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Published: September 21st 2006
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Ahh, spontaneous action. The awakening of the zombies. I was in Beroun for 2 weeks to participate in the Meet the Freak camp which has the ambitions of practicing inclusion, and collectively getting our act together to do performances. It was a special time for me in which 60 people were truly united in the space of the long Plesnik campground full of chatas(huts). At this place there were no pretenses of anonymity as you passed familiar faces to the campfire or back to the zachod. If you felt a touch lonely, you just walked 10 feet from your hut and joined the nearest soul or group to “chew the fat”. In other words, it was what a neighborhood could and should be.
The most memorable moments for me were doing the actions at the square of Beroun. It was truly an attempt to awake the locals from the tedium of routine. We made a drum circle by the fountain and juggled, or contributed tasteful graffiti to the decrepit bridge by the train station. And the children would come, if few, to have a sticker of their name “tagged” by Angel, or elderly would gather by the edges
A new mode of transport!
This is my blood brother Czech Mysek pushing mein Deutsche freund Oliver on the skateboard! to secretly enjoy the music. The most unique, and challenging act was very, very, very, slowly walking around the Saturday market with our troop of 15 all draped in silly clothing and colorful make-up. Each of us had a quirk: I would gasp in amazement at any pretense of a monument and photograph it with a camera; while a Ukraine girl played the grumpy old lady pushing me on with exasperating looks; Portugese Laura would give random bursts of ‘mamma mia!’ in her overfed housewife outfit; Joan did his best cuckoo clock ‘cookoo!’ to the delight of toddlers and adults alike; and the Slovak would lead this motley crew as a tour guide. It was all very silly, to the Monty Pythonieth degree, and I relished it. Granted many people around us were completely unresponsive and a few seemed annoyed(to the great distress of Belgian Anna), but equal numbers did gleam a smile making it worthwhile. Following this I grabbed a drum and followed our mini-parade around the center. Mysek pushed Oliver on his skateboard, bubbles were blown, and we took advantage of the great acoustics under the town gate and wailed away on the djembe with Oliver on the
Antonio the sage
My good Portugese friend Antonio. May we meet again soon! skateboard percussions. They were spontaneous moments with joyous people which I won’t soon forget.
And these are actions known to the Czechs as ‘recess’. Wernie related a story to me of how during Communist times a man inflated a giant pink whale onto the Vltava river and, with a leash, dragged it across the city. When the police came to control the situation he played stupid, gave them the leash and ran off. Apparently it was quite a site watching them reign in the renegade whale. People may ask why we do these things. I would tell them it’s an expression of the joy of life, and an attempt to pull the people and its city out of the doldrums of the home to work to shop to home routine. This 45 hour work-week, and notion of being entertained as a film in a cinema or stale concerts doing nothing but standing there whistling and clapping at your cue, is no life. This is about awakening to the potential of the urban environment and what our individual minds actually can do when out of the herd mentality. These are also the reasons I will ride my bicycle at the
Music in the gate
That's Oliver using the skateboard as a percussive instrument for the record. Adventures in sound waves! Critical Mass on Friday, world Carfree day. During these rides we, in the hundreds, take over entire lanes of streets to in a way reclaim them. This is merely a reinterpretation of how a street can be used, its urban space. This world, this life could be so much more!
Does not anyone agree with me? Please xcuse me as I take the slippery step off the soap-box. Well, Meet the Freak reinforced these values in me. The potential of the individual(in the small collective) was truly realized during our Meet the Freak performance. The theatre group pulled off a magnificent alien comedy with a message, the dancers truly surprised people with their shadow tricks, the graffiti gang did a wicked alien today, and we in the music group surprised ourselves with the
Five_Elements composition and
Meet_The_Freak. *click on the highlighted words to download the mp3 recordings of the songs*Here’s to hoping that we can apply some of these principles to where we live, and that we can all return next year!!!
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Sean
non-member comment
G'day Mate
G'day Chris, Good to read you are well. Obviously you are back in Czech. I will try and get over there early in the new year to visit you. Are you still proceeding onwards to Ukraine? Keep well mate, Sean