»I could never be in love with someone whose name looks orange«

Nachtschicht, May 28, 2010, 21:30 h, Schauspielhaus/Foyer
Dance/Performance

»Pickled ginger tastes light green and has little sparkles inside that make the tongue go violet. Sweet ginger is different: yellow with small crowns on top.«

In their performance: »I could never be in love with someone whose name looks orange« the two dancers Asher O’Gorman (IRE) and Malika Fankha (CH) dig deeper into perception. Perception is receiving and processing information with our senses. Everybody perceives themselves and their world in a unique way and has their own definition of reality.

The piece is an exploration into the subject of a phenomenon called »synesthesia«, this is a perceptional condition in which the five senses become mixed up. Synesthetes may hear colours, see sounds or taste a touch.

»I could never be in love with someone whose name looks orange« is about the way the two performers experience daily life. They share stories from their childhood both inspiring and frustrating and take the audience on a sensory journey into a world where music is colourful and letters taste like fruit salad.

Brooke Bryant

Hello again from Nashville! I’ve been thinking about your production of FFL and how much I wish I could see it. As you know, actors in the states (unless starts of TV and screen) usually “wear another hat,” or in other words have at least on other job, to make ends meet. My “other hat” right now is writing and directing a country music show in Pigeon Forge, TN (called Country Tonite – check it out on the web!), so I’m very curious about how the music was worked into your play. I think Alex had said before that Marin was the musician: did he end up singing, as well as playing guitar? Did you write original songs or use existing songs? So many possibilities!

Brooke Bryant

Hello, lovely fellow theater lovers! Before beginning this entry I feel compelled to make the following disclosure: I have never seen this play done, I have never been an actor in this play, nor had I ever read it before this week. I’m rather glad of that, as I entered this process with no deeply-planted, preconceived notions about it. I have now read the play, read all the blog entries to date, and also a few online analyses for good measure. As is usually the case, the online analyses I read offered only a handful of insightful tidbits, and missed the mark entirely on getting truly intimate about what’s really going on between these two people. The blog entries have been far more interesting to me. In an effort to “think less and play more,” I shall fight my overly-analytical side and jump right in with a few ideas about the play, reactions to blog entries, and how at least one American actor would probably approach it.

Axel Strothmann

December III
What I love about being in a rehearsal space not knowing exactly what to do next is that you have sudden revelations that come like cramps. I put in a CD that Marc has prepared for me, a blend of action movie sound effects taken from a Bourne movie, and I think, man, this is totally inappropriate. It’s so bad I have to laugh. Then Mark suggests that since he’s doing all the other tunes and sound bits anyway, why shouldn’t he do the sound effects for the action scene? He does it and it is hilariously funny and exactly right for what we’re trying to achieve.

Brian Russell

December II response:
I read with an unabashed sense of envy and wistfulness about the latter end of your rehearsal experience, Axel.  As you know, here in the oh-so-very-capitalistic states, theatre and theatre business tend to be all about the bottom line.  For a number of reasons (shrinking fiscal budgets, union concerns and expenses etc) rehearsal periods here usually run about two weeks on sheer hustling intensity and the detialed minutae of run-through notes, followed by one to two 12 hour days of technical rehearsals followed immediately by opening night.  So, whatever outside “insights” we get generally are found in performance and before an audience.

Axel Strothmann

December II
One of the main differences of the Thespian’s every-day work on each side of the Atlantic: Over here, we tend to have more time on our hands and sometimes we use it to discuss certain artistic aspects of the production, such as: Why are we doing theater in the first place. That can get out of hand. And you need lots of coffee. (As in the old joke about the American, the Italian and the German actor: The director asks all three actors to appear stage right. The American actor shrugs his shoulders and says: Sure, just let me know when. Then, it’s the Italian’s turn. He squints at the director and says: I’ll do anything, just tell me how much they’ll pay me for it.

Axel Strothmann

December I
We start proper rehearsals in our rehearsal space at the harbor. On our very first day we don’t have a set or anything so we start scene-and-character-related games in a bare room still filled with left-over debris from the last production. A little downer. Raphael and Katharina are trying out various things, from leading the other one through the room blindfolded to standing on my very spiky yoga mat – I don’t do yoga! – trying to gently push the other one off balance while doing the first dialog. Marc is looking for appropriate sounds and does some harmonic and melodic sketches on his guitar to enhance the general atmosphere.

Axel Strothmann

All of the cast and creative team meet and I introduce our ‘concept’. We want to stress the universal themes of the play, such as forbidden and unhappy love, relationship addiction and the ever-prevailing dominance of (movie-) images. Anja and I talk a lot about what we call the ‘traditional American Naturalism’ – go ahead and hit me… I keep saying I don’t want to do a psychological chamber piece. I don’t want actors who will lose themselves in overemotional and self-absorbed method-acting. I’m German, after all. (I have acted alongside Americans. The good ones were great.) I want irony, I want action, I want grotesque and bizarre ways of dealing with a doomed relationship. I want to laugh. I want to shake my head. I want to fall in love with the actors. I want to go home and start thinking about getting out of a relationship. Or getting into one.

Brian Russell

Axel, I have to agree with Richard about not underselling the whole “Western” notions inherent in Shepard.  There truly is a whole mythos to the cowboy image here in America….the rugged, individualistic loner taming the vast unmapped and wild territories of the equally harsh landscape of the frontier coupled with the other prevalent idea of Manifest Destiny, that it was all set in motion and pre-ordained by God above.  (Why else would Bush 2 want that as his predominant iconography?)  That image however is matched with its equally harsh opposite notion:  that of the taming of this wild land coming at the expense of the Native peoples that first inhabited here and usually at the point of a gun.  This two-sided coin of American identity is what Shepard specializes in.

Richard Northcutt

This post is being written by Richard Northcutt who lives in Woodbury,
Tennessee USA where he makes his primary living as an attorney.  When not
practicing law, he works in theatre, having been an actor, director,
producer, and designer for more than 35 years.  He was among the group of
American actors who spent two months in Germany working on Das Treffen in
Magdeburg, an experience he still warmly cherishes.

First, a disclosure (because Gunda encouraged me to):  I am not a fan of
Sam Shepard, either as a playwright or actor.