Hello everyone,
After completing 31st night donation all the Dreamcatchers were so happy and now we had a small celebration together in day time on 1st January because we already celebrated our new year Eve with street people on 31st night.
So now on 2nd January early morning our friends from Germany were coming and me and Vinod with our Dreamcatchers decided to stay together the whole night to welcome all of them early morning.
We cleaned our place at night actually, me and Vinod didn’t sleep the whole night.
Then morning started, we already had a rental car.
We headed to railway station to pick them up.
We were standing on the platform and the team arrived, we were in hurry, we put the luggage fastly in the car and after a small tea refreshment we left to Bodhgaya.
When we reached our place, the Dreamcatchers were already prepared with welcome things with Indian style like malla full tika, everything.
After welcoming they entered our theatre hall. For Wolfgang it was his place which he created by his own presence last year, but for the girls it was a totally new country, new place, new people.
So you will be thinking, which girls? Don’t take so much pressure.
Three girls came: Sarah, Madita and Ina along with cute Moana (daughter of Wolfgang ).
After so much travel they decided to go to bed, but you know here what you think doesn’t always work, so first we went for masala dosa place and we had a breakfast together.
Then after 1day rest we decided to welcome our dearest Christian brother, he came on 5th Jan. so we decided to welcome him with Bollywood dancing and the girls also joined the Dreamcatchers for dancing .
After 1 or 2 days practice we had to go for welcoming him, and we all went together.
Me and Wolf brother went to receive him from the main exit gate of the airport and the others were preparing themselves for dance on the open ground at the airport.
We had a small struggle with airport security also because we didn’t have any permission for this but at last he allowed us to do it.
When Christian saw the dance he was very happy, his reaction was totally as I had thought. I choreographed like that because I have known him for a long time.
Then after dance we had a hug party and then we started for our cultural centre with a small chai break on the way.
When he saw our centre, Christian was so happy because it was the same like when they left last year….
Time was running, so we decided to work with our production “The Magic Mirror”, but first we were told to perform the full show for them.
After performing we got a feedback and it was really good because the main thing for us as actors was to get a good feedback.
They told us that all Dreamcatchers had really changed and become good actors.
So as trainers it was really a proud moment for me and Vinod.
On the next day we started our theatre classes, the first 2 or 3 workshop were totally open for all of us.
Then after that we started developing a workshop for “The Magic Mirror” .
The main part was to replace some scenes which were not clear, and also the difficult part to add something here and there.
After doing several workshop concept works we had developed some good scenes for the show.
But Wolfgang had to go to drop cute Moana at Delhi airport, so we had a cake cutting party with Moana and then she left Bodhgaya with Wolfgang.
All the children were surprised when they heard small girl Moana (8 years) was going alone by airplane to Germany.
It is not so common for India.
Everybody was sad because we all had a very good time with her. And then she left.
Wolfgang came back after dropping her.
And then we started buying fabric and cloths for making costumes for the show characters.
The girls Ina, Madita and Sarah supported us in costumes making.
And than Antonia and Mariton came.
It was really nice to meet both of them. Antonia is an experienced theatre trainer from Berlin .
She works at the university and Mariton is a very beautiful lady by heart.
Antonia did two workshops, one with teachers and one with women only.
Both workshops were so successful.
Then she started helping us for our show.
She had a really very big theatre experience.
She worked on characters like business women and Parvati to develop the actors.
The best and funny part was that she always started speaking German, but we were always confused because we don’t know the language. So Sarah and Christian were translating all the time.
But what was helping us, was the language of art.
The time came to welcome our so strong member of Creacting Frieder. We welcomed him and we came together for lunch directly.
After that time passed with training and in the end the show was complete.
Now we had a plan to make a movie of our production, so we all decided together where and when we had to shoot and which scenes. So we visited different cities and States of India according to our plan:
Kolkata, Varanasi, Digha, Dhuneswari mountain near Bodhgaya.
Kolkata
We started from Bodhgaya by bus with the whole team and it took the whole night to get there. We arrived early in the morning and went to the hotel.
Then I was in a hurry because I also had an appointment in the German consulate for my visa. So I just got refreshed and me and Wolfgang went to the consulate.
I went inside but it they were not working because they changed their rules and we were not aware of this. That was not a good sign for us, so we took the next appointment just the next day on 19th February. We went back to the hotel and one more news we got was that Sarah was sick. It was a hard time for her because it was the first time she travelled with an Indian bus and the road was not so good and so ride wasn’t good either.
But we had to go on with the movie so I decided to stay with her there because one of us, me or Vinod, had to be there, so I decided to stay with her and Vinod went with the group for the shooting.
And yeah, they did only some shooting, because some places were closed already.
Next day I successfully submitted my visa application and we did shootings at some spots of Kolkata.
And Sarah was also better than the the day before.
After Kolkata we started again by bus for Digha.
This time the bus was better than on the last trip so it was ok and we didn’t face any problem.
We arrived and I already had online hotel booking, so we directly went to the hotel, everyone was tired as we arrived at night .
So everybody was relaxing. Vinod went outside along with Rahul to bring food for everyone. By doing this we had also a nice view of the sea and we also finalized our shooting spot for the shooting tomorrow.
We came back and we slept early because we had to wake up early morning .
The Morning started again with some bad news . We found Christian was totally sick and that was really very hard for him. So he decided to stay there and we went with Wolfi and all the team for the shooting. We did our dance shooting very well but on the other hand I was thinking about Christian .
Then we took breakfast and me and Sarah took some medicine to Christian and then we decided to go back to Gaya .
We came back to Kolkata and from there we took bus for Bodhgaya.
The whole trip hat its ups and down, but we completed everything successfully.
Then after relaxing a few days, on 26th February we left to Varanasi for our next spot city.
We reserved our own bus so that was easy for everyone.
We arrived and we went to Badi Maa place .
We had our personal rooms there, so we relaxed a little bit and then me, Wolfi, Christian and Vinod along with the girls went looking for spots for the next day while the others where relaxing at the place.
Mariton also joined us here.
We were walking on the banks of the holy Ganga river. It was really such a nice vibration I was feeling there.
Then the next day we started and shooted at some places. It was a little bit hard because at many places it was not allowed to use the camera, but anyhow we managed. And we covered some parts.
Badi Maa Ajaan had a very delicious meal for all of us. After eating we decided to go for a night Aarti on Ganga by boat.
When we started in Ganga by boat, some musician from different countries also joins us and they played their piece of music for us. Then we decided to dance together with Everyone on the boat and yeah, we danced “Bum hum bole” again after a long time with everyone.
The next day we shooted next to the river.
The biggest highlight was to walk in the streets of Varanasi. Because it is a holy place many priests are there and when the priest character of our show was walking with full costume with the magic Mirror that mirror was really strange for everyone.
But ya, it was good to see this.
And at night we returned to Bodhgaya.
It was a really nice adventure for the children and the whole group doing the shootings and at the same time visiting different parts of India.
The hardest part was to edit the videos to make a movie.
Sarah took that work ( hard working & intelligent girl!).she worked sometimes until late at night because it was not so easy task to edit the movie.
And while she was busy with the movie we were working on our show and the other two girls, Madita and Ina were helping us in our show. So everyone was doing his and her part very well.
Since we had to perform our show The Magic Mirror for audience on 12th and 13th March 2020 we practiced every day and at last the time came for our performance.
This was interesting in two ways: one thing, we were going to perform and another thing was our two Dreamcatchers Arti and Shima who learned to handle music and light. This was really nice to see.
And in the end, we performed our show successfully with a huge Audience.
CREACTING INDIA TRUST 