of us in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

As many of you may know, I love the hypothetical casting game. Plays, Disney characters, animals, doesn't matter. Give me a group of people and roles to cast them in and I will have a blast.

Therefore, I stopped paying attention to the lecture (Sorry Peppy) and proceeded to cast our cohort in the roles of Midsummer. It worked out amazingly well. So well in fact, that I started brewing an idea of how we could actually put on this show, as a bit of an experiment.

Long story short, I got all 11 others on bored, secured space for us to rehearse over winter break, and we created our own version of the show.

A bit different from your usual Midsummer...

Oberon (me) and Titania (Rowan)

We wanted to use the well-known text and ensemble nature of the show to put into practice things we'd been learning so far in our program.

We cut about half the text, keeping only what was necessary, and focusing on how we could tell the story physically.

First example of a pretty major cut to the script: Egeus. He's gone. Well, not really. He takes the form of a letter:

Lysander (Robbie), Hermia (Nicole), and Demetrius (Jared) with letter

We were divided more-or-less into three groups, Lover, Fairies, Mechanicals (players). Each group focused on a particular movement vocabulary as a starting point for staging.

The lovers used a combination of stage combat (fight directed by Rowan):

Demetrius and Lysander

and contact improvisation...

Helena (Chloe) and Demetrius

The lovers also took a really realistic, youthful and raw approach to the characters.

And there was lots of fighting. It was awesome.

Lysander and Demetrius

Everyone got involved:

Hermia tries to fly!!

The Fairies took an acrobatic approach:

Puck (Mickey) and Oberon

Also, since there are only 12 of us, the fairies became four actors: Oberon, Titania, Puck, and Fairy/Peaseblossom/Cobweb/Moth/Mustardseed/allrolledintooneschizophrenicfairy.

Puck and Fairy (Sophie)

There was a lot of climbing on each other and upside-down stuff

Titania and Oberon

lots of climbing...

Puck and Oberon

*Are you looking closely? Some of these photos were taken at our dress rehearsal, and some during our performance, so costumes and tattoos change a bit :-P

We also condensed the mechanicals from 6 people to 4. They started their work from a slapstick approach:

Quince (Scotty), Flute (Taylan), Bottom (Francesca), Starveling (Renia)

Notice, an actual slapstick.

Flute and Quince

We really wanted to (and had to) keep design elements simple, so we got creative with costume accents and props

Bottom [as ass] and Starveling

The mechanicals were ridiculous. And hilarious!

Flute and Bottom, with Starveling behind

Some of the most exciting parts were when character from different worlds (and thus, different movement vocabularies) interacted. This lead to bizarre fusions like acrobatic-combat or acrobatic-slapstick:

Bottom [as ass] and Titania, one of my favorite photos!

Since we put the whole show together in about 2 weeks, it wasn't perfect, but it was a really great experiment, and I think we were all pretty pleased with what we came up with :)

If you're interested in watching the whole show, you can! It's all online, thanks to G. Ben Fred's cinematic skills.

Speaking of skills, a big thanks to Katie Dingle for taking all of these photos!

Wow, this suddenly became a closing night speech. I should wrap up. I will leave you with one last photo of Lysander and Demetrius. But mainly Lysander: