This blog is long overdue, and for the next few days, I am going to revisit key moments from the last few weeks of my residency. My last blog post was from the week before I travelled to Bern to attend a theatre festival, auawirleben, alongside a workshop on theatre and race at the University of Bern.
It was a hectic week, but nevertheless one that I enjoyed immensely, especially as it allowed me to immerse myself into a week of watching performances, speaking to practitioners and researchers, and walking around the stunning city of Bern. At auawirleben, I particularly enjoyed the opening show, The Making of Pinocchio, by the Glasgow-based artists Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill, who embed contemporary narratives of gender identity and sexuality within the 19th century fable of Pinocchio the wooden puppet.
The workshop at the university, facilitated by the theatre studies researcher and scholar Azadeh Sharifi, was a warm and supportive space, made up of artists and doctoral researchers from Germany and Switzerland. It was really nice to spend a sustained amount of time in conversation with the same group of people, watch performances together, and share meals. We went over a shared set of readings that made me feel inspired about my AWA project in new ways. We also had spirited conversations about the performances we watched. We had uncomfortable conversations between ourselves and with others, and all the participants in the workshop worked to create a safe space in which to have these conversations. I left Bern feeling exhausted but also warmed by the sense of community.
I could not end this post without a note on walking through Bern. Bern is built on very uneven ground, and there are huge elevation differences between areas that might border each other. This means that you can also look at the city in many different ways. You might walk along the Aare river, which is at the heart of the city, or take in the city and the riverside from high up above, the stippled brown roofs of houses dotting the gre-blue sky. My week in Bern was a topographic reminder of perspectives, that you could see and know objects, landscapes and ideas differently, depending on how you looked at them.
