TIP HYBRID residency. New tools for my toolbox

I’m Joni-Beth Brownlee, 28 years old and a bilingual, European, emerging artist from Germany. I studied acting at the adk-Ulm in southern Germany, where I received my final qualifications in 2019. I‘ve been working as a puppeteer, actress, performance artist and theatre pedagogue part time since before finishing acting school and full time since 2023. As my academy has a partnership with the European Theatre and Film Institute,  I have had a unique chance to apply for their project Theatre in Palm Hybrid residency.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from the experience during the Hybrid Residency. My hopes were to broaden my network and take back new skills for my personal repertoire. These hopes were fulfilled, even more so than I had initially hoped. I felt challenged in the first week, in the online part. I am not particularly comfortable using digital resources and felt the distance to our international partners very strongly.  On the other hand I found it fascinating to work creatively with this new medium, and drew inspiration from our partners in Belgium, Italy and Dublin. Sometimes things were chaotic and I wished our German group had had a mentor present. A part of the time, I was uncertain about who was responsible for what. Those fears were diminished upon arriving in Dublin. I was amazed at how quickly our group bonded and grew together creatively. We worked with many different ideas, everyone could include themselves in the work. I‘m particularly proud of the strong images we produced in the short space of time we had together and how respectful every individual was of each other personally as well as professionally.

There were so many memorable moments, but I think the first time we improvised together with the Italian group, who we had just met, will continue to remain with me for a very long time. Our mentor gave us the exercise to take all the information from the last online week and try to bring the different ideas together, without discussing with each other, but rather through play. Which we did, for 45 minutes without stopping. 

The energy in the room as we improvised together was incredibly special.

The two weeks assured us that we didn’t have much time to „overdiscuss“ any decisions we made and we used most of this time to experiment: with the digital format, each other and our chosen materials. Having been given little, simple, but flexible materials to work with allowed for us to be all the more innovative with our ideas. Knowing that our focus was to be on the process allowing us to easily discard ideas, replace and rebuild them. Meeting our trio-partners online and regularly presenting said ideas gave us lots of opportunities to then help structure our experiments for the final presentation.

Certain aspects of our communication, as well a new flexibility towards working with new and unusual media and materials. I‘m also taking away certain exercises I learnt from my Italian, German and Irish colleagues. New tools for my toolbox, as I like to say. And last but not least: the new-found belief, that cooperating and creating, co-directing within a group with different individuals is possible, so long as one respects one another.

I expect I should have the opportunity to meet many more artists and creators and hopefully collaborate with them to create even more and become a part of an international European community. I would hope that within this community we could create art and pieces of European importance, working on ideas that may separate or connect us across different countries.

Joni-Beth Brownlee