BED & BREAKFAST

Bed and Breakfast offers you a unique alternative for hotels and hostels. Instead of spending the night in anonymous hotel beds or in private guest rooms, you can spend the night in a public space. You will have the possibility to experience again a privileged moment: you will be sung to sleep, a privilege limited to the early years of your childhood when your mother or grandmother sang a lullaby to chase the fear for darkness away and to ask mister sandman to bring sweet dreams...

Lullabies bring us back to our earliest personal memories, but they also connect us to ancient old traditions and cultural heritages. When someone is asked for his favourite lullaby, the whole memory machine starts: who sang who when and how to sleep? The idea of this night is to bring back this wonderful, intimate, unique moment in childhood: the moment someone sings exclusively for you.

Heike Schmidt, a singer from Berlin, and Thilo Thomas Krigar, a cello-player, wander from bed to bed and sing you to sleep with tender lullabies, goodnight stories or poems. Lullabies from different cultures, in different languages, with a different musicality guide you into the night, into a world between waking and dreaming.

When the singer and the musician finish their goodnight round, you will be asleep.

When you wake up, they will be there to sing you a morning song and to invite you to a collective breakfast.

Heike Schmidt (concept/singer), Thilo Thomas Krigar (cellist/composer) and Erwin Jans (dramaturg) found each other in their fascination for the night, bedtime stories and lullabies. They are looking for new ways of communicating with the public from unexpected perspectives. Their aim is not to keep the public concentrated, but to release them from their concentration and open up new spaces for imagination.

Reviews

A night to remember
Peter Crawley, Irish Times, Tuesday September 20

... Heike Schmidt’s entrancing Bed & Breakfast invited us to spent the night in a hostel, where we pyjama-clad spectators peered out from under our duvets, minds hovering in that liminal space between sleep and wakefulness, as two German performers sang us to sleep with international lullabies.

It was disarming and hypnotic, graceful and startling, as Heike Schmidt moved serenely through the room performing songs, familiar and strange, over the restful strains of Franziskus Rohmert’s cello. At times Schmidt sang warmly to individual slumberers, or ruptured the tranquillity with sudden starts: an unsettling Grimm’s fairytale, an Emily Dickinson poem, an unexpected thump and feral chant. Waking us at 6:30am with a dissonant composition torn from newspapers headlines – “Tourist shot dead!” – they invited us all, strangers no more, to sit down to breakfast, to share our recollections of childhood lullabies. Weird, perhaps, but quite wonderful, too. ...

Sweet dreams in Schmidt’s B&B
Luke Clancy, EVENING HERALD, Thursday September 15th, 2005

The Fringe has always had a special talent for throwing up unusual shows in unusual venues. But this year’s show from Germany’s Heike Schmidt is, you might say, the best one yet. ...