Concept
Nicola Dahlinger, Jeanette Sendler
Direction, Text, Voice
Nicola Dahlinger
Performance, Choreography
Esther Nicklas, Sigrid Westenfelder
Light
Frank Vetter
Sound
Pablo Juanes
Design
Sönke Hoof
Project Co-ordination, Production
Catherine Launay
Thanks to Boris Baltschun, Thomas Charbonnel, Susanne Held, Colette Sadler and Karin Wickenhäuser.
Produced by emerging properties in co-production with Schloss Bröllin e.V., sponsored by Ministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur des Landes Mecklenburg Vorpommern and with kind support of Mime Centrum Berlin
Premiere, Brotfabrik, Berlin, 2004
The words "a form of patience" are a quote from the poem Banners in which McCann looks back on his experiences: "Grief seemed a form of patience I should learn."
For the performance Nicola Dahlinger and Jeanette Sendler reconsider the title of the book of poems: Ghost Letters. The poet wants to make contact with his dead partner. In the process he touches and is touched by the paper, the pen, the table and the chair.
Nicola Dahlinger explores the inner and the outer movements of writing and writes letters to her dead father. Jeanette Sendler focuses on paper as a material and manufactures paper from plants used for healing, like camomile and yarrow. The performers Esther Nicklas and Sigrid Westenfelder take on these respective roles and choreograph the process of writing and paper-making. The musician Pablo Juanes collects writing sounds and sounds from the performance for his electronic composition.
The performance connects the memory of a person with the formation of a text, the formation of a material with the memory of its origin.
"One writes as well as one listens. In the performance, the sound of writing and the movement of the performer in the role of the writer must correspond strongly, otherwise the movement appears theatrical. The moment the movement appears theatrical, the audience react to what the performer is showing. The audience then no longer experience the state of listening, which belongs to the realm of being, but are transported into the realm of action/reaction.
None of the elements of the performance should reveal any personality, at the end of the texts for example, there is no sense of having gotten to know the father or the daughter, they don't even have a name. The narrator appears as a disembodied voice. The performers do not seem to have a story, they partly merge with the objects in the space, which are placed there to fulfill particular tasks. The task of the papermaker is making, the task of the writer is listening. The sound the performers produce, live and electronically reproduced, emphasises the performing of these tasks. Everything in the space is objectified, even the audience members, placed at the edge of the other objects. Their task is the witnessing of the individual acts, visible and invisible: writing, moving, papermaking, speaking, listening.
The text is poetic rather than narrative or dramatic, the performers do not act as mirrors to the audience. The performance thus creates a space, a void, in which the audience member can experience his/her own perception and new associations to his/her own story can reveal themselves."
Nicola Dahlinger, 2006
05 and 06 April 2008, Druckstelle, Berlin
July 2005, Galerie der Künste, Berlin
July 2005, Kunstladen, Berlin
February 2005, Festival 100°, Berlin
November 2004, Galerie space untitled, Berlin
October 2004, Brotfabrik, Berlin
"It needs time for the words to come. Paper is being made, the table stands there, but it needs time.
The voice is clear and calm, like the light. The narrator recites a letter to her father. She describes this photo of him, in which he is playing the piano; his girlfriend Edith is sitting next to him but she is not in the picture. The narrator tells her father how she heard of his death and what followed: the trip on the airplane, the church, how she found his photos, visits to his friends.
The table has allowed itself to be touched, but one can see there are opposing forces at work. A pen rustles on paper. Paper is being made, over and over, like in a Sisyphus work.
The clear, assured gestures are calming the way the voice is. The feelings, the hesitations were left at the table and not transmitted onto the page. The words are free from sentimentality, from judgements. The narrator says, what it was like, no more than she knows of, no more than what is there. And the power of poetry opens up the mystery to us, where there are no solutions and no answers. Paper is being made." Séverine, September 2005