Chennai
Chennai (iPhone & iPod) from Thomas Lehmen on Vimeo.
Please scroll down for photos.
It worked fine. The idea jumped over to the audience: everybody found the piece like a present for them as well. During the short week of work I found out that we started with many misunderstandings.
"There is no discourse as we know it, Thomas." Karl Pechatschek, the director of the Goethe Institute, who invited me, said that several times, and nowhere I found it so dramatically true after a couple of days. The simple discourse of asking back some questions, after the explanation of the plan, didnt happen, let alone giving an opinion or suggestion. The idea is not discussed. We need some corrections later because of that, which takes too much time from the six working days we have. Nevertheless all works out fine. We get a fluid mix of movement, performance and music together. The audience appreciates the present, which is made specially for some of the people, but also the ones who dont participate directly with one of the artists have the impression, that the whole show is a present for them.
But, no wonder that almost everything goes wrong all over the world, when it is expected from the "leaders" to know at any moment what is "right" to do.
But also in the world of "discourse" not everything works out. It seems just to be a good tool when the parties agree on that system of discourse, but nothing more than that. Underneeth there are always the old structures: powergames, relations, envy, money, ..., and a fair discourse is superficial.
The show was great! Misunderstandings are one of the bases of art, maybe the most important one. The whole world is one big misunderstaning anyway.
