The most stressful moments are the most calm sometimes… I am sitting in an apartment in Odense, Denmark, listening to the quiet sound of the refrigerator and the regular ticking of the clock by the entrance, waiting for my poor little computer to render a video, or not even render it but export it non-rendered. There is 1 hour and 50 minutes of export time left and the participatory performance is supposed to start in an hour in a park at the other end of town. I have all equipment here with me, and it is too far to walk there and make everything ready and then come and fetch the computer. And I do not even have a car… and, and. Luckily Danish people are fairly relaxed, but they also like their comforts, so I guess nobody wants to stay up one or two hours extra simply for the joy of swinging with an image projected on a tree. Well, well.
The first part of the performance went well, the sun was shining, the swing was nice and well placed, and quite a few people were interested in swinging and seemed to enjoy it. That is one reason why I am late, the video is more than 30 minutes long. And I have not even had the chance to see it yet. Wow. I thought of walking across town with the computer open on my arm, in order to be able to prepare the projector and the rest while the program is exporting the material, but then I am afraid that the electricity there will not work, or that the power runs out in the middle of the walk or whatever. So I just have to wait patiently…

I got a ride to the park and there were other things happening so people did not have to wait too long, and everybody was very helpful giving light with their phones as torches – what an idiot I was not to take my headlamp with me, it would have made life easier in the darkness. But then again, the darkness was good for the projection. No time to experiment or try out things, I just dragged the cable to a spot left of the swing and placed the tripod with the camera in line with the swing, at least somewhere in the vicinity where it had been during daytime. I had nothing to put the projector on, except its own bag, and the same with the computer. Miraculously everything found the right place, somehow, and the swinging movement was visible on the foliage and the swing was hit by the light of the projector sufficiently to be distinguished and so on. Some people were trying out the swing and I would have liked to run through the whole half hour film, but people were tired. I suggested that I could just stay in the park, because I would have liked to film the whole thing on the foliage, perhaps swinging there myself. But the electricity cables could not be left there, and they wanted to pack them away, so I had to stop it before it even really began. Well, people liked the image, and I have a few moments on video, although not much is visible in the darkness. And the photos are completely dark, really. So not much remains to show of this afterwards, but it was an experience and for me a learning experience for sure…

Because I was editing the video all day I missed the rest of the program of the first day of the seminar “Sense it … don’t tell it” in Odense 1-2. September, organised by Nordic Performance Art – reaching a new audience, an organisation that specialises in new music theatre, despite its name. The second day I joined in and had my talk amongst the other presentations and exercises. It was very interesting and fun although more about relational aesthetics or what seemed like participatory strategies in working with theatre and performance than about the environment, so in some sense I was quite out of place. Hopefully my small contribution about process and performance – based on the text for the coming book edited by Emma Meehan and Hetty Blades – was at least somewhat relevant to some of the participants, who seemed to represent a broad scope of practices from children’s theatre to dance, from music theatre to socially engaged art practices and more. And as you could expect in contexts linked to theatre it was all about doing, improvising, moving together, and of course sharing emotional exercises, which was engaging, but exhausting, too.