Our piece was composed of scenes concerning Xenophobia and migration that both the South African group and the German group prepared in advance.
When we were in Stellenbosch, it was our task to marry the different parts in order to create one complete piece that should last about 45 minutes. As we had material for one and a half hours we had to cross out quite a lot of scenes.
In the beginning we intended to perform outside, which required a great amount of hard work and planning as we had to find the right location for every scene and plan how to get from one place to another smoothly. But in the end all the suffering under the hot sun while trying to rehearse paid off well, as we had some loosely fitting scenes that made good use of the environment but still connected well as a whole piece. At this point we were all looking forward to the performance, but then we heard that it was going to rain. So all in one day we had to come up with another version of the piece that we could play inside, right in between the audience, as we did not have a normal stage. We now had to invent connections between each scene, as they were all in the same place. We also left out some parts, as they were difficult to act inside, but replaced them with some of our other work. So in the end we had two different versions of our performance that were roughly the same length and quality.
Besides our piece inside we also had a little dancing performance in the yard, which we prepared with the help of our dancing teacher Shane. The dance consisted of three different groups that were trained apart from each other and put together in the very end, but still formed one performance.
For us it really was a great experience and we had loads of fun performing with our exchange partners as one group.
Written by Tim Schneider
