Herzog's insistence that there is no meaningful difference between his features and his documentaries - 'In both cases, I am a storyteller,' he likes to say - offends advocates of cinema verite.. [whilst he], of course, relishes tweaking the traditionalists. 'There is just a very shallow truth in facts,' he told me. 'Otherwise, the phone directory would be the Book of Books.'

A long more-or-less business-as-usual Werner Herzog article (i.e. a portrait of the artist as crazed/inspired lunatic auteur, blundering around with stolen cameras in a travel-brochure of extreme landscapes, making films beset by bad-luck, injuries, illness, gun-threats, acts-of-god and fuelled by tempestuous relations with colleagues, all the while speaking some pretty eccentric English etc etc) in the Observer here. The quote above jumped out though, as did a brief note about Herzog's habit of surreptitiously feeding poetic lines to documentary-subjects during interviews.

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Kate Valk, the Wooster Group performer, interviewed a while back by Bomb magazine here, with pictures by Paula Court I haven't seen before.

The Richard Burton film—Burton playing Hamlet—is the backdrop of our version. The Burton film is played onstage and is an integral part of our performance, which plays off of it...  we aren’t really acting, we are channeling. There are things I bring to it just because of how I am and who I am, but my task as a performer is to stay open and fluid to channeling what’s on the screens.

Also at Bomb an impressive archive of other articles and interviews. Plus a slightly circular review of the WG's Hamlet in the New York Times here. Hoping I can get to see the piece in NY. Sold out, but fingers crossed.

Strange the way machines write into us. I'm waiting for someone, he's late, I'm stressed about it because right after this now-destined-to-be-brief meeting, there's something else and someone else I need to meet in another place, and tight after that something else etc. I'm imagining the pileup of all these things and how that will play through and the gesture that I'm half doing, half imagining as I scan the café and the passing crowds to see if the guy is here yet, is that of neurotically flipping my hand/wrist towards me, as if looking at a wrist watch. I don't own one, haven't owned or worn one for years, maybe 20 years, even longer. But somewhere between the time I did wear one, and all the movies or descriptions of people 'anxiously looking at the their watches' its in me as a kind of body-writing, and I'm half doing it here, repeatedly, in this terribly incomplete way as I sit in this cafe. A habit echo of something long gone.

Just writing (below) to Barbara Campbell (1001 Nights Cast) about my own work with Forced Entertainment which circles some of the same territory by very different means, titled And on the Thousandth Night...  Wondering now about how these simple rule-based performance pieces are so hard to describe. I guess it's something about the balance between the explicit rules and the ones which are more implicit/unspoken; 'rules' created in fact by having a shared sensibility and frame of references. I guess this kind of shared knowledge is really important to a work like And on the Thousandth Night..., a fact that's something like the flip-side of what I was writing about here.

'And on the Thousandth Night...' is entirely improvised. The only rider to that is that over the years we have done it people have 'favourite' narratives/things they like to work with. These though have to fight and find their place in a structure that is always emerging in live negotiation and strife.

The piece works as a game. One player begins "Once up a time..." or "there was once..." and starts to tell a story. Once it has begun any other player can interrupt *at any point* with the word STOP after which, and starting with "Once up a time..." or "there was once..." begins their own narrative. This process continues, with 8 players/performers, usually for 6 hours. The audience can arrive, depart and return any time they like.

Within the rules of the game (as above) we play a kind of compositional thing - some stories are allowed to go long - 5-8 minutes I guess. Others are cut short ("Once upon a time there was a man..." Being an amusingly short story).

There are a few rules re the stories themselves - no names for people, countries, cities etc. Instead: A policeman, an unhappy queen or a prince or a famous motorcycle stunt rider. A town far away, a small country etc. This means everything takes place in generic story-universe, slightly folk-tale in feel, which serves to level the ground between contemporary stories about love, outsourcing, gardening etc and evidently folk-loric or fairy story-like tales about princesses and dwarves or gothic horrors, or murder stories or sci-fi adventures involving spaceships.We constantly invoke, shift, disrupt and disturb genre in the piece and, in addition to these moves, quote liberally (and incompetently) from narratives we can remember from movies, traditional tales, recently-read fiction and elsewhere. People often steal or reinterpret elements from each others stories, and come back to stories they have begun elsewhere in the piece. Every time a player speaks tho they are obliged to begin at the beginning. There's no sense in which we are collaborating to make *a* story - instead many many competing narratives and versions of those narratives are proposed.

We try to balance the preposterous competitive atmosphere of interruption and general fooling around with allowing space for stories that actually work, or have space to get somewhere even tho no story is ever ever allowed to complete. We try to keep the tone fluid - comical one moment, horrific, tense or intimate or banal the next. It's not unusual for performers to start telling a story about which they know nothing other than the first sentence... The 'game' of the piece is very much about the process of live invention - the desire, struggle and obligation to make something happen, using words.