My journey with the angel is a little hard to trace back. Like the road unfolding in front of you, it was a really just a matter of continuing to put one foot in front of the other. I’ve experienced this just a few times; when you have the sensation you’re not so much creating something as uncovering it.

 

Siegfried Sassoon said it about writing poetry in his poem Limitations, but I’ve always held on to it for things beyond that:

 

            Yes: you can do it, once you get a start;

            All that you want is waiting in your head,

            For long ago you’ve learnt it off by heart.

 

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I started developing this character of the angel in 2016, just after I’d moved to Berlin. I was training in my second year at collaborative, devised performance school LISPA, itself just moved from London.

 

I have to admit that I was finding it very hard to settle into Berlin. I was so glad to be free of London. After 30 years living there, I definitely wasn’t riding the wave anymore; I was coughing and spluttering in the foam and undercurrents. I was ready to leave.

 

But I wasn’t quite ready to land anywhere else.

 

Struggling to connect with where I was, avoiding contact with people and the city, I was just living in the bubble of the school and the work. When I rather abruptly had the feeling the angel wanted to go outside, to get out of the studio and feel the cobbled stones under her pointy feet. To meet people and see what happened.

 

So we did.

 

And it was brilliant.

 

Somehow I was able to connect with ease with Berlin and its people. I could play. I could dance with people in the street. I could look, I mean really look. Everything resonated, everything was bright and beautiful and exciting. She was a child in a playground, a bee in a field of flowers. It was like seeing for the first time.

 

Basically I just needed a huge, white angel costume with wings to feel more at home...

 

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Then the research began in earnest.

 

Adam Zagajewski has been my poetic companion for many years; I’d met his work in 2006 and he’d always popped up at particularly poetic moments. Try to Praise the Mutilated World circled around me a lot that first term of my LISPA second year, as the angel was born.

 

At one moment I realised that the angel’s way of experiencing the world was through praise.

I started to seek out praise poems, odes, blessings.

 

In his late forties, Pablo Neruda started writing an ode a week, in the end writing 225.

 

Oda a la casa abandonada

Oda al viejo poeta

Oda a la manzana

Oda al otoño

Oda al alambre de púa

Oda a las cosas rotas

Oda a una castaña en el suelo

Oda al cactus desplazado

Oda al ojo

Oda a la campana caída

Oda al día feliz

Oda a la esperanza

Oda al picaflor

Oda al limón

Oda a la luna

Oda a los calcetines

Oda al piano

Oda al camino

Oda a la sal

 

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At one point I started to reach out to other artists, to open my hands on the project, to find a wonderful energy from the encounter in between. There was Alix – who was the very first person I met when I moved to Berlin. Hugo, Angharad, Nerea, all of whom I met, somehow, through LISPA.

 

Coming back from a summer of rehearsing outside Germany, organising the next step of the project, I started to sink into Berlin in a new way. For a period of about three weeks there were incredible rainstorms and thunderstorms nearly every evening. I cycled home in the late afternoon under red skies, patched with glowering black clouds. The building electricity got into my bloodstream. I started to really fall in love with the city.

 

I walked and cycled a lot. I connected up known places and discovered new ones. I revisited places and found that I could see my own memories and stories in the landscape: ghosts and visions of past encounters.

 

I got to know the city through others’ eyes, to know their places.

That’s when I really started to fall in love with it. When I realised what it meant to others.

 

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We live in provoking times, when many of our encounters in public happen through a screen: we instinctively capture and post who and what we meet, or else we hide behind our phones and ignore or simply don’t really see the world.

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The angel just wants to connect and play…

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…and we’ve found it’s quite hard to ignore her. Through our earlier research we discovered she gives people the permission to connect and play. The angel reminds us of another possibility, another way of being, even for a moment: to be open to having a real encounter with another, which might even spill over into the rest of the day…

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And we’ve found she also connects people in other ways. Through the project we’ve started to bring together a network of artists – visual artists, performers, poets, in Berlin & internationally – who come together to support the project and each other’s work. A community.

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She opens the possibility of another way of seeing, not just ourselves, but also the city. She offers a way of, for a moment, sinking in, to begin, just begin to be of a place. I hand over to the inimitable Martin Shaw...

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