I AM

I am … and here we usually add our narratives that place us in space and time … whilst the Fool isn’t holding on to any of these stories and their perspectives. 

Still, in the “Room”, in the place where I get up in the morning, have breakfast, have a family, study, work, make a living, I do have a narrative. Which in my case is that I am Anne, Anne-Kristin Jahn, born in Thuringia, in GDR. 

I remember when I was 12, I jumped on the stage of the theatre of my home village. This was in autumn in 1989, after a performance about the sad changes of the French Revolution. Together with my sister, my German teacher and self-made French tricolor flags, signifying the great beginning of a new society, I waved to the audience and embraced the actors. 

Hardly understanding anything of what was going on, I became witness of the gap between a society that disappeared – and an unknown future. Later I understood this was a moment in history in which for a split second the whole country was neither obeying any socialist doctrines anymore nor joined the capitalism of the west. Instead there was something else, something they called “the third way”. I remember the special air, this point zero in between an old and a new order. It lasted not long, only a couple of months. But it fired my imagination in the following years and still today I am intrigued by the possibility to begin anew. To change the story we tell.

Maybe out of this early experience I considered theatre to be a place where new stories can be told and possibilities explored which are not (yet) visible in the outside world. And thus I set off to study theatre at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, alongside with doing documentary films. What the heck could have been this “third way”? Didn’t it collapse because people lacked a common sense about it? And what common sense would that be?

After thirty years these questions still remain with me. And I suppose they also led me to where I am now. Being a member of the Nomadic Academy for Fools! What bullshit is this? Nomadic Academy for what? Fools?! Well, for me the work which is done in the ‘NOA’ is the most profound I can imagine as it makes me response – able. It takes me into my inner world, out of which I perceive my reality, my possibilities and those of the others. The magic of the inner world is that it is not bound by any restriction. It works outside time and space and it is, ultimately, universal. 

I wonder what will happen, when I, when more and more people do understand more about this, about our common make up as human beings. I am longing.