LIKE WE NEVER KISSED BEFORE
Imagine it is Friday evening the 9th of December 1983. You’re going out tonight. There is a party.
Right here in this very building you’re standing infront of. Entry is 1,50.
You grow taller, and branches
grow out of your torso.
Written for the Synaguge in Esslingen as part of Podium Festival’s Soundwalk on Jewish Life in Esslingen,
LIKE WE NEVER KISSED BEFORE invites the audience to trace the near and more distant pasts and futures of the Synagogue’s building. Used and abused in verious shapes and degrees of violence, it is the site of the old synagogue that becomes the very space that invites the listener to trace and naviagate personal memories and narratives of shame, excess, holyness and transgression.
Desecrated and its insides destroyed through the National Socialists during the November Progroms, the synagogue’s building was subsequently used as a meeting place for the Bund Deutscher Mädchen. In 1980s a youth club used it as its new home, holding regular events and parties, before it was re-inaugurated as a Synagogue in 2012.
The psychogeography of a continuously de- and re-secrated holy site weaves intself into a synth-infuelled sermon and becomes the dream of an encounter with an angel, on a 1980s youth-club dancefloor, drenched in glitter and puke.
You take your shirt off and you notice the purple leaves
growing out of your navel.
There was dancing, the angel said.
and music
Be kind, said the angel. Be open. Like a tree, broken or a flower.
LINK TO ADUIOWALK:
https://soundwalk.podium-esslingen.de
PREMIERE: 18 July 2021 as part of PODIUM ESSLINGEN