Butoh dance and dancer

dancing darts 
darknesses
darkness drapes
tense dancing
toward time
trashing dross tales

and I see
her shaking
the dance is
not the dancer
and pain is
realistic

The video clip above was the writing prompt in this workshop run by Eva, who has two texts on this blog.
Before today, I did not know anything about Butoh, a Japanese dance form. Ankoku Butō (暗黒舞踏) = the Dance of Darkness.

backsight: The last execution

Nahschuss / The Last Execution (2021)

Gosh, I had been meaning to do this for a long time: write a few sentences about a film I saw, a book I read, something I heard. And here we go, the first one:

This German film came out last year. I heard people talk about it, because this story was still in them. Metabolizing. It was screened yesterday in the Digital Gym, with English subtitles, so I went.

The sujet, based on historical events: The last death sentence in the 40 years of East German history. Executed. At close range. The closest range possible. In 1981. The East German Stasi killed one of their own.

For me, one of those films where I focused on the story, felt it, lived in it. The warped, inhumane manipulation of people in the Stasi and outside of it. Manipulating and being manipulated. Each on their own. Cleverly and brutally enmeshed. Soon after their greed sucked them into tentacles of the secret service. Horrific and human. In its weaknesses.

The film-making and acting must have been very good; I got gripped by the story, the characters, the tension. I saw David Striesow – here the commanding Stasi officer – in Ich bin dann mal weg / I am off then (2015), when he played the loveable Hape Kerkeling walking the Camino de Santiago. In Nahschuss, he is traumatized, empty, and nasty.

Highly recommended.

New Welcome page

Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Pexels.com

What is happening on this site? Here is an update, which I wrote for the Welcome page.

Hey, Friend,

Thank you for coming by. What brought you here? Do we know each other? In case we don’t, I am Mathias Schulze. The pronunciation is [ma-tee-us], and many simply call me Mat. Yup, I only have one T; there is only one in the long version.

On this site, I have a little bit of information about my professional persona. This is how this site started a few years ago; I simply wanted to have a personal presence on the Internet, which is somewhat independent of a work and professional website. Now, I post the work-related stuff on Panta Rhei, my second blog.

I began this Texterium in 2020. It is like an infinite aquarium for texts. I have always been writing, usually work-related. Here, the texts are personal. Some might be enjoyable for others. Some might be insightful or interesting. If you’d like to know when something new is in the blog, follow it. There is a blue WordPress button on top of the right menu. If you are in WordPress, you know what happens. If you are not, you will get an email. Very occasionally. Thank you. This is important to peeps who blog. Very much appreciated.

I have grouped the texts losely into categories to organize myself and, hopefully, orient you, the reader.

  • Just words: I play with them. Sometimes just for fun. And then quite seriously and deliberately. Always to learn something new.
  • Just texts: poetry or prose. Often experimenting with form. Me trying out different genres, different styles, different forms, different topics, … often in writing workshops.
  • Shaping circles: me making sense of my world. One text at the time.
  • Voices: texts from friends. Occasionally, I post someone else’s creative work. If I like it. And they gave me permission.
  • Adjacent Stories are a budding fiction book project. I have been posting the occasional draft. Over time, I will add character, scene, and location sketches. I am hoping to be able to write this book in front of your eyes. It keeps changing and shifting because I am learning a lot in the process about writing fiction. One thing remains the same. There is one and the same character in each story somewhere, and he never gets to speak.

Enjoy. I hope. And let me know what you think about any or all of this.

And I spend some time on another blog. We called it Panta Rhei Enterprise. It is the home of non-fictional texts on complexity and change: language, leadership, and learning.