Last year: "The fiendish experiment of Professor Ohnelieb with the potential to destroy the world" Markus Kalb as the Professor.A normal presentation for Xpresso is about 7-10 minutes in length, presented as part of a service, with minimal props and costumes. However, you can get too much of a good thing, so it’s good to be able to let yourself go occasionally, and fortunately the ideal opportunity is found in the local Kirbe festival every October.
Kirbe in Kemnat is not really much to write home about: a small, rather tacky fair, a collection of craft stalls and a lot of shops selling every kind sugary substance known to man. Traditionally it is a church celebration & locally it’s thought to commemorate the dedication of the Lutheran church. Of course, no one remembers when this happened, especially after the beer has been flowing for a while, so in common with a lot of places Kemnat’s Kirbe is in late October from a Friday to Sunday, more or less continually.
However, it is a church celebration. This means that it can’t technically get going on Sunday until after communion has finished and the pastor comes to set it all off, and also that we can have a service in the afternoon and people actually come who don’t have any other church connection.
A couple of years ago -when we were still new here- someone had the bright idea of having the service outside in the church courtyard, which brought us closer to the street and made the service more accessible. And people heard the music and came to see what was going on. Last year’s service -where the preaching was reduced to a trio of two to three minute slots between scenes of a loud and melodramatic drama- was another step, and this year, we hope to build on that with a different theme, destiny, and a new piece: “Baroness Isabella von Katzenberg’s evil and despicable plans for world domination” which I’ve mentioned before. This morning the third scene was sent back to me translated and ready, now I have to get it printed and ready for the team to use.
This is another 20-minute piece, but it has more technical details (read: bits that could go wrong) than all the rest of the year put together. Most of these take the form of loud bangs, but there is also that silent movie, which fortunately Dominic is directing, and some interesting props that we’ll have to make ourselves. (What does a “Patent evil mass subjugation device” actually look like, for example?) Where you get props there are costumes, and although we’ve managed to source a top hat for the hero, there are plenty more things we are looking for, and I’ve already spent several hours going around the local electricians and plumbers asking for permission to root around their scrap piles, and tonight we meet with the rest of the team responsible for the whole service, and decide how we fit into the whole…
More to come. Please pray.
Kirbe in Kemnat is not really much to write home about: a small, rather tacky fair, a collection of craft stalls and a lot of shops selling every kind sugary substance known to man. Traditionally it is a church celebration & locally it’s thought to commemorate the dedication of the Lutheran church. Of course, no one remembers when this happened, especially after the beer has been flowing for a while, so in common with a lot of places Kemnat’s Kirbe is in late October from a Friday to Sunday, more or less continually.
However, it is a church celebration. This means that it can’t technically get going on Sunday until after communion has finished and the pastor comes to set it all off, and also that we can have a service in the afternoon and people actually come who don’t have any other church connection.
A couple of years ago -when we were still new here- someone had the bright idea of having the service outside in the church courtyard, which brought us closer to the street and made the service more accessible. And people heard the music and came to see what was going on. Last year’s service -where the preaching was reduced to a trio of two to three minute slots between scenes of a loud and melodramatic drama- was another step, and this year, we hope to build on that with a different theme, destiny, and a new piece: “Baroness Isabella von Katzenberg’s evil and despicable plans for world domination” which I’ve mentioned before. This morning the third scene was sent back to me translated and ready, now I have to get it printed and ready for the team to use.
This is another 20-minute piece, but it has more technical details (read: bits that could go wrong) than all the rest of the year put together. Most of these take the form of loud bangs, but there is also that silent movie, which fortunately Dominic is directing, and some interesting props that we’ll have to make ourselves. (What does a “Patent evil mass subjugation device” actually look like, for example?) Where you get props there are costumes, and although we’ve managed to source a top hat for the hero, there are plenty more things we are looking for, and I’ve already spent several hours going around the local electricians and plumbers asking for permission to root around their scrap piles, and tonight we meet with the rest of the team responsible for the whole service, and decide how we fit into the whole…
More to come. Please pray.
No comments:
Post a Comment