Wir Warten/We Wait

Wir Warten/We Wait

June 2010, Stephansplatz

I write a Text, which consists of several paragraphs. I learn the text by heart.

On the day of the performance I perform the text in front of each and every member of my audience on an individual face-to-face basis. My female prompter helps me to recall the lines.  Her presence underlines the staged and performative character of the situation.

But every individual will only get to hear one paragraph, plus an indroduction and closing words.

So the whole audience gets to know the whole text, as every single viewer knows only one small part of the content.

Every piece contains a map of it all.

The viewer experiences a re’evaluation as he_she becomes a literally essential “part” of the performance itself; the individual, who has to relocate him_herself within the context of the momentarily experienced, anonymity and individual

ity at the same time.

The audience is not an anonymous mass anymore. Responsibilities are newly redistributed.

Excerpt

“We wait. We know we are not going to live forever.  (…) Nobody will ever have me like this, like you do, inside of him/herself. (…) My failures you will have seen first and closest, the trembling of my voice and lips, I am nervous, nervous because of you. (…)’But you are here, nowhere else, you are here with me, in front of me. You are not somewhere else right now. That jusitfies my being here, my doings. (…) your inwardnesses, which I cannot access, except for now, when I am adding myself to your history and memory (…) I’ll have lost you, and thus, my work, once  you don’t remember anymore.’”