Concept, Direction, Voice
Nicola Dahlinger
Video
Joanna Kane
Video cut
Marie Chartron
Sound
Sophie Watzlawick
Project coordination, Production
Catherine Launay
Thanks to Judica Albrecht, Sima Abidi, Thorsten Bessel, Gregor Blahak, Caroline Dear, Ellen Esser, Judith Gaida, Daniela Graefe, Andreas Harder, Sönke Hoof, Eve Hurford, Timo Kahlen, Joanna Kane, Annette Leeb, Leslie Malton, Vanessa Mildenberg, Birgit Patzelt, Jurij Poelchau, Jörg Richter, Jeanette Schäfer, Jeanette Sendler, Inge Sievers, Frank Vetter, Sabine von Rothkirch und Murray Watts.
Produced by emerging properties - poetry . performance with generous support from kunst:raum sylt quelle, Sylt and The English Theatre, Berlin.
In The Glass Essay the narrator visits her mother in the country after the break-up of a love relation-ship. During her solitary walks in the wild moor landscape and the talks with her mother in the kitchen, the narrator connects personal memories with the life and work of Emily Brontë.
As a Greek philologist Anne Carson is a mediator between the world of thought and the use of language of the antiquity and the modern age. In many of her poems she contemplates the nature of the Greek God Eros. The word “Eros” designates “lack” as well as “want”. The dynamic between these two states is central to The Glass Essay . It shows itself in the memories of the love relation-ship, in the triangle of the three protagonists and at the borders/connection points between different inner and outer times and spaces.
Whichever way you look at it, Eros takes up space and at the same time embodies a void: within us, between us and around us. LOOKING FOR ANNE is an attempt at such an experience of space within the frame of The Glass Essay.
Extract
“It's stunning, it is a moment like no other,
when one's lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.
I switch off the lamp and lie on my back,
thinking about Emily's cold young soul.
Where does unbelief begin?
When I was young
there were degrees of certainty.
I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.
Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands
occasionally disappear—
From the next room I hear my mother shift and sigh and settle
back down under the doorsill of sleep.
Out the window the moon is just a cold bit of silver gristle low on
fading banks of sky.
Our guests are darkly lodged, I whispered, gazing through
The vault…”
(from The Glass Essay. Glass, Irony, and God, New Directions, 1995)
Juni 2007, The English Theatre, Berlin
“Since we didn't know anything about the performance beforehand we were impressed, surprised, touched. It was like a blind date. Thanks a lot.”
„Danke! Euch allen für dieses Erlebnis. Ich nehme viel mit und habe noch mehr Raum und Zeit als zu vor."