A month ago I visited the festival SPIELART, spending 4 days in Munich. I also have something that more or less resembles a review. If you need to, you can find here. You're welcome. I don't mind if you skip reading this, it won't be necessary and it's in Estonian anyway. In the following text, you'll find my notes app excerpts, pieces of thoughts that – like broken glass behind an abandoned school building – reflect on the festival.
Alright, now imagine entering a theatre space… even better, just enter a theatrical space in your mind, some performative area, where things happen, where you don't search to make sense of things, where you see poeticism in causality. Relax your shoulder blades. Let them shake hands and then fall into the bed.
As a teenager, I had sketches of Guggenheim Bilbao on my walls, I was fascinated with the brand. I didn’t even care if it was Bilbao or NY, I cared about the tilted floors. As a teenager, a teacher said our small town has no culture and we’ll never be cultured. As a teenager, we studied Carl Spitzweg's Der arme Poet in art history. As a teenager, I was supposed to be sacrificed to a dragon in a school play. And the Christ was white.
I have an appointment booked at the Büro to go and register myself to live laugh love in Berlin. Although yesterday I forgot how to say “I don't know” in German and for some reason, I replied in Russian instead of just shrugging with a clueless face.
Well.... I'm stuck in a world of dreaming computers and illegal anal sex.
In the backround you can see a photo from the project GGNHM – guggenheim im münchen? by God's Entertainment:
And I don't know what it feels like to fear for my life. Moreover, I don't know what it feels like to come to terms with this. Like running on a treadmill I'm used to waving my fists in the air. But what I can't imagine is something a c t u a l l y meeting those fists.
After the bus takes us back to Munich after a tour around the plantation of Dachau, the pouring rain annoys me as I hurry to listen to love songs in a pavilion in the middle of a park. I did not bring rubber boots, I sink into my own inability to apply a transnational perspective to the performances I see, clinging on to my Euro-American knowledge of queerness as the Joker in my French-suited card deck.
This was a photo I snapped during KULTUUR by Maria Metsalu.
(Wet leaves twirling around the noses of my sharp-pointed thrifted shoes)
And as an audience member what I enjoy is the cluelessness of not knowing where to step. To fear the consequences.
Oh, there's the Sun, the citizen of Everywhere, shining on us through the thinning atmosphere. So sweet and friendly and welcoming with a grain of awkwardness... oh but the finger paintings on a flower pot… that's not really Scandinavian… leaves a bad taste in my mouth, where are you from again?
The map says the place does not exist, the browser's never been used before, are you sure you want to continue, there's roadwork and hotdog carts, you're vegan, make a U-turn. (If you want to understand everything – knowledge is power.)
So hard to have agency as an audience member.
(The buzzing white noise your refrigerator makes at night)