From 5am till 11am, on 22 Mrach 2014 (Saturday/Sunday), I live-blogged about the live streaming of Forced Entertainment’s ‘And on the Thousandth Night…’ here:
http://1000th.exeuntmagazine.com/
The following was written just after the performahce finished, thus not making the conceptual cut. It’s not a review, not a reflection, it’s live thought, and so it only makes sense to me to post it straight away, close to the time of writing.
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My body is hungry. I have drunk two pots of tea and peed dozens of times. I was extremely sleepy for twenty out of the last thirty minutes – but not the last ten. My body is coming out of a shock, like a long flight, like meditation, like exercise. I have already forgotten what happened to it, I can only feel the physical imprint of the experience.
Durational always gets the easiest in the last hour, because it is no longer taken for granted. I am alert because I want to see the end. And yet I always miss the exact moment somehow: I blink, it’s gone. Roll credits, applause.
Is this against our rules? Not if we can agree that the performance ends only when we stop thinking about it, as half of that famous phrase goes. I wish there was a ritual of exit from the theatre, like there is one for entrance. If we could be directed towards the ritual of debrief.
What was it? Perhaps up to… five hundred?, a thousand?… unfinished stories in a row. Themes and variations, like jazz: dead children, monkeys, kings. Remember the orgasm shop?
It’s not just jazz that feels like this. Techno parties feel like this. One remembers them in a haze: between hour X and hour Y it all came together really well.
I really wanted to hear more about curled sandwiches sitting in the window at 5 to 5, knowing they would be thrown in the bin at 5pm, when the cafe closed.
