Munsbach 2001 review

The weather forecast for this year’s Munsbach was not promising, but optimists one and all, we packed as if for warm summer days. We got one, or at least a large part of one and that was on our picnic day. It bucketed with rain as we drove through the winding lanes towards our destination and, miraculously, as we stepped down from the coach the sun came out and shone on us for the duration of the picnic and the evening spent in town. But I am overtaking myself in my haste to describe what a wonderful week it was, yet again.

To start from the beginning then : The thespians flocked to the chateau this year in record numbers, some were habitués, new people had come through hearsay and one had come as a result of finding our site on the Internet ! We gathered together for the opening introduction of the tutors and their presentations of their course options and we made our choices. It remained to be seen whether they were informed or not !

The overall theme this year was ‘remembering’ and the courses were divided into two : process and development. I’m not sure whether we ever worked out whether we were being processed or developed, some of us would prefer to revert to the old denominations of Project 1, 2 and 3 but by dint of following someone else from our own group we managed to get to the right place at the right time, most of the time ….

It was terribly difficult to make my choices this year as I wanted to do everything ! I have long wanted to try my hand at writing but my hands itched to twitch a marionnette and my heart, like a lark ascending, leaned towards singing. In the end I got the ‘song into speech’ option. Barb Jungr is an extraordinary teacher, with boundless and infectious enthusiasm for everything she undertakes and with a capacity for bringing out abilities one never knew one had. She used the vocal exercises that we did at the beginning of most of our classes to liberate our voices so that by the time we came to read aloud some of her chosen texts we were not afraid of the sound of our own voices. It was, however, important to make the distinction between energy and loud – the one doesn’t automatically mean the other.

She had brought with her a selection of speeches from plays by authors of whom I, for one, had absolutely no previous experience – Debbie Isitt, Julia Pascal and Stephen Berkoff. With titles like Nasty Neighbours, the Woman Who Cooked Her Husband, the Holocaust Trilogy and East we knew we were in for something special. When she handed us the texts she told us NOT to read them to ourselves but to stand up, read them aloud and move around. It was surprising how soon we discovered there was a certain musicality and poetry to some of the texts. The texts were very difficult, not only because they were often quite lengthy monologues but because some had little or no punctuation, difficult speech patterns and/or complicated vocabulary switching between Shakespeare and pornography with disturbingly visual imagery. By the end of the week we had all moved a long way forwards in being able to deal with such texts and, on the last day, during our last share, produced some very memorable theatre in the courtyard. We would have liked to have seen this for ourselves but, alas, were unable to, for we were part of it.

My other option was Noel Greig’s 'I remember'. We started off by exploring what the word ‘memory’ meant to us and were surprised at how widely this one word could be interpreted. We then started to look at some of the texts that he had brought with him. But how do you find any meaning in a page of speeches where the change of speaker is merely indicated by a dash. There was no cast list and you had no idea how many people were involved. It was partly a game, partly mapreading and you could have any number of variations. We tried a number of exercises to see if we could find our way through the maze and gradually some sort of logic was recognisable and we began to be able to identify the different speakers. This really came alive for us on the Tuesday evening when we separated into small groups and explored the chateau to see if location would throw more light on the subject. My group found its way on to a small terrace at the back of the chateau, which looks out across the valley and we immediately cast ourselves in the roles of scriptwriters who had found their perfect location. Each group watched what the others had come up with and we all exclaimed with delight at the results as we all had produced something valid and watchable. The difficulty of the pieces Noel gave us increased on an almost daily basis. Somehow we managed to make some sense of most of them. At the final de-brief, Noel admitted that he had found them difficult himself and that he had chosen them, having heard of them but never having seen them so that he would not be prejudiced as to how to approach them. We all reckoned that if we had picked up any of these texts on our own none of us would have got further than the first page before putting the book down as hopelessly incomprehensible.

The bar featured largely in the week’s activities, not only as a working space but as shelter from the rain in the evenings – as if an excuse was needed to descend to its welcoming depths, there to converse with fellow sufferers after a day of heavy textual analysis ! The poetry evening on Sunday proved to be a good ice-breaker and the music evening on Friday prompted several tears to be shed - all part of the ‘therapy’ or rather the ‘magic’ that is always worked at Munsbach. A number of songs had been ‘re-worked’ to incorporate Munsbach happenings and were greeted with much hilarity.

The other magic moments were when we all got a taste of what Mike McCormack’s puppetry class had been doing. With minimal props – sheets, string and black plastic bags – they created beings with names and very definite characters. When they appeared above the top of the wall, my heart almost stopped and a shiver ran through me. The ‘puppets’ were twice as tall as the humans who operated them and they moved with grace and majesty. This was what being at Munsbach is all about.

All good things come to an end and the end of the course came all too soon. Many people had started their goodbyes the previous evening. Some, for whom ‘parting is such sweet sorrow’ was in fact quite the opposite, simply slipped away. All of us came with something to give and all of us took away memories. Some of us will return to Munsbach and some of us will not, but those memories will stay with us on our journey through life and the experience we have gained will help us in many different ways.

My thanks, and those of all the other Munsbachers, I’m sure, go to Chris and John for organising everything in Luxembourg and to Mike and his team for all their special gifts that they are always so willing to share.