I know where to find blueberry-yoghurt dark chocolate in vienna

migritude rocked the kosmos tonight

packed....

the saris, the set, the red suitcase, the snow boots. Oh wait, I forgot one eye.

migritude roadshow

no really, this is how I look after the final vienna show

closing party doppelganger

Gifts

My friend Sandra, brilliant beautiful artist, thinker, and human being. She travelled 5 hours by train from Munich to be here for the opening night.

I couldn´t have known in advance, but in retrospect, she is the person I would have chosen to have here for those 24 hours. She understood completely that I needed to be totally focussed on rehearsal and prep right through the day. Without being asked, she took on the role of unconditionally generous just tell me what you need me to do support. From videotaping the show, to pinning up the back of my hair before I went on. I hope I can do the same for her one day.

As if that wasn´t enough, she gave me a box of Schoko Maroni, delectable chestnut-puree-stuffed chocolates, before she left. We had a couple of hours to hang out together yesterday morning before I saw her off at the train station. She had to get back to Munich for her own performance tonight. Her energy is still with me, as I savor the chocolates, and pass them around at the Kosmos Theater.

Cake quest

I learned yesterday that Marie-Antoinette was an Austrian princess. Which brings a whole new meaning to Let Them Eat Cake.

My tourist mission for the week was to find Vienna´s best patisserie. Albert, tech director of the Kosmos Theater, recommended Oberlaa, on Babenbergerstrasse, just off the Museum Quarter. So I landed there yesterday afternoon, and took over 20 minutes to choose what to have from the cake selection - a nut and chocolate torte. It was pretty amazing. And wonderfully funny to eat it, very slowly, to Would I Lie To You Baby, playing over the sound system. Mozart would just have been cliched.

the lovely thing

about being in a city where you don´t speak the language is the way it expands your vocabulary of hands and eyes. The hundreds of ways you find to connect and communicate without speech - glances, smiles, the lift of an eyebrow, the shrug of a shoulder. The pleasure of being an observer in conversations, with no sense of exclusion, because you couldn´t participate anyway.

The lovely thing about the imperative of total voice rest i.e. silence, in-between rehearsals and performances, is that it liberates me to be alone without feeling lonely. It´s like a children´s book adventure to wander the streets of Vienna, dive into tiny hidden squares and snowy courtyards, delight in scenes and sounds and cafes, museums and esoteric shops, without being able to speak. Without any wish that I could show this to X, or share this with Q, because my voice is in protective silent custody.

opening night in Vienna

Three curtain calls. And magenta tulips. All of which totally took me by surprise, because the audience was so quiet through the whole performance that I was convinced I wasn´t reaching them. Barely a ripple of laughter at the funniest parts, none of the spontaneous bursts of sound and applause that I expect when the work is really hitting people.

"They weren´t silent, they were rapt," said Kim (my director). "And as you saw, they were most definitely not ambivalent about the clapping."

"Hell yeah," Riley (my set designer, tech director) chimed in. "I had to bring the house lights up to get them out of there - they weren´t gonna stop."

"Audiences here pay attention," Albert, tech director of the Kosmos Theater, told me. "We listen. Then we clap."

Three curtain calls. On opening night, when some things were ragged, when I had a raging stomachache right through the show, when I was still in the space of nailing the cues, the movement, certainly not at the pinnacle I reach for when I forget myself and everything else and simply become the work.

Wow. I´m so grateful. Feel so blessed.

sorry about the weather

the Austrian organizers keep saying.

Maybe by the end of the week, snowflakes melting on my eyelashes, catching on my tongue, will have begun to irritate me. Right now, it´s pure magic. I´m a little Kenyan tourist, dancing down snow-covered strasses, delighted by every cliched winter postcard scene.

another reason to love this festival

they feed all the artists. Really well. Hot healthy veggie-rich meals, salads, fresh fruit. The hardest things to find on the road, at prices that don´t gouge you, when you´re in a strange city, at a hotel, rehearsing all day, performing at night.

The Kosmos Theater

in Vienna, main venue for Her Position In Transition,
http://www.herpositionintransition.at
is the coolest theater - community - arts space I´ve ever been in. Amazing that it lives up so perfectly to its history and mission.
http://www.kosmostheater.at/herstory.asp

Kim and I checked out the stage I´ll be performing on, and met some of the organizers and other artists. Performance spaces either welcome you or they don´t. When they don´t, it doesn´t stop you doing good work, but the effort is exponnentially greater.

Tonight, we walked into the empty Kosmos theater auditorium, and elation surged through all my cells. I could FEEL Migritude rising out of the floorboards. Wanted to dive into rehearsal right there and then, with snowflakes still dripping off my coat.