Der perfekte Tag

We will dedicate this evening to neurology and love. Every day, each one of us produces some 60,000 thoughts, neurologists say. And most of them are rubbish. We think it’s part of our reality, though, our truth, our life. Now let us assume this is Let’s Dance, and all the participants would be invited to share – between dance numbers – their mental rubbish which they think is their life, in dialogues between them, sharing 60,000 thoughts per person. And the showmaster would add: “Before, there used to be more dancing. Today we get together to do some cooking and things have got a bit boring. And cha-cha-cha has fallen into oblivion.” But then – light change, bam! People start dancing. And they’re doing it amazingly well!

We could also let you have a taste of things to come in the coming season. Two or three dancing couples will make an appearance on the stage of the Volksbühne. We could, perhaps, create a whole NEW DANCE together with the audience (which does not have to take part in it)? A little dance that only takes place in our heads, a dance that cannot be lived out nor scored, because it only exists in our head. Then the dancers appear to dance entirely different dances, that is, the dances they’ve only just devised which they will deliberately not film for TikTok. They are just presented in a short introduction: This is going to be a perfect day! From now on it’s a perfect day!

The wheel’s got to be reinvented. This wheel, not that beetle over there (points to the Volksbühne wheel).

You will experience the perfect evening tonight. This place will transform before your very eyes. This is a promise!

We will make a horse disappear before your eyes! We will make this house disappear. It’s hard to believe, I know, but it’s going to happen.

It was us, and our seductive powers, to who the estate of Pina Bausch has been bequeathed.

You will see the piece Café Müller tonight!

We are testamentary entitled to perform her work here, to keep it alive. We are going to dance Café Müller to save it from being forgotten. It’s going to be a six-hour show. And you will be released only at break of the next day. Which is when the first act will have come to an end.

We have to reinvent the wheel, re-explore it. Maybe it’s not fully understood yet.

Unfortunately, we’ve got to reinvent everything! We must pretend all this has not existed before. These tools, like your arms and legs, and how you touch them, approach them. We are reinventing the wheel. Maybe we haven’t yet fully understood it.

What is a wheel anyway?

What kind of invention is that meant to be – the perfect day? It sounds like progress. What about the invention of “men and women”? What about the invention of biology? Sexual reproduction? Why does love not rank among the 100 most important inventions in the history of mankind? Is it not important? Was that not progress? What about the invention of the dildo?

This is where the shower was invented, and there, the contact lens, and the sponge, the soap and, look – the fire. The wheel has not been invented, it’s been explored, but our senses were invented and the absence of sense, and human vision, which the eyes had to get used to at first, because they were busy doing other things, and the arms invented being-arm, and the legs invented walking, but also the hair began to go, and the smoke, and then those animals with their antlers whose ends had eyes, and each end signalled to the other that it was listening. And the level used to be levelled, but the trousers didn’t give it a thought. And the ears were just obnoxious handles on the sides of the head, when they suddenly received order to let everything in, into these funnels, though it wasn’t funnels then, they were still antlers with vision sitting at their top ends ready to operate like a strike force, but eventually it was handed over to Blue, White and Brown, these funnel things through which we can see. That’s how it happened. And everything was scrutinized again and again, and when all the seeing and scrutinizing came to an end it still wouldn’t mean death.

So you‘ve once again only heard ‚dildo‘, and you’ve missed hearing me tagging ‘men’ and ‘women’ as inventions? We got to ask ourselves, if we don’t listen or hear, what’s happening here?

What the spectators in the theatre see, even when the actors are standing directly in front of them – indeed the mouth of any another person (before it touches ours) is in the past. Though only a few nanoseconds older than we, our own mouth, our own presence, are, but still…For a moment, we mustn’t forget the fact that everything before us is in the past, even if it is only a few nanoseconds. Light is very fast, not infinitely fast but 300,000 kilometres per second. If it were slower, everything would be even more complicated, I once read, parents would then be younger than their own children. But as for now, everything around us is in the past. Nothing is simultaneous. Because energy is not infinite and light is not infinitely fast. We are not contemporaries. My tuppence on why people, once they get older, experience time passing by more quickly: because most of them are boozed most of the time. So this is for all the binary blockheads out there – two quotes by biologists: Every creature is their own species (Darwin), perchance living in a jointly inhabited house of difference (Haraway).

Der perfekte Tag is part of the Kultursommerfestival.