diepuffbrause

First performed at the ICA theatre in conjunction with the Bernadette Corporation exhibition, DIE PUFFBRAUSE, PER FAVOR* was a live performance in response to Bernadette Corporation’s 2007 screenplay ‘Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte’. Taking the never-to-be-filmed script as its jumping board, artists LAUREN GODFREY and SIÔN PARKINSON perform sections of dialogue cut to music and animated gifs, warping BC’s original tale into a narrative of sport history and the undead.Taking cues from the script in both delivery and structure, GODFREY and PARKINSON have adapted the text to amplify certain moments, finding common ground in tennis and a zombie tragedy. The piece is enacted like a script reading with MINIMAL stage direction and MAXIMUM drama.

CAST at ICA on Saturday 1st June 2013

LAUREN GODFREY ........ an artist, a young woman with a fringe that weeps.
SIÔN PARKINSON ........ another artist, a thirty-something man with a moustache that weeps.
PAUL HAWORTH .......... and another artist, a rapper, a writer, a friend and a friend of a friend.
ALICE ZUSAMMEN ........ re. ‘alles zusammen’, re. ‘all together’.

As well as appropriating words, phrases, character names, and stage directions from Bernadette Corporation’s ‘Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte’, DIE PUFFBRAUSE, PER FAVOR!! draws specifically from one line of text within the script. In a scene within the offices of a reputable French newspaper there is secreted between dialogue a headline that says TENNIS STAR STABBED. Godfrey and Parkinson’s screenplay explores the dramaturgical possibilities of this scenario, blowing it up and warping the incident and its main players for their own ends. The tennis star the headline refers to was the then women’s world no. 1 player, Monica Seles, a tenacious young usurper of the top spot a year earlier from rival Stefi Graf. In 1993, and in front of TV cameras, a crazed fan stepped down from the stands of Hamburg’s Am Rothenbaum Stadium and onto centre court to stab Monica Seles in the back. She sustained a minor injury but it was one that kept her from tennis for some time and from ever reaching her former glory. A few days after the attack, the Women’s Tennis Association invited the players to vote on the status of Seles’ no. 1 seeding, which she lost. At her next international match, Stefi Graf reclaimed her world no. 1 position. Seles’ attacker, Gunther Parche, served no time in jail nor was admitted to any psychiatric facility for his crime. Instead he insisted that he be kept in prison for one day to avoid the furore of the tennis fans.

*Die Puffbrause is a German canned Prosecco drink whose name loosely translates as ‘brothel lemonade’