Category Archives: Settlement

Settlement was a performance by Hans Van den Broeck / SOIT at ImPulsTanz Vienna in 2008.

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goat snake witch dance theatre blackness

The last couple of days I’ve been working on a side-project, cleaning up my dance/performance/choreography website, francesdath.info. I decided a while ago I wanted to move it into WordPress, change the font to Anonymous Pro, and try and make everything I would do by hand-coding possible through the WordPress browser editor.

Success! (Mostly). The design hasn’t changed, except it’s been cleaned up a bit, and a more structured layout used. The video took the longest and was a rather intense learning process, which is going to fall over into some other projects I’m working on at the moment. The words I edited a bit, but mostly left alone. Some time I’ll clean that up also.

As for ‘goat snake witch dance theatre blackness’, I couldn’t decide which word I liked the least and somehow they all sit together quite nicely, like an excess of baroque.

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BER – BRU – BER – VIE

Not so much an open secret as something I haven’t got around to writing about here, I depart tomorrow for a journey around central Europe for the next few weeks.

First, to my second home in Brussels, to see Gala, Hans and others, and for Dasniya’s Yoga + Bondage workshop in Charleroi Danses. Then back to Berlin for a week, and then on to Vienna.

Vienna again. It will be my third time at ImPulsTanz, the first where I was a DanceWEB-er(in), and heard/saw/met Hans for the first time, the second, in 2008, fresh off the plane from Adelaide (after a week in Berlin), to work with him in Settlement, and this time to work with him once more, in Café Prückel.

Yes, rather thrilled about it all, summer across the three cities I have a strong attachment to, performing, making new things with friends, friends themselves…

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impulstanz – settlement… (perhaps day 12)

Sleepy all day, getting up late, nearly lunchtime, slobbing around all afternoon then too quickly i’m almost late and so… towards WUK again. The second night is… not so much hard as unknown. Opening is preceded by all the rehearsals and then a day of leading in, so there’s tiredness, nerves, immanent departure, like being launched in a space craft, everything impels towards that zero second when things commence.

The second night is, usually follows the first relaxing day in a while, and so is a mix of things, tiredness from the end of preparations, sometimes feeling too relaxed and so getting too nervous as a consequence, wondering if it will be as good or not as good or what, no first night hysteria to rely on, and so how to find something new in what we do, to not slip into a pattern, to not become old and dead.

Less people, calmer also, a faster start. I take off my trousers in the clothing section and find I am completely adhered to the floor, having to shunt myself along with my shoulders and skin. Funny in a “oops, that didn’t work at all” way.

I heard some people thought from the first night we were too isolated within ourselves, almost mechanical in progressing through tasks, so to find some way of being in this when not doing things. I have less to pick up tonight, a badminton shuttlecock, Barbara’s badge, some threads and fluff. It is much warmer also, and so we all sweat and are drenched. Jessica and I drag Elodie, and I pull her too far into the river, half submerged, splashing a few people in the front row, Elodie’s mouth and eyes open circles of shock and surprise. She and I have kept each other amused during rehearsal pretending to eviscerate ourselves with sharp swords, guts flopping out, blood fountaining.

It’s over so fast. Once we get to the second night, I creep again to Barbara’s sleeping patch, so much cooler than the trapped heat inside a zipped tent. Suddenly it’s dancing girls, deep strangeness, the theatre piece, running, finish.

I can’t run. The lights in the theatre have burnt iridescent blobs into my retinas and in the darkness I can only see with my periphery. Bodies hurl into vision out of this blindness, I’m completely disoriented, groping, expecting to be plowed into, or on the one time I do run, to slam into chairs or tents or a wall.

Theatre was fun this night and felt… I became relaxed a little in the complete uncertainty of what I should be doing and what might come next, and in this calmness found maybe a way to observe the madness and not be so freaked out. It has been the mountain for me. The first half and second morning are much hard breathing, exertion, familiar pushing with my body to get through, but the theatre… oh, the moment the light comes up is a small horror every time.

We finish, surprise it’s all over, begin to dismantle everything. It happens rapidly with some drinks and much loud music and dancing. The settlement is in piles. People begin to depart for the last time, and at midnight we move, leaving WUK finally for this time, to the Burgtheater again and instead of dancing sit on the lawn outside talking, eating, till dawn. More people depart during the night. I’m tired and not tired. I want to see these people till the last moment, till it’s finished. And soon the sky lightens, a bird, street cleaners, early jogger, a tram, more, awakening, and we leave.

My last day in Vienna. Sleeping till midday, doing washing from a week of stink and dirt, domestic things today and hopefully to see a couple of people later, and maybe Tony Rizzi’s show. I could lie around here all day. My brain is fuzzy cottonwool also my mouth, I’m hungry from depletion as much as needing to eat, soreness has crept out and made itself known, I need to pack, also to clean. I want to see something of Vienna, to go to Arsenal also. I wonder in all this isolation these two weeks what happens there? Tomorrow morning to Zürich. Another return.

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impulstanz – settlement… (perhaps day 11)

We opened.

We went to Burgtheater to our tables in front of Casablanca playing and ate potatoes and pasta. And some drinks also. I had a cigarette. This morning I sound like a demonic old grandmother.

And…

I don’t think I have written here about a performance I’ve been in. I usually stop the day before, then a pause of some days, or weeks, and a slew of photos I manage to purloin from someone. I can think of two people with cameras I would like to take advantage of for this.

I must stop thinking that Melina’s name is Concetta. And accept my peevish inability to remember names even this late and near the end. Johan, Melina, Hans, Anushka arrived early, 11am to attempt to reduce our anxiety about the play. More changes, and finally it became something coherent and… Do you expect we remembered this when near the end of an hour and 20 minutes?

Some warming up, some working through the piece again, first half is coherent, second is… not illegible but difficult, resisting the ease of coming together the first half, first day has. The handshakes are a vortex we can all be sucked under by. Hans says something like, I don’t want to rehearse it too much, I prefer to leave it open a little so… I think he said, so it can grow or become something when we perform.

I wonder if this is a common thing. I think and have said this often when we get to the days and hours before, I like under-rehearsing, I like some quantity of unknowns, maybe paths that fade out and how to get to there has to be invented, or… openness. To know enough and to be comfortable enough so as to have time to think and look when it’s happening and decide then from myriad possibilities what is next. Which is partly why I find steps to counts traumatic.

Waiting, doing things to ankles, wondering if soreness in back and calves will become something I have to think about the entire night. We stand in a circle and yell “C’EST BON CI!!!” (yes, we do say that, I wasn’t imagining it). Into tents, wait, nerves that say inaudible things calmness that says it’s too late for that now, fart, wait, people, talking, darkness, night sounds, crickets, water, running…

How do I write about the inside of a performance? I can say, oh this was good, this bit, this was uncertain here, I forgot this thing. We had fun. We arrived at the other side.

Yes, I had fun. I have almost always performed with groups of five or so, and there is nowhere to hide or pause so much. It is a public way of being on stage. Here, there is so much going on that requires maybe only a few people to be effective, much time for watching and looking then. A nice world to live in, so public with an audience yet as calm and private as digging in the garden.

Afterwards a cigarette with Barbara from Toronto. We talk of ourselves, drink a little, join the others along two benches without a table in-between, warmth of bodies in a warm twilight.

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impulstanz – settlement… (perhaps day 10)

I’ve been meaning to say something about my apartment, I mean to say, where I’m staying. The woman who let it out to me, not the owner when I asked what she does (I don’t think this is a dumb or lazy question because I’m actually interested in what someone does, especially if they’re passionate about it or it’s weird) said, I’m a freelance philosopher, in feminism. Oh yes I already wrote this on the first day. And so into the apartment, two flats on different stories joined by a flight stairs by the door. A vast bed, a thin futon oh what bliss, a bathroom I could drown in, a kitchen meant for cooking with gas burners like exhausts on tiny space probes. One woman lives upstairs and we have spent some evenings drinking wine and schnapps together talking about central asia and other things, and…

I have imagined the owner because I’ve never met her from the books in her study that line the entirety of one wall. On her table is a text by Bruno Latour, much of the packed shelves are in german, cultural studies and periodicals, then a couple of regions populated in Engilsh, Judith Butler oh yes!!! and Susan Sontag, Gilles Deleuze, and Love and Rockets comics which seem to be sprouting up all over my life recently, and a stack of dyke comics also, mmm… happy bedtime.

Outside walking home in the evening I have to ignore the endless cars slow-crawling with single men looking to pay for sex, and similar walking the pavement, whistling or making clicking or other noises like trying to call a dog or pet. Occasionally I show them a middle finger. I don’t mind at all people working the street or men seeking, but I get really shitty when these men think any woman they see can be approached. I want to make them read the entirety of the last sixty years of feminism.

I bought a ticket to Zürich this morning.

A small warmup and then a talk about the day, a photocopied page of Hans’ running order of the piece, a plan to get through the first half before lunch, the second half after, and a run of sorts around 6pm. I was expecting a tough day for some reason, but besides occasional plummets into dreaminess, it was all quite smooth and I didn’t feel like I’d been flattened at the end.

What to say…

Oh, hello everyone from the settlement who has now discovered me here courtesy ImPulsTanz’s newsletter.

I think I’ll just write about the evening rehearsal.

There was a small audience and someone filming for the run, Libby Farr I think, because I seem to keep seeing her everywhere, not that I go many places.

I have to find underwear I can run in that doesn’t try to lacerate my adductor tendon. I managed to partially destroy the badminton net on one pass, and soon discovered in the clothes dressing bit, lying on the floor shunting ourselves along, dressing, undressing that my sweatiness meant I stuck to one spot and clothes to me. Everyone slides, I attach and detach from the floor like a floppy limpet.

Occasional blanks where I whisper to someone, what’s next. Many moments of business where I decide to do nothing. Estelle and I talk about this in the tent, I’m trying to say something about the tendency needs to be towards nothing, but am cryptically obtuse, she says, people think, oh I need to be doing something, instead of oh, I need to be doing nothing. With sixteen people, a lot of nothing can happen.

In the darkness, badminton being played in fading light far from me, people sleeping in tents, I sneak to the public call phone and I order a large jar of peanut butter, two kilos of bananas and two loaves of crusty white bread. mmm… I am single-minded.

The dragging bit seems to paradoxically work better when all four are being hauled along when they go much slower, almost a delicate thing. Olive says some things, “I met her at my funeral”, “He took me to a stadium it was full of dead bodies”.

I decide not to fight at all. Too much bedlam, everyone swinging at each other. I thought about consensual behaviour. I’m not sure what I want to say here. I’ve been reading let them eat pro-sm feminist safe spaces recently, I wrote on day two of this, thinking about the applicability of discourse in the bdsm scene to genderqueer, and so was thinking about ‘safe, responsible, consensual and respectful’, that is to say in part, how to conceptualise rules for play. For me, the fighting if seen and thought (from both audience and performers’ perspective) as a representation of a brawl, it is quite problematic for me, and I’m content to skirt the edges and concentrate on setting up our appallingly bad amateur theater caper. But to imagine it as something consensual, we decide to fight, we take pleasure in hitting and being hit, to have respect in this play and in the person and body we do this with, I think is far more rich with troubling interpretations.

We are in therapy, and part of this is to hit each other. And we agree to do this. We love to give and receive this.

So we reach the end, running again, in darkness this time. It felt good, coherent, a lot of work for two weeks, 70 minutes or so. We rehearse in the afternoon tomorrow and then…

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impulstanz – settlement… (perhaps day 9)

I saw Jan Fabre’s Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Day. It was unmemorable. Earlier I ate organic crunchy peanut butter and banana sandwiches. mmm…

This morning two tonnes of sand arrived. Actually two cubic meters of wet sand, so possibly somewhat heavier. I kept my hands clean by shoveling it into a wheelbarrow while others moved it inside and arranged it on the khaki groundsheet into a low embankment the length of the space, eventually to be filled with water. I do like simple repetitive things at the moment and the satisfying sshhhh of blade cutting sand and rasping as it flew off into barrow over and over was soothing and immanent blisters aside I could have done it for hours.

Cleaning up with a water blaster. Mopping the floor. Lunch. I bought the peanut butter then, and ate more cheese and tomato on bread, plus apricots in the third floor green room. It was suckily cold today, not as bad as yesterday, but I remember my time in Vienna was endless days above 30º and blue skies laced with a tapestry of contrails. Now it hangs disinterested, a grey nothingness, with frequent warmth-sucking bouts of rain.

We warm up. I’m feeling a lot more energetic than I have for months, since ADT, I think. Though each day eventually fatigue reaches me and pulls me under.

I think we started with the martial arts drills. I like Hans affinity for reducing things to simplicity or even absence, obviously that has much in common with my attitude to making theatre, why dance around a lot when what you really meant to do was walk from here to there? And also it’s uncommon to work with someone who indeed does the work themselves, not just deferring the manufacturing of content to performers.

So we reduced the fighting drills to repetitions of each of the three phrases in order, after a time one overtaken by the next. For some reason the three big guys start it. Of course it looks impressive, but there are some girls here who punch and attack like Durga. Or maybe it’s me getting picky over gender divisions.

Which of course was the big thing, the big disappointment, if somewhere in this an artificial delineation of male and female has appeared I would have lost all interest. Instead there is a strange lack of intimacy and binary relationships. How to imagine a closeness between people that does not automatically become about couples. For some this has been irritating or even frustrating, that there has been no real development of such relationships, as though this was the genuine and real definition of intimacy. I far prefer imagining other worlds and ways of relationships and whether or not this was Hans’ intention there is for me something more compelling in a suspension of the individual to the group, however much in need of therapy we are.

We are putting the scenes together, and went to the start, morning, emptiness, I go for a run. Highly, highly improbable. More likely I go for a chocolate croissant and return to snoozy oblivion. A body floats down the river. People wake and begin, and for some this morning os broken by the intrusion of the waterlogged and washed up newcomer.

I forget how much we do every day…

We have a line out, a public phone to make calls. I order much peanut butter, bread, bananas. It’s been weeks since my utter favourite meal has passed into my mouth. How to say, to elucidate without saying. How the brevity of words, pauses, silences, convey the entirety far more than if someone were to say it all. We’ve done several different versions of this, the ‘what to do with three euros’, others… again I forget, slippery memories already beyond capture.

The river reminds me of the storm-water culvert and flooded stream under rain in epidemic.

We go to sleep in our tents. I miss this all as I’m passed out. Both Johan my former tent companion and Estelle are secret polizei, who slip from their tents to capture the four who try to escape. Three or four times to run this part and I photograph the inside of my tent, and the outside through it.

And finally dancing girls to fighting to our theatre piece (which still needs a lot of work) to the possessed running. I for some reason started laughing in the fight part, like a brawl in a club, all my worst imaginings, vile hetero men like thuggish tanks, vacuous tiny girls, it’s like hallucinating with a raging fever. I can’t easily subsume myself into a role where there is this kind of violence. So I laugh while others pound each other, stalking for the next savage explosion. Maybe it’s like A Clockwork Orange.

We haul ourselves through the three act travesty and begin to run in darkness, and then to finish.

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impulstanz – settlement… (perhaps day 8)

Wherein I discover that ImPulsTanz knows about my blogging of settlement and having revealed as such in their newsletter, I suspect the game is up.

No yoga for me today, instead a pleasant sleep-in, snooooze… oops I’m going to be late. Rolling on the floor with Ivan, no concrete is not so hard if you accept it doesn’t yield. Box-steps, pointing, prancing, prancing and turning and pointing, walking in many different ways, running a little. I realised this year I like simple, repetitive things. Excitement over many many many pliés, each one new, the same over running, each step oh who knows what it will bring.

Trying… to… remember…

The bound dancing has become dragging, pulling these bodies around on the floor, sometimes getting them up slightly only to drop them down. I think what I like in this is that it is not so much violent, and most things tend towards being non-antagonistic or confrontational. There’s a gentleness and care in swinging these somewhat helpless four about, though it can get frenzied at times. It’s much grunt work though, figuring out how to move efficiently a person who can’t do so much to help. And figuring out how to move each person as an individual. Jonathan is quite happy to be pushed down a cliff and bounce his way to the bottom, Elodie is deceptively strong and has a completely different momentum. It was good today to spend some time just working out how to do things with one person, become familiar.

I think we did handshaking again. I have a memory of this.

Fighting. Stalking. Circling and lashing out. It’s an old movie, maybe a black and white war movie with James Stewart, sleeves rolled up, a punch comes, single, deliberate, aesthetic in the completeness, a head snaps back, staggers, more circling, maybe pouncing and driving a shoulder into the stomach. Or Sergio Leone, a long silence and flash of naked brutality.

Two people circle and smack their chests with their hand while the other fist lashes out, it’s disturbingly convincing when it all happens. We do this two-by-two, then into groups of four. Then another change.

The girls dancing in a line, slow motion to The Knife. I didn’t notice how similar these eight are in height, but possibly is an illusion of the stage they are on, the backlighting, the fans blowing their hair. Forever doing the same moves, heads fall back with one hand behind, hips jut, slow dirty running turning and clapping… Tried in a line then a group, three, two, three. I think it looks better this way the sense of depth and also that the inexact unison gives it a more feral, deranged, orgiastic sense, like the rows of dancers at the ImPulsTanz party, bedlam and sweating walls.

The fighting is added in, in the darkness. It feels… hmmm… like therapy. All this together sometimes acting out base and damaging scenarios, sometimes caring for each other, somehow always morally ambiguous, and perhaps in this we reveal ourselves as unsympathetic.

I forgot the present. How to give. Maybe when I don’t want to, or want something in return, or want to manipulate, or don’t want to receive.

Lunch?

Oh! Running. (Was before lunch I think.) As therapy. How to indulge the desire to escape the settlement by running away. Some try to escape and are stopped at the river (two tonnes of sand apparently arriving tomorrow), and are then held by two people and forced to run, held off the ground, legs shackled by arms maybe, all manner of exhausting yourself through grunting physical exertion.

I’m surely forgetting something.

Concetta! James! Elisabeth! Jean-Pierre Louis Saint Bouillion mmblemumblemmble… We talk through with Anushka all this, or maybe better to say the post-yesterday discussion she and Hans had about this, then begin to write a three-act play that should last several minutes only. I get to play the Baroness, Hans my butler, Concetta my cleaning lady and Johan the visitor with the very very long French name.

Act one my happiness is broken by discovering the Baron is dead (James: “The Baron is dead!”), act two further grief discovering he left the castle to Concetta (James: “The Baron left left you nothing”), act three I kill myself, and it is revealed the Baron had syphilis infecting Concetta and causing her thus to kill herself (she had an affair with him)(James: “The Baron dies of syphilis!”), and then Jean-Louis who was in love with her also follows us out the balcony window, leaving only the Machiavellian James with castle and emptiness. I return from the grave to haunt him.

That’s if we play it straight. All the stuff from yesterday applies: Misheard lines, wrong lines, improper prompts, set disasters, lighting mishaps, oh catastrophe, arguments backstage, primadonnas, oh I think I should be an alcoholic for this scene, or maybe actually drunk. And to do all this in several minutes, fast and hysterical but trying to keep up with what comes next.

We finished at 9. Only my body was tired and my brain fuzzy, I wanted to keep going if this wasn’t burying me.

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impulstanz – settlement… (perhaps day 7)

I think a stop to yoga soon, or maybe exchange for snoozing or lying on the floor pretending to warm up. Move my fingers some. Move my head a little one way… oh, too much.

Staying out late then chatting with Daniel till 1am then getting up at 730 was all a bit much. I have sultry black rings under my eyes. We warm up sitting in chairs, like a lapdancing Martha Graham. I can feel my torso grinding around with my breath contracting and extending, sitbones digging into the wood. Then some yoga. Then some, oh I love so much, running and line stuff, mmm I could run for ages, it’s so peaceful.

A new thing to work on. Several actually. A morning scene, getting up and getting dressed. I have a feeling this is going to be a quite physical 80 minutes. So, we fall forward, hands knees, sit back and swing our left arm behind us and catch out weight on it, then swing to the other side and collapse onto our right sides, beginning a motion like things buffeted in the tide, one way then the other, onto one side then the other and with each swing we pull ourselves along with out feet, push a bit with our hands, rather briskly. And undress or pull clothes on. It’s not as hard as it first looked but there’s a certain businesslike commitment to keeping it all together with each other, an amount of brusqueness with the clothes, yet care also. It’s kinda fun and oh frustrating sometimes also.

This for an hour, then… oh of course, martial arts. A new phrase, or maybe that was yesterday, anyway, three phases we do in groups feeding in and out, each one it’s own species, yet together they all somehow, with occasional clonking of heads, come together. We are getting things finished, how to being and how to end, yet so much is only with Hans and his notebook.

I’m forgetting things, was this before or after lunch? Today or yesterday? Anyway, so we have lunch and I forgot to take pictures, bread and tomatoes and cheese, I tore bits together into mouthfuls. And a small sleep. Ivan wakes me. I’m insensate until I stand.

The line and handshaking pulled together with the water phobia therapy, and then off to the kitchen. Real food will be there. Should I offer to cook something? Rice with… oh you know, rice with pretty much anything.

I forgot the bound dance. People with their legs tied, we did this in the VolksOper studio, real and natural light for a change. Today I enjoyed again the perpetual unknowingness of what time it is in WUK, all light excluded, a monad of sorts.

They have their legs tied for trying to eat at night without sharing their food. We eat breakfast and then knock them to the ground. It’s more humiliating than vindictive, though an implied brutality or sense of violence is there also. Dragging around pulling up, causing to topple, more physical work, like digging fields on the farm.

A short break then everyone splits. Some get to do slow-motion dancing to The Knife, Anushka does this like she has been filmed at a fast frame-rate then played back at normal, such an eerily convincing low speed. Hans, Johan, oh I forget her name, oops, will fix this tomorrow, and me work on a play. Theatre that is.

Except the lines are all wrong, we need prompting, the prompting is wrong, the set gets in the way, we forget, miss our cues, miss pages, read from different plays even, mess up lines, combine lines into… oh disaster, over and over and over. I keep dying, well you all know I love to die over and over. Then we make a little scene, Hans is the doctor, I have an affair with him, I’m married to Johan, affairs all round, discovery, betrayal, madness, missed lines, fart, peeing, toilets, more chaos and confusion. We get to perform this.

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impulstanz – settlement… (perhaps day 6)

This being the day of my birth… uh… day, AND!!! my second in Vienna. Excellent!!

(AND!!! not getting around to writing this till Wednesday because I went out for drinks and dinner and a small bout of trashing a restaurant (“I can destroy this place in less than one minute…”) with four of the settlement.)

So I decided to do yoga that morning and shuffled through some up and down and stand, sit, upsidedown, lie down, snooze, think positive thoughts, bllrrrrrr…

Then to warm up with everyone, yoga!

Then: Running, circle stuff, martial arts phrases, handshakes, politics (oh, political grandstanding, I mean)… other things? Not sure… The drinks and cheese at special secret café were rather fun, and so bicycle five people four bikes to Taborstaße and Enchiladas and other chicken things. Home late. Hello to Daniel (^-^)

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impulstanz – settlement… (perhaps day 5) (and sunday also)

umm… Supermodels. Catwalks. Shopping lists. Hate. Ambivalence. Whispering. Not whispering loudly enough. Microphones. Costume changes. Love. Happiness. Drugs. Music. This song is stuck in my head. Dancing with legs tied. 1 hour of live mannequins…

I think a lunch break.

Being posed with Ivan by an audience of everyone, a slow real-life stop-motion adventure story.

Not rehearsing in WUK. Instead off to the VolksOper rehearsal rooms, huge with vast windows, much light. Peculiar to work with natural light. One last meal at Deewan before it closes for summer, a couple of weeks only but for us, it is forever.

It’s Sunday now. I didn’t get around to writing this on Friday night, nor yesterday so it’s a rather large blur of… I think we did this, things were said, maybe these things, things were done also, maybe some of these things.

Saturday night, ImPulsTanz’s 25th anniverary opening party at Kasino am Schwarzenbergplaz. I discover Ivan and Estelle just arrived. Warm and sweaty, loudness. Later much dancing. A vast room full of drenched, wild bodies, half the space is raked seating, the other the stage, one side faces the other, bodies grinding in pale blue light, boys in dresses and makeup, a girl in blue underwear or bikini, skin glistening with running sweat, the walls almost leak, madness and hysteria, things go into slow-motion and yet more frenzied. I fall into bed after a nightbus ride at 5am.

We were to build the set somewhat today. The theatre was a cesspool of spilt beer, stale cigarettes, chewing gum, noxious odors and mess. Three and a half hours later after a quite obsessional effort with buckets, mops, brooms, and large yellow beetle that sucked up goo and regurgitated cleaning fluids in a rather loud high-pitched whine – soothing on ears bashed by compressed treble banging techno and house, oh, and a hose. Maybe two. … we have something cleanish and go for Chinese, no Turkish, no Pizza, no walk, tram, Chinese, no Kebabs… oh Vienna you so fail to seduce me with your all-close-on-sunday-and-go-to-church attitude. Milchreis really is milk-rice, rice pudding. mmm slippery tastiness.

Return. It’s 4:30, Ivan is contentedly or methodically finishing the far corners where the stage once was. We now have a rather vast empty space and quite a lot of stuff. And so to assemble tents and lean-tos and a badminton court and kitchen, bathroom, lights, other things, hours of hammers and nails and gaffer and scissors and string and…

Around 6:30 I become insensate. Sugar won’t help. I go home. Tomorrow we do something with this all.