She explains herself, or tries…
After several “are you dead?” emails from friends and strangers alike, I feel compelled to explain why I’ve left the Kittensnake to wilt for a spell.
Within the last three weeks, I’ve remounted two operas, Hänsel und Gretel in Stuttgart and Madame Butterfly in Berlin. During this time, I also directed a reworking of a performance experiment I developed in Berlin in 2003…a bizarre pantomime to accompany Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. This was performed as part of the Staatsoper Stuttgart’s opening festivities.
Being back in Berlin was not the warm, perfumed bath I’d expected. Besides the obscene amount of work I had to put into Butterfly, I fell back into annoying tendencies that I’d hoped were slowly waning. Late nights of hanging out and drinking. Too much booze. Too much grass. Too many late night döners and way too many hangovers.
As I dragged myself through my fifth or sixth consecutive day of feeling like migrainy shit, plans were made to hang out with an old friend that evening. “Do you have any green?” I asked him. He didn’t. “Do you think you could try to score some before we hang tonight?” I asked. He said he would.
I was sitting outside of a bar in Kreuzberg with my main homo Toby, when the afore mentioned friend ambled toward us. “Dude, what happened to your eye?”
This friend leveled his gaze at me and calmly recounted how he’d gotten the living shit beaten out of him while trying to score in Görlitzer Park. As he came closer, I could see that both eyes, and one of his ears were already turning an angry purple shade. Toby and I spent the next four hours shuttling him around to several area hospitals…giving fake names and addresses to cover for the fact that my friend is uninsured.
As I sat in the emergency waiting room at the Virchow Clinic in Wedding, watching the clock near 3 A.M., knowing that my next rehearsal would begin in seven hours…I began to feel really sick.
It was the saturation point. I’ve spent so long trying to be everything. A cool, unscrupulous urban artist. A house assistant. A New Yorker. A European. A fiancee. An adult. A remorseless kid. Friend and counselor to dreamers, junkies, emotional cripples, neurotics, opera singers, filmmakers, performance artists, impatient people….unhappy people…
It was in that moment that I became really grateful for the opportunity I have in Stuttgart. I would even go so far as to say that I ached for Stuttgart in that moment. I wanted to be in that beautiful apartment, with my boring evening tea, reading the NY Times on the internet and going to bed. I wanted to be on the rehearsal stage in Stuttgart forming something, shaping something…I wanted order, accomplishment, accountability….
I’d had enough. I’d had so much more than enough. It was then that I knew I was done with Berlin.
Or at least the Berlin I’ve known for the last four years.
You know, I thought I’d miss it more.
