may is a month of travelling for me; right now i’m briefly at home in munich, between berlin and nantes – enough time to wash clothes, plant out the tomato, basil & rucola seedlings, see a few friends and catch my breath after four make-shift gigs in eight days. annoyingly, public holidays & pfingsten mean i’m not getting a yoga class, but i am being good & practising at home every day
my first trip in may was to vienna, for the libre graphics meeting and a make-shift event, which was hosted by alexandra reill as part of her birthday celebrations. i stayed with eva and rudi who were excellent hosts, despite being in the process of packing up their lives in vienna to move to germany. martin eisenbarth had come with me to present DownStage at the LGM, & we managed to have good discussions about the project, as well as enlisting the help of another developer, and a french translator for the UpStage manual. we were joined online in our presentation by jenny pickett from APO33, and by jenny & miljana peric for a 5-minute “lightning performance” to demonstrate UpStage.
as well as the LGM activities, and trying to catch up with people there who i knew and meet new people, i was busy negotiating make-shift with sascha, sending out invitations and creating media for the event. as it was a party, people kept arriving throughout the event & i think by the end there were about 30 people there, a lot more than we usually have in the house for make-shift; so it was a little bit noisy & chaotic, but everyone had a good time, & the best thing was that afterwards i didn’t have to quickly pack up & leave as i usually do – but instead was able to sit down, eat & drink with the participants, & have some really interesting conversations about make-shift & other things.
after vienna i came home, washed clothes, repacked my suitcase, & took the train to berlin where i stayed with sandra sarala & we had 2 make-shift events in her livingroom; the third berlin make-shift event was kindly hosted by brina & nikolaus. it was interesting to do three events in three days – i had been worried that i’d be exhausted, since each event involves about five hours of quite intense work, as well as the surrounding activity of publicity, host negotiation, tech set-up & media creation … well, it was tiring but i wasn’t totally exhausted; & i did find that i was able to get much more into the flow of things. i hardly needed to look at my cue sheet & i only forgot to turn my mic off once!
on the social side of things, while in berlin i had the pleasure of reconnecting with a friend i hadn’t seen for 30 years; sarah drake had been in my year at intermediate & the first year or two of high school, then her family moved to australia (actually, back to australia) & we lost contact. she’s now known as sarah asling & has been living in berlin for 25 years, starting as a singer-songwriter before the wall came down and being involved in the venue/community schokoladen. in fact, we realised that nearly ten years ago on my first visit to berlin, i’d been at schokoladen for the premier performance of the inimitable princessin hans (who i also had the pleasure of catching up with on this visit), & sarah was most likely upstairs with her young daughter; little did we know that we had come so close to a chance encounter! would we have recognised each other, if she had come down to the bar that night? possibly – we don’t actually look that different to 30 years ago!