: Perfekte Fehlern

On the last day of February, I joined the premier of a participatory performance, VERSCHREIBEN, by Jingyin Li. The performance takes place in an intimate and imaginative setting at the Berliner Ringtheater, running until March 9. The small foyer is filled with paper hexagons: questions on how to relate to language are hanging from the ceiling (such as, “How much do we allow our languages to be changed by others?”), topographies of past participants are placed on seats, and close-up images of hands writing and drawing are taped on the wall. At 16h, Li greets us, dressed in a lab coat and an angel’s halo. We hear that we are about to enter a writing laboratory where we will investigate “the perfection of mistakes”. Li prepares us to be ready to play and stretch the limits of what can be approved as grammatically correct and translatable and how mutable meaning can be when allowed. 
 
The German word and the title of the performance VERSCHREIBEN translate to prescribing, misspelling, and even to the act of being fully committed to something. VERSCHREIBEN embraces all these possible meanings through a participatory performance akin to a workshop. We, the participants, travel through different stations, each asking us to request our relation to the German language by memories, iconography, tactile skills of our hands, and chains of associations. The first stations facilitate participants to get to know one another by sharing stories, deciding on a collective question but answering individually, or encountering one another’s hands. Each station gradually moves from each participant’s autonomy to a more meshed collective body: at the final station, we, in pairs, write together, holding the same pen, negotiating how we can maintain the integrity of our handwriting that is constantly blending with that of our partner. The performance ends with each of us sketching a moment of personal experience of a mistranslation of the German language. These sketches circulate in the space until we all have continued the original misunderstandings. Ultimately, we read and laugh at the short, surprising, and non-sensical comic strips. A tone that has persisted from the shows beginning. Li, as the laboratory angel, ushered us to look at our relation to the German language alone, together, and through different humorous methods. After the show, Li shares that the production began from an interest in typography and through workshops with children. Her reflections on her experiences investigating the act of handwriting and its becoming directly shine through the structure of the performance. Just like children exist in a singularity in language, writing and reading letter by letter, we, the participants, break down our own experience with language by doing it together, hand in hand.
 
The implied innocence, unseriousness, and playfulness of VERSCHREIBEN, with the intimate setting meeting with a hands-on approach to what we can do with language and what language does to us, advanced to a constant curiosity and active engagement in me as a participant. This resulted in a joyous experience of collectively celebrating and creating from a messy existence of unique differences. Truly, as Li prompted at the beginning of the show, mistakes are perfect.