Fanny Loeb was responsible at MDT for finding the different places in Stockholm to receive a ‘Lecture For Every One’. She witnessed different lectures in Stockholm, a.o. one at the Miljödepartementet.
Face after face, body after body, Lecture For Every One gives people and myself room to contemplate on how similar and totally different everyone is. When I look around in the room where the lecture takes place, I feel the silence and the need or longing for silence around me.
The lecture doesn’t ask much of its audience if the audience doesn’t want to receive it. The audience hasn’t asked to participate in this experiment and in that way they might be much more “allowed” than an ordinary theatre audience to dismiss this lecture. But, when given the chance to rest in a lecture that is about really essential questions, maybe they get more affected by it than they would ever think. The suprise element seems to do something special to people receiving Lecture For Every One.
The concentration in the room differs from person to person and whether or not the person that looks most bored actually is the most bored person in the room is a question worth asking – it might be that the seemingly bored person is the most attentive, affected person there. It’s hard to know how Lecture For Every One strikes and that seems to be part of its power. Salka, the performer, asks questions such as “Do you love enough?” and doesn’t expect to get answers directly, but problably gets answers indirectly through the thought processes of some of the people having experienced the lecture. Maybe some of the questions or thoughts linger in the people afterwards and come up much later on and give “result” in the form of “life evaluation”: do I love, do I care, am I in a love crisis, can I live with others?
The power of the now, to create the now together by doing nothing extraordinary is to me the most interesting thing about Lecture For Every One. To realize that you can create moments together without the big gestures strikes me and probably a few more as spectacular.
Fanny Loeb