Premiere: Selbstausloser

Friday night we broke the ice on our new piece. Literally. It took some high-tech efforts by the props department at the theater to construct that thing, which hangs on the side of the stage, dripping, for most of the piece. On Friday night the ice was more solid than it had been all week, so this took Eva awhile. Poor Eva. This is at the very end of the piece, and the rest of us are tucked away in our boxes, mostly holding very still, while she hacks away.



Which is one of the easiest things we've done all night, after much dancing.









Both in and out of boxes.






Afterwards was the premiere party, mysteriously sparse this time around. Which was strange after a full house and a warm applause. But there were many special guests, including



Jens and Ela, Massimo, Atesh, and Julia...



Bert from Amsterdam and Helge from Bremen, both old friends of Johannes's. And Johannes's mother, who drops in like a benevolent angel from Berlin to our premieres, always so generous with her compliments and supportive of what we do. And cracking me up because she's always got one little thing ("the microphones should be louder") she says she absolutely has to tell Johannes about the piece.



In the lobby, there was an exhibit of sorts, a kind of 3D collage of images and texts from each of us. Throughout the process we each brought in items that represented a wish, a secret, or a lie, wrote some sentences about each object, and presented them to the group. Johannes had the idea to fill one of the tanks from Sacre with all the items as a documentation of our research. It's hard to see all the tiny details here, but you can get the idea.







Seeing it, I had the feeling I was looking back and forward at the same time. Back to the research, the origins of a piece. And forward to the life this one will now have on the stage.