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I Delayed People's Flights By Walking Slowly In Narrow Hallways
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Quite quiet (2006)
Based on "Self-accusation" by Peter Handke


Percussion Group The Hague
photo: Ineke Oostveen		 In collaboration with: Wouter Snoei (live-electronics)

Instrumentation: 4 players, 4 chairs & 4 amplified blackboards with live-electronics

Text: Peter Handke / Mayke Nas

Duration: ± 18 minutes

First performance: 14 december 2005 in Felix Meritis in Amsterdam by Percussion Group The Hague and Wouter Snoei

Written for: Percussion Group The Hague

Commissioned by: Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst

Review of a live-performance: "The dusty-fresh 'I Delayed People's Flights' by duo Mayke Nas and Wouter Snoei had everything to do with wiping. Four percussionists moved their chairs back and forth audibly and rhythmically and wrote on four blackboards in the same manner; the boards in their turn were enhanced, transformed and enlarged by the electronics of Wouter Snoei. The wiping of the self-accusations (after the play by Peter Handke), that were chalked on the boards like lines of punishment, produced columns of dust-clouds. Visually and auditively, the duo made an incredibly exciting and original work, from an equally strong idea."
(Anthony Fiumara in Trouw, 16 december 2005)

Review of the DVD: "Percussion players can turn anything into an instrument. But chalking on a blackboard rythmically, that is quite something else. Slagwerk Den Haag rightly decided that this grand composition by Mayke Nas and Wouter Snoei could only be presented well on a dvd.
Director Jellie Dekker turned it into a fascinating film, in which she managed to capture the essence of the piece - the texts, the electronic sounds triggered by the sound of the chalk - perfectly."
(Frits van der Waa in de Volkskrant, 18 juni 2009)
In the famous stageplay “Self-Accusation” (1966) by Peter Handke, a first-person narrator puts on the hair shirt. In a sheer endless enumeration of wrongdoings the human morality is cool-headedly dissected and exposed. Almost half a century later the text has lost nothing of it's thought-provoking meaning and inspiration. In “I Delayed People’s Flights In Narrow Hallways”, Mayke Nas has adapted the idea of Handke's text into a musictheatre-piece for four performers rhythmically writing new confessions on four blackboards as if they were lines of punishment.


Direction: Jellie Dekker. Performance: Slagwerk Den Haag (Marcel Andriessen, Martin Ansink, Elyssa Shalla en Fedor Teunisse