A Bit of Background

DaPoPo is heading to Berlin again to participate in the Just Say It! 2006 Festival at the FEZ-Berlin. FEZ-Berlin is the largest non-profit children, youth and family centre in Europe.(FEZ-Berlin)

Just Say It! is a bi-annual festival featuring the English-language countries of the world: Australia, Great Britain, India, Canada, South Africa and the USA. Young people in Berlin grow up more strongly ever under the influence of the English language. It surrounds them in everyday life, they use it in daily communication and it is the most learned foreign language in school. The multi-cultural family celebration presents the English-language countries and gives an idea of the various cultural spectrum to this - with stage shows, project presentations, going through offers, exhibitions, culinary specialities and so on.

This will be DaPoPo's second time participating in the festival. In 2004, artistic director Garry Williams together with Steph Berntson, Chris Cohoon and Amanda Jernigan created the show Four Actors in Search of a Nation for the festival. Each actor also taught a workshop to smaller groups of the youth attendees.

Our task this time around is similar. Prepare a show to perform to hundreds of kids. Make it interactive, fun and hopefully pedagogic. The theme of the festival is "globalization" with a special focus for us on "transatlantic prejudice." Prepare a workshop to teach and also be involved in the daily introduction to the festival day.

Hey! No sweat.

We (minus Eric who was home taking care of Kitten) had a meeting with Michael Raj Kunsmann, of the FEZ-Berlin, when we were in Berlin this summer touring "13 Ways of Looking at a Madman" (Tour Blog) so we had a chance to hear right from the horse's mouth what was desired and to get a jump on thinking about it.

Of course, in the interim, we also had to finish up that Berlin tour and remount "13 Ways" for the Atlantic Fringe Festival in Halifax, NS, our base of operations. Between people travelling, teaching theatre intensives and other work, we have managed to meet a couple of times to start tumbling over ideas.