I happened to pick up a little booklet about the work of French choreographer Jérôme Bel. Bel is famous for rejecting formalism and refusing to put anything that looks like a trained dance move on stage. He uses bodies and they move on stage, but he’s less  interested in dance for its own sake than he is in bodies as cultural products. Gerald Siegmund, one of the booklet’s authors states, “The body as such does not exist. All we know about it is determined by signs or signifying social and scientific practices such as the world of fashion, astrology or history, which in turn create that which we call a body.”

I’m sitting at a table listening to a group of young Belgian writers converse in Flemish. I don’t understand a word, but it’s clear these people are masterful in their ability to push mellifluous flows speech at each other and receive them effortlessly. It’s the same with speakers of any language. When you don’t understand a language you can really hear the music in it. The best playwrights make the most of this and the best actors are finely attuned to the writer’s musicality, making it a joy to listen to.

The program notes for 1:Songs say, “Behind a row of microphones…she sings, speaks and screams…as if it were a concert.” Performer Sanja Mitrovic does exactly that. It looks like a concert to me, but an uptight one.