To everything there is a season , turn, turn, turn … 

The trees are on fire with autumn colours
and busy with squirrels collecting their nuts.
We have folded away the summer clothes
and taken our winter jackets out of storage,
hats, gloves, scarves and boots.
Wardrobe change, all change, turn the page –
we are turning away from big tech and billionaires,
towards people and the planet.
The tide is turning – in Hungary, Serbia, Brasil,
out with the old, in with the new.
Aotearoa is voting; we can turn too!!

In September, with collaborators Eva Ursprung and Alexander Gscheil, we presented “Turn“, a new hybrid cyberformance, at the 10th International Frauen* Theaterfestival in Frankfurt. This performance invited the audience to respond to three questions: What turns you on? Who do you turn to? and What do you turn away from?

The online audience could respond directly in the chat, and the proximal theatre audience were using a new feature of UpStage that allows access to the chat on a mobile phone without the whole UpStage interface, which they could see in a large projection. The words they contributed were then incorporated into the visuals of the performance.

We will continue to develop and present “Turn” – check out the UpStage website for information about future turns!

What else has happened since I last posted: thankfully, after such a full first half of the year, I was able to have a quiet August. Munich can be lovely then, when so many people are elsewhere on holiday – there’s a quietness and slowness to the city. But it was also too hot, and while we got to the lake as often as we could, sometimes it was simply to hot to go anywhere. The silver lining to the heat was a bumper tomato harvest – we started eating our balcony tomatoes in June and as October ends we still have the last late tomatoes ripening in a paper bag on the windowsill.

Also during the summer I celebrated what’s called in Germany a “round” birthday; that is, reaching a(nother) number that ends with a zero. Since my friends are scattered all over the world, I decided to ask everyone to contribute a song that they either remembered dancing to with me, or would like to dance to with me, & then we could all dance to the same playlist wherever we were in the world. I got over 120 tracks from 95 people! Suffice to say this was more than we could get through even in an eight-hour party, but we thrashed the playlist in the build-up to the party and continue to enjoy it.

In a nice blast from the past, I was interviewed for the OUSA newsletter. I confess it makes me feel old, to look back on events from 35 years ago, and to connect with the youngsters running the show there now. Amazingly, the secretary Donna Jones, who I was part of interviewing and employing back then, is still there and still loving her job.

Some things change, some stay the same … !