Stealing—ehm, 'appropriating', I mean—its title from a collection of poetry by Nelly Sachs not otherwise referenced, this piece celebrated the nighttime, and things that go bump in it.
I had begun working with a couple other theatremakers in early 2016, practicing physical theatre techniques together and trying to develop new material. After a member swap out around a year later, we started calling ourselves FREMT (from the German fremd, meaning 'strange') and began working on our first full-length project. (It wasn't terribly long, actually, maybe the better part of an hour, but longer than the scene-length movement and performance art pieces we had hitherto performed.)
After a first round of development looking at material—particularly Dostoyevsky's short story "The White Nights"—and trying to create an interweaving narrative structure, we were generously offered a space by the performance/installation collective Club Real, who weren't using their barn-like workshop and warehouse filled with fantastic set pieces during the winter. They made us a copy of the keys and said we were free to use it through October. It was unheated, though, they warned us.
The ambiance of the space was a massive influence, and we knew we wanted to use it to create an immersive performance, a world into which our audience would be dragged, so we created new characters to inhabit the specific subspaces within the small warehouse, most of the old material becoming impulses or vestigial narrative elements. And the cold motivated us to move quickly. The result was in many ways quite abstract, but also quite mysterious. It gave us the opportunity to interact with our audience directly, with vignettes which were alternately confrontational and soothing, alternately frightening and comedic.
After organizing the three performances ourselves at the beginning of November, for which we obtained a cozy-sized audience (luckily, the smallness of the space would have made even a few people feel appropriate, while still managing to fit a couple dozen), we applied for and received a place in the 2018 Berlin Performing Arts Festival, so we revived the performance next June (when it was indeed considerably more comfortable to rehearse).
While very much rough theatre, it was an enjoyable experience to work with a couple interested others on new material, and to participate in the expansive Performing Arts Festival.