I am going to be talking about and reading from The Broken World as part of Sheffield's Off the Shelf festival on Sunday 19 Oct. Due to circumstances etc the event has moved from its original location at Bank Street Arts to the Showroom Cinema, in Showroom 5. The starting time will now be half an hour later than planned - at 8.30pm -  to allow time for  anyone that turns up at Bank Street enough time to get over to the Showroom. Advance tickets are from the Showroom on 0114 275 7727. 

I will also be reading soon in Berlin at the Hebbel Theatre on the night of Monday November 3rd. This time it's a reading from Endland - the German edition of my Endland Stories which also features a whole lot of new material including stories I wrote for Barbara Campbell's 1001 nights cast and for Kate McIntosh's solo performance Loose Promise. Endland has been translated by my good friend Astrid Sommer (as my occasional posts about it here already mentioned) and for the reading I will be joined by a great performer Thomas Wodianka (he's going to read the German versions, me some English ones). I first met Thomas working on Meg Stuart's project Alibi. I don't think I'll ever forget his fading, almost whispered version of a passage from David Wojnarowitz's amazing book Close to the Knives. Hebbel also shows my Manifesa 7 project Art Flavours as part of it's season Fressen Oder Fliegen – Art Into Theatre – Theatre Into Art. There will be something like 6-800 portions of Osvaldo Castellari's fabulous gelato (created for the project) going free in the season as well as screenings of my video work that documents the process.

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Forced Entertainment's Spectacular kicks off it's UK tour tomorrow at the Arts Centre in Warwick, full tour dates here. My piece for Victoria (now Campo) That Night Follows Day meanwhile is heading for the Melbourne Festival, with performances 22-25 October. 

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To celebrate all the above I will spend the whole day tomorrow locked in a hotel room in Coventry and working on my taxes. This hotel boasts of refurbishment by the way, but we all know that demolition is the only answer.

In any case I claim as my work this week the choreography of all the drunks in Brussels. The backwards and forwards staggering of the guy at the ATM, with its interlaced measure of side-to-side swaying, the guys head leading his body in confusion, his whole frame suspended from time to time in moments of temporary balance and bewildered thought, was pretty much the start of the show. Later, when his money spat from out of the machine, he let it fall, stupid fingers bluntly grabbing as the notes scattered flightless to the pavement  - the green brown of brand new 100/50 Euro notes heading downward to their place at his feet. His comical grasping, blind, flat palmed, was my work, and the trick of the other guy, his friend, with a darting less-drunk motion coming in to help him, crouching and grabbing the fluttering cash was a maybe too clever way to turn a solo into a duet, the two of them gathering notes in hurry that was frightened by the prospect of wind. The way they circled the pavement to the waiting taxi was mine, the more-sober one going round, out and into the road to take the left-hand passenger door after first flinging the other wide open for his friend, who, after collapsing inwards to the darkness of the seat, made great and protracted drama from the action needed to close the door after himself - faint circles of the  hand, conflicted leaning in tension with the seat belt and then finally the gesture of his fingers, straining for the handle, a miniature ballet staged one full half metre short of their mark.

The climax of my work was maybe days later when a different drunk altogether, a veritable Nureyev or Nijinsky of his time, crashed down the stairs of a restaurant, head over heels and then wedged in the curve of the stairs turn, unable to right himself, in unwinding agony of an overturned beetle, legs in slow motion, animal groans. His friend also joined for the duet, the latter trying to right the former, by pulling him upwards, all the while threatening to fall and join him in the almost and painful horizontal. Their exit was the piece de resistance - the drunkest of the two clasping his hands around the neck/shoulders of the other who took him, weaving an unsteady path between the tables, his friend a good natured more-or-less-sentient sack of potatoes at his back declaring good! good ! good!, as they lurched closer to the door then found release to the darkness of the night beyond.

The work I am proudest of though, was my trio for a drunk man, a half empty beer can and a brand new Mercedes Benz taxi. Staged at 1 or two in the morning the lone dancer - in white track suit, sideways baseball cap and rolling stagger - drop-kicked the beer can from his hand and out into the floodlit street, the can moving in a wild unruly arc, towards the parked up taxi, but over it, a beautiful clearance which non-the-less dripped and dashed a curve of lager to its gleaming bonnet and windshield, incurring the wrath of the driver but stunning the crowd with its thrilling, abrupt and unexpected parabola. In the aftermath the dancer almost collapsed, fell back on himself with the recoil, so beautiful.

The rest of my work - all the swaying, blundering of the city's many drunks dispersed across its vast stage, all the missed footsteps, the fumblings, the falls, the yells, extended arms, slumped backs, entangled pas de deuxs, the gyrations, twists, circlings, stumbles and misunderstandings, the sudden motions, the unison chorus of staggerers, subway platform soloists of confusion, argumentative quartets around benches  etc etc I will not recount or describe in full detail here but hope that you have seen them, and appreciate the work. Something about a venture on this scale is suiting me. I will move, in the not too distant future to larger things - the rise and fall of the money markets beckons and I have let the relevant authorities know that I am ready for the job.

Spent some days working with Fumiyo on the piece we do for next year. Early conversations still. Some nice things in the studio. On the floor of the space we were working in at Rosas many coloured dots and lines of tape, red, blue, yellow, green - the dots  like oversize confetti, diagram-ghosts, marking points for the geometry that backbones so much of Anne Teresa's choreography. The week before (in London) I watched the Reich evening, in which the standout work was Phase, to Reich's Piano Phase. I loved it, in its tension, and apparent singularity - the dance like the music a simple-but-complex, complex-but-simple braid of repetition and doubling. Stunning. Ant Hampton has been blogging some here lately which I'm glad of - he wrote nice things about the performance here as well as linking to these two YouTube clips of the piece here and here.

Really noticing these days how much I watch hands in movement - was momentarily  obssessing over what I saw as a difference between the hands of the two dancers in this work (not visible in the grainy YouTube clip of course!). Watching Fumiyo in the studio too it's certainly her hands and her face that I seem drawn to as she moves - maybe not so much that these are what I see more, but rather that they are what i can frame a comment on or through - as if these more easily narrative parts of the body (?) allow me a language with which to start speaking. I'm not sure. Sara Jansen watches the rehearsals too and at some point commented on what F. was doing with her feet. I'm suddenly reminded that whilst I must have seen how she moved them, and certainly felt it, I can't even start, for the moment, to describe or speak of it. It's either not in my memory, or where it is, I don't have the words with which to extract it.

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New York based theatre academic Jonathan Kalb did an interview with me a while back, then came to Portland to see Quizoola! and Sight is the Sense... His generous and smart response to the work can be seen here.

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Reading this meanwhile I really wished I could read the entire 31 page guidelines - a "statement of understanding" - for the recent town-hall meeting debate between McCain and Obama.