Anna Tolkacheva

As we sit down and I ask her what feeling, thoughts and memories passed through her mind, while I was giving my lecture, she thinks for a very, very, very long time. Then she says that she really enjoyed my lecture and that my lecture made her feel deeply happy. I ask her if she can feel any relationship between the feelings of anxiety I illustrate and her own life and she tells us that she always feels that she can never physically move freely enough, when she spends time in the streets or other public places. She tells us that sometimes she tried a bit making strange movements, but very carefully, not to scare other people and that some time she takes a different route than the most direct way ore walks completely in the opposite direction, even if she afterwards has to go back, just to experience the shift of doing something different or absurd. She says that she would like to do a project about that. We like that Idea and suggest discussing it with the group later. After the meeting with her, I laugh with Masha, because I had been especially struck by her movements when I first watched her enter the room! I tell Masha that I rarely had seen somebody move so freely with such vast, expressive, swinging motions as she is able to do. I am very curious indeed, as to where this would lead to, if SHE challenges herself to be completely free!

On the next day, as we ask Anna again about her project, she says that she is very interested in Masha’s position as an interpreter and that communication os often where it’s lacking in our society, Therefore she would like to do a project that involves communication. With the group she comes up with her project of telling some random stranger a phrase she is burning to say to a specific person but lacks the courage to do so. After delivering the phrase, which in fact was really meant for someone else she asks the listener if the or her could tell her a sentence he or she was dying to say but couldn’t. And then she would take this phrase to the next person and so on. She would do this exercise until she felt that she heard what she needed to hear to move on with her life.

We all really like this idea and talk wither about the possibilities of costume. Does she want to be her self or does she want to take on another identity to give the project a more formal character. She chooses her direct self.