We are here. We are all here. And we are waiting. Waiting for what? Who are they? Where are they from? What is their story? I see them. Do they see me? Are they looking at me? Still waiting. Are they waiting for me?
In the beginning was the word. For my part at least. Mostly there is a word, an idea or at least a thought I begin with. Mine was “wait”. And while I was thinking, brainstorming and literally waiting for something to happen, I found myself in the process of circling around the word that should eventually became the impuls of my final work.
At the same time I tried to find a setting to visualise the idea. A place that would inspire and speak to me.
And I guess it was the experience of the last months to sit in hundreds of online meetings & events that led me to the picture of a couple of faces staring at me through my digital screen. In my mind they were all just sitting there, doing nothing really, just looking straight at me. I wondered what they were really doing, if they were actually seeing me or the other people in the meeting. Maybe someone was studying someone else’s face or those pictures in the back of my room. They might as well just read their notes, scroll through the internet or just sit there and listen.
In that process I shifted my focus to the expressions of those people on “the other side”. For my setting, I made my protagonists just sit there and wait. They are not connected to each other, they have never been in the same room. But after putting them together, I felt some kind of unity, a common ground in that moment of waiting.
I was fascinated by the thought of the connections between the five people on the screens and also with the audience watching them. In the moment of nothingness, what are our thoughts, what do we focus on? Is there communication? How are people communicating? Obviously without any words. But what would they have to say? What is their story? Their individual role? What if one of them leaves? What could happen next? And for me it came all back to “wait”, just watch and experience this tense pleasant silence - with my decision what to do with it. What are we waiting for?
