check http://everybodystoolbox.net once in a while, I’m sure the transcripts or videos will show up there eventually.

Tex.

I was there too (meaning: I too attended this pseudo-interview with Janez Jansa). I want to ask you: was the interview, well, “entertaining” to watch even for someone like you? I am asking this because you wrote that you hadn’t seen the actual installation/presentation. Unlike you I had actually seen it (it was one of the few still on sale once I got to Berlin, everything else was sold out). Having seen the show made it somewhat interesting to watch, but I can’t imagine such pseudo-interviews being interesting to anyone who hasn’t actually seen the show they’re talking about.

The most interesting thing for me was Janez Jansa’s (who was essentially interviewing himself) tendency to insert his own agenda into his questions. It would be really interesting to get a
hold of a transcript of this interview, and to isolate his questions from the answers. Methinks that those questions, read in isolation from the pseudo-responses (that Mette&Co were making up on the spot), would reveal a lot about his agenda, as well as any interviewer’s ability/power to push an interview into a certain direction. For me, it was as if Janez Jansa was constantly providing Mette&Co with leads to his personal ambitions behind the art-work, hoping that they’d follow up on the leads he provided them with and adopt his agenda (which they sometimes deliberately resisted, or that was my impression).

IMO, It would have been better to present the pseudo-interviews instead of a regular Q&A straight after “the show” instead of as standalones for Mette and Alice to film early in the morning in Podewil.

It would have also been helpful if they’d posted in advance the names of the people they were going to interview. I would have loved to see someone impersonate/stand-in/whatever for Vera Knolle (considering how bland her presentation on Prince, _The Utopic Body of Prince Roger Nelson_) actually was), but since I didn’t know what day that particular interview was, and since it was early in the morning I didn’t bother with the rest.

By any chance, did you see the Vera Knolle pseudo-interview? If you did please post what that was like! I love Prince and I expected so much of her lecture on Prince, but this was the first time I saw Vera Knolle, and I was totally disappointed. Hopefully the person impersonating her was less bland than the real Vera.

As for the rest of the festival:

I saw a total of 4 performances for which I paid: 2 SODA graduate pieces, Janez, and the GAWDAWFUL BORING BORING BORING performance by BADCo that you wrote about in another of your blog entries. My favourite of the whole festival were the solo presentations of the Trisha Brown dancers. I still cannot believe they didn’t ask any money for that. I would have paid 15 euros, cos it was that good.

Maria Technosux