Thursday may 8th
2025
09:07 (am), Shabaz café in Nordhavn
All right.
here we go in English. Here we go – OK go – music videos from a time when youtube was a teenager. I stole a line from bo burnham’s second best song about the internet and I put I in both the script and in the speech I gave in the foyer in front of the preview-audience. “The whole world at your fingertips”. Just like he would’ve wanted me to. This could have been more about the internet; the global village, how could it not? It turned out, in the end, it was humans all along. And of course it was – we are the ones with hearts and longing and tears streaming down our cheeks as we realize we’ll possibly never meet in physical life. I wrote a line about data centers and the 1% of the 1%, but my mr. robot references didn’t make it to the final version and in a week’s time I’ll be happy about his decision. Maybe even tonight.
Tonight is opening night. Do you get that? Do you know what that means? Do you know that I’ll be pressing the panel to unlock the door to the theater in exactly 40 minutes? Do you know that it’s a little crazy to be doing that on opening night – day?
I wouldn’t know it was crazy if someone hadn’t told me. I’ve never been great at listening to my body, but this time around I’ve heard its calls for sleep. Moved into the spare room in my parents’ apartment and gone swimming in the harbour two out of three days. This morning I went here instead. To clear my mind.
I thought, in this performance, there would be more, actual, hyper stimulation. I’ve been talking to two of my people last week, the only people in my life that aren’t colleagues right now and one of them kind of is, about ADHD. I’ve been thinking about notifications and brain pauses, and about the only way to fall asleep for some people is to listen to audiobooks because it makes the brain not think about everything else. I thought the play would be about this, somehow, with notifications and visual claustrophobia, of sound in frequencies to kill your concentration, maybe it is about this but I thought it would be done differently. I didn’t know that the way would be to see the streets of Mumbai and listen to a wise and incredibly kind man talk about a constant state of stress, of people, of over population, wondering where his body might ever feel at rest.
I’m realizing I haven’t had time to pre-mourn. I sometimes do that, just to take the edge off the actual goodbye a little bit. Usually a successful strategy, but this time around there has been no, well, time. And after tonight, when they log off vMix it’ll be over. For me. I’ll come back in a few weeks and the week after that, but I’ll have left the village. I’ll have moved out, possibly to the big city, in the search for something new with someone else, and I’ll be longing to go back. At some point in August I’ll be completely mindfucked that I haven’t spoken to Okan in months, and that Christi’s probably still sleeping as I suddenly remember Nnamdi the next time I see someone wearing a red tie. Possibly I’ll pass Mette on the street and we’ll almost cry and it’ll be like we’re family, but we’re not family, we were neighbors and when we open whatsapp and return to the village we’ll be the same. Or I’ll actually make another show with Katrine, next year, and we’ll feel bad that our connection lives on when the others don’t have the same options. Will the village only exist digitally or will we ever change the format? Will our 3D bodies finally hug, and are we gonna pick up Abhay in the airport when he goes to Berlin in December?
Or it could go completely differently. We could speak. We could talk, text. Still be sending memes and send love for each our countries’ struggles, heart their stories of going to demonstrations and cross our fingers that the flooding won’t be too bad this time. That they will get the fires under control and that someone, somehow, will see the light and legally stop the accumulation of wealth. We’ll be each other’s hypemen and hypewomen. And everything in between. We’ll surf the Bosporus river of being kind of connected but also not at all, and hopefully the line I wrote was a lie; “and once I log off, to me, you stop existing”.
Too much? Brutal? Dumb? Simple? I have no idea, but a wise opera singer from Canada/USA/Germany told me that this is it, we’ll have lives everywhere, and we’re going to have to figure out how to make it work.
Maybe this time the audience can help.
All the times I’ve been traveling alone and returning, with no one to confirm stories with, no one to hold me accountable or to remember with, when I’ve only had my diaries and scrapbooks to consult, to stay sane and remember that it wasn’t just a dream, all the times I’ve done this it’s been fine, it’s been ok, absurd but ok. But this time maybe the audience could help?
Is anyone out there? Are you seeing this too? Do you hear Christi as well? Do you see the streets of Lagos and hear the honks from tuktuks in Mumbai? Did you also feel like smelled the romantic cigarette on Okan’s fingers even though he was all the way in Istanbul? Did you listen to Nnamdis line about police brutality too, or were you lost in his charming eyes and beautiful lips?
As the landslides cover the Bollywood Hills, we’ll still be here. Needing to remember that it happened, and just because something happens digitally it doesn’t mean it’s not real. It’s been a beautiful chaos of imaginations and lines that got cut, of cowboy scenes that got cut, of meditations that got cut, of botox that got cut, of cockroaches that got killed and of hearts that were broken and mended and broken again.
Thank you for letting me into the village. I loved living next door. I promise I’ll come visit.
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