Monday 12 May 2008

Performance Lecture, Theater Freiburg, 10.5.08, and Return

Mariella and I delivered our bilingual lecture in a small white space, the Kammerbuhne (Chamber Stage) at 20.30 uhr Samstag, 10.5.08, to a small audience (9 people). On the stage we had white cushions for the audience to sit in and we weaved about amongst them whilst we gave the talk.
The lecture was open to the public and ticketed (3 euros), but we expected most of our audience to be colleagues of Tommy's from Theater Freiburg (the German StadtTheater [City Theater] system is crazy, Theater Freiburg employs 500 people - do any art institutions in the UK support that many employees?) The director currently kept the whole cast of the current production in rehearsal effectively guaranteeing us no audience.
It was a big challenge to translate the texts we wrote into a form of German that would be nuanced and subtle enough to do justice to the sources we were working from - Emmanuel Levinas, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Berger, Florian Schneider, Nancy Roth, Goat Island.
It has been good for Mariella and I to develop the lecture but neither of us knows where it will go next. I will put up the full text of the lecture as a .pdf on www.archive.org when I get back to Hayfield.

Flight back was fine, got into Stansted about 5.15, at Livererpool Street for 7, and in Hampstead for about 8ish. And who should sat drinking rose at my old friend Christine (from Rules and Regs)'s house but the legendary Alice Booth, down to the Big Smoke for a preview of Kellerman with Imitating the Dog.
Christine took me for a tour of Hampstead pubs, but it seems that on Sundays most places round here observe the half-ten Sunday closing - punctually. Went back to Christine's for Grappa and a chinwag, to the strains of mostly listening to Roy Orbison and the Killers.
Woken up by a bumblebee stuck in the windowsill - watching Frasier, drinking my first proper cup of tea in a week (all the Schwartztee in Freiburg couldn't get close to a Yorkshire Gold), wondering when Ms. Entwistle might surface. Spanner the dog is waiting for her breakfast, but quietly.