What did I say „tomorrow“? It’s today! Time flies, as Adorno liked to put it.
And indeed, it seems even to be speeding up. „Eternity is awful long time, especially near the end.“ Woody Allen said that. But stop quoting for a moment. More is to come.
I want to hold still for a moment and dedicate this work to the memory of my father, who died last week on CoVid-19. When something comes this close to you what the whole globe has been freaking out now for months, there is no way of denial. Besides this insight I want to thank him, Josef Dézsy, for all his support he had given me to pursue my funny ideas, call it „art“. He was always interested in it and followed through as long as he could, he always supported it and made things possible. I am very thankful for this.
Now that we are again on the verge of a premiere, things regarding „culture“ have changed. I often critisized the use of the word „culture“ for being mixed up with „art“. In German „Kultur“ and „Kunst“ are much closer neighbours in pronouncing than in English. But this time we hear a slogan saying „cancel culture“. In fact, this is what is happening.
Creating new theatre now is sort of working against the grain, against a maelstrom that should not carry away live performance and social events based on culture. There are ways to work around the obstacles CoVid-19 has created in gathering and socialising. But we as human beings should set our ideas to what is important to us. We shall not give up to technology which serves mostly as a pretext of controlling for the end of profit-making and „political“ power. There is nothing „political“ about it if you go closer. It is just a wrong idea about what we are as human beings and what we can achieve.
This premiere, „The 8. Film“ actually does question this situation. Robots, Chatbots, deep learning systems and so on. Great gear, yes. But we out ourselves in danger in having these laying around. We have to be smart enough to understand what is going on and how we can master it. There is absolutely nothing „racist“ or discriminatory about being quite dogy, bullying or dissing robots and chatbots, for example. These are machines! We are the human beings! But our nature, our instincts, tend to make us „stupid“ and forget, who is who. A machine becomes a person, a person a machine! This should not happen. This is, why I invite you all to come and discuss with me and together this truly burning issues!