The Timemongers Concert

I spent the best part of 2022 working on this, so I figured it deserved its own post :). I ”blame” Comic Art Europe for enabling my obsession with folktales, and I must admit that when I made my grant application I didn’t really have a clear idea of what it was going to grow into (I envisaged a book)(it turned into a concert and a card deck – but I still harbour secret ambitions about the book, because of course I do) (if it helps, think flipbooks and foldable maps).

I did know what the starting point was going to be – time manipulation in fairy tales. And yes, yes, Youth without age and life without death was center-stage, because I cried when I was little and I keep revisiting it every 10 years or so.

And if you would like to know more about the project, I made a website!

But I’m here to talk about the behind the scenes experience, the bits that came together (like the class on Romanian fairy tales taught by Laura Jiga Iliescu at Fundația Calea Victoriei, which gave me a crucial puzzle piece), the blind panic (does it ever get better? will I grow old and wise and not have to do the mental equivalent of wild boar hunting at the start of every damn project?), the blind panic, second edition (I did a 14 days residence in Lyon, in September 2021, my first travel after the start of the Covid Pandemic – and for the first week the anxiety was unreal, as if I had completely forgotten how to human), the endless research (live drawing requires mountains of preparatory sketches), more puzzle pieces coming together (the concert is half my drawing and half the musical composition of Julien Limonne, and you really can’t have one without the other, and it really only came together three days before the first show in Lyon) and the absolute blast that were the two concerts. And maybe the surreal experience of being able to say ”oh, I went on tour” :)).