Customer Reviews

Blixa Bargeld - Rede/Speech

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As Blixa Bargeld said in his welcome to us, he set up Rede/Speech as a way of not having to do readings, readings being pre-scripted, pre-determined and dull. He created Rede/Speech so that he would have a forum where he would not know what he was going to do, where there would be challenges to face, where he could work through the stage fright the situation engenders in him and turn it to good use... Rede/Speech is billed as performance art, but this differed from the vast majority of performance art, which in my experience tends to get swallowed up by concepts for the performers to hide behind. More performance than art. In contrast, Rede/Speech was intensely human, an exhibition of the art of life. Blixa Bargeld was very present on stage, sometimes shockingly so, as when he built his model of the Solar System. He rapidly set up an intimate relationship between himself and his audience, partly due to the immense honesty of his performance and partly, I think, due to the fact that he was not performing in his native language. Throughout the evening he asked us questions, and these were not rhetorical: he expected answers. For those of you who've never seen Rede/Speech, or who haven't read about it before, I should explain the basic set up. And it is very basic. A microphone, four foot pedals, which are connected to a machine that can loop 31 seconds of sound, said machine presumably being part of the sound desk manned by Boris Wilsdorf, two speakers, and, in Blixa Bargeld's pocket, a small notebook with concepts & notes for pieces to perform.