Homo Ludens on artmetropol.tv - now with subtitles

The artmetropol.tv piece about Homo Ludens - shot at one of the preview performances, so the space isn't quite finished - now has English subtitles. Watch it here.

Game Over (for now)

Photos by Nina Urban.

Thanks for playing. More later in the year, hopefully.

Respecting the Grid

Perhaps it's just us, but we thought Katja painting 100 squares by hand (with assistance from Martina, in this video clip) was kinda beautiful...



Video by Rita.

Homo Ludens

Homo Ludens opens tonight at TiG7, Mannheim, under the guidance of Third Angel associate artist Lucy Ellinson, in collaboration of the whole of the team from TiG7. It's been an exciting, fun, challenging and sometimes moving process, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how the audience/players experience it. Full credits below.

Third Angel & TiG7 present
HOMO LUDENS
Devised and written by the company
Inspired by Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man
by Friedrich Schiller

Performed by:
Rita Böhmer, Daniela Cohrs, Lucy Ellinson, Martina Heubel, Einhart Klucke, Martin Kornmeier, Jellena Lugert, Alexander O. Miller, Julia Rützel, Stefanie Rapp, Natascha Slominski

Games Waiters:
Tobias Grauheding, Tobias Hannemann, Christian Lidy, Pascal Wieandt, Nils Witte

Licht- und Tontechnik/Lighting and Sound: James Bogner
Bühnenbau/Set Construction: Hubertus Seelhorst
Malerei/Scene Painters: Katja Angerbauer & Stefan Schneider

Research texts by Chris Thorpe
Co-directed by Lucy Ellinson
Directed and designed by Alexander Kelly

Third Angel management: Hilary Foster
Third Angel Co-artistic Directors: Alexander Kelly & Rachael Walton
TiG7 Künstlerische Leitung / Creative Director: Maike Lex
TiG7 Organisation / Organisation: Christine Seikel

HOMO LUDENS is produced within /
wurde im Rahmen der Freien Theater Tage
SCHWINDELFREI 2009 produziert.
Kindly supported by / Mit freundlicher Unterstützung durch
John Deere & Sheffield Theatres

Das Theaterhaus TiG7 wird unterstützt vom
Kulturamt der Stadt Mannheim und dem Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg

Third Angel is regularly funded by Arts Council England

Postcards From The Road - Mannheim

A note of caution to start, one of the images lower down this post is of the Schillertage 2009 publicity campaign - which some people may find quite strong, featuring, as it does, a very new born baby. Certainly the woman who stopped as I was taking a photo of it felt it was a bit too strong... or that it was weird that I was taking a photo of it, or both. But first, clocks.


The clocks at Frankfurt Airport railway station are all in sync - to the second. There are perhaps 8 along one platform, perfectly in time. Doesn't really tranlate to a photo of course.


We needed to borrow some furniture for Homo Ludens from NationalTheater Mannheim. When we made Stage An Execution for NationalTheater's Schillertage 2003 we got to explore their costume store (although we ended up making the costumes from paper) which was suitably impressive. We actually rehearsed Stage An Execution in this building, that also houses the furniture store, although we didn't come and explore that time. This floor is tables, cupboards and sofas (plus those two grandfather clocks). We needed chairs or stools, too: there's a whole separarate floor of those. They had to pretty much drag Lucy and I away before we started staging Presumption there and then.

Homo Ludens is a collaboration with the wonderful TiG7, which is both a company/producing house and receiving house. They are one of 5 independent, or free, theatres in Mannheim. The free theatres have their own strand of Schillertage, which is called Schwindelfrei. There's no direct translation into English - or no equivalent single word at least. It's a pun (kind of, I think), and it translates as 'freedom from the fear of heights'. And all of their print is vertigo inducing op-art, which you can get a taste of here.

The theme of the whole of Schillertage this year is the idea of play and the playful human. Whilst I was there the advertising campaign went up - some posters using the Schiller quote that 'man is only truly a man when he plays', and also these new-born baby posters.


I asked our collaborators from TiG7 if there is any ambiguity about the phrase 'Spiel starten' - could it mean 'start to play' - but they said that although it hints at that, the over-riding meaning is as it it looks - 'Start Game' - enhanced by the computer game style graphics. This image, and the slightly sinister undertone, really got under my skin whilst I was there. Very powerful marketing. I think our work offers a more optimistic counterpoint to the slightly bleak reading I have of this image. But as that bleak interpretation is mine, maybe that idea is somewhere in our piece, too. We'll see.

Homo Ludens rehearsals

Five days to make the show, this week.  Starting off by finishing off - working out the second half of the piece, working from the ideas we took with us, and the texts that Chris Thorpe had written.

Working with the performers who we started making the show with in English (Julia, Rita, Martina) and with the cast who they have been teaching the show to: Steffi, Jellena, Martin, Daniela, Natascha and Einhart (who will be performing the show in German) and Alex, who will be stepping into the English team and also doubling with Einhart as the show's Concierge figure.

It was a great five days, lots of ideas, try-outs, translating and discussion, but also plenty of decisions.  The show now has a working model, within which the performers are still honing and developing their own material.

It was great to hear the material they had all been developing in preparation for Lucy's and my arrival, and even quite moving at times how they had all really embraced this task.  The results were sounding great.

The two teams of performers have been working as each other's audience most of the time, apart from when we can find someone else around the building (Maike Lex, Director of TiG7, for example) to be an audience member to play the game. So in this photo:

Lucy (blue) is performing to Steffi (green) and Julia (red) is performing to Daniela (hiding), on a temporary version of the gameboard. The game does throw up these dual performer/audience member encounters from time to time. The second pair to arrive tend to get to eavesdrop on the other performance briefly:

These photos are by Marita Heinzelmann, a design student from Mannheim's University of Applied Sciences, who is visiting TiG7 for a photography project.  I like these other images she's been working on from an earlier rehearsal, too:

Martina and Martin.

Julia and Steffi.

Rita and Daniela.

Once the overall structure was in place we realised that the piece was too long for the 30 minute slots we have worked out.  This always serves to focus the mind, and suddenly it was very easy to make a couple of specific cuts of sections that were sitting a little uncomfortably in my thinking anyway.  So the structure and rules are in place, with time for the texts within them to evolve and develop.