Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2025 W50: Equal measure

December 8​–​14, 2025

Quick bits:

  • The show is happening tomorrow. Come see me perform tomorrow, Monday (December 15th), 20:00, at theaterforum Kreuzberg, Berlin.

    Anxiety and excitement are increasing in equal measure.

  • I’ve got my glasses repaired. It took longer than anticipated, but I am glad I no longer have to tape the broken half temple to the side of my head anymore.

  • Once in a while, I am reminded of a company I worked for where there were three teams: Team One, Team Three, and… Team Seven. (There never were more than three teams.)

  • Yes to Paul Dano. No to Liam Neeson.

I am 99% back to health. My voice isn’t fully back just yet, but I’m good to perform tomorrow.

All in all, I am quite happy that my recovery is going so quickly. Perhaps this is because the last time I was sick was not too long ago.

Common recovery advice includes avoiding coffee, as it dehydrates. Foregoing coffee, however, would yield quite the caffeine-induced headache, so I yeeted that advice into the trash. I will recover on my own terms, thank you very much. Besides, I made sure to hydrate properly!

I also made sure the humidity was at a reasonable level. My apartment tends to be quite dry (below 30% on occasion), which is not conducive to healthy living. Bringing humidity up to 50% in the bedroom made a noticeable difference in sleep quality, too.

Speaking of sleep: I slept so much. I had a fourteen-hour night and then some naps here and there. I am still surprisingly low on energy, but perhaps I’ve just gotten used to that delicious, delicious sleep.

Now, on to reschedule all the things I canceled…

I keep thinking about a choir performance I saw a while ago. Not because I thought that it was good, but because there was so much potential that didn’t quite get channeled into the right places.

This was a choir performance accompanying a self-made silent film, in a local movie theatre. The choir sat on chairs in front of the left half of the cinema screen, facing away from the audience. The film itself had environmental sound and even recorded voices, which makes it not a silent film. Some musical pieces had different directors. For some pieces, there were child singers, but their microphones weren’t functioning properly and so they couldn’t be heard. Some parts of the film were clearly AI-generated.

There are a few reasons why this experience/performance didn’t click for me:

  • A live choral accompaniment is a great premise. But having the choir turned away from the audience and off to the side meant that the focus was drawn away strongly from the core of the experience — the live performance.

  • The film itself attracted the most attention, but I could not make out the story, and it felt like a patchwork of scenes created by different camera operators and directors. The film had visual effects and used chroma key effects that I found distracting.

  • Having sound on the supposedly silent film made me unsure where the sounds and music genuinely were coming from. This took away so much from the live choral performance.

That said, there were genuine moments of beauty in both the film and the music — they were just so rare.

I am not writing this out of a desire to bring other people’s work down, but more as an analysis of why something didn’t click for me. I’m more interested in asking myself the following question: given the material and people available, what would I do differently?

It’s not an easy question to answer, but it’s useful to be able to do so, because it is a good way to surface my own artistic sensibilities. There are no clear answers, either, but I’d like to give it a shot anyway.

With that in mind: what would I have done differently?

  • Focus on the strengths of the collaborators. This choir is good at being a choir. That needs to be the core of the experience.

    The choir members are not trained actors, trained film directors, trained cinematographers, trained film editors, or trained colorists. If the film genuinely is an essential part of this performance, then it needs experienced people producing it.

  • Establish a hierarchy of importance. The performance was, first and foremost, the choral performance. The film is secondary, yet it took up center stage1 rather than support it.

    I’d have loved for the choir to be in the center, facing the audience. The director can face the screen to ensure the choir and visuals are synced up. I don’t know how that would work, but such a setup would have given me, as a member of the audience, so much more.

  • Simplify, simplify, simplify. Anything that is part of the visual or auditory experience needs to be there with a reason. I would much rather have a well-executed minimalist performance than an experience that tries too much. What supports the experience, and what distracts from it?

  • Absolutely do not use any AI-generated content. I’m already inundated in AI slop everywhere else, and I really do not want to see that garbage in live performances.

Part of the issue here is the mismatched expectations. This was marketed as a “world premiere” but distinctly without the quality that would support an international release.

Maybe this is a wider issue with the Berlin art scene? In this city, there is a carte blanche to do anything artistic. Too often, though, I’ve seen this lead to an “anything goes” attitude where it’s sufficient to slap the label “experimental” on a creation and be done with it.

A related question: who was this experience for? What is the target audience? From what I could tell, it was primarily family and friends of the performers. Was this the intended audience? If so, I don’t take issue with it — but the way it was marketed suggests otherwise.

There is genuine skill and talent at work in this choir, but I feel they’ve far over-extended themselves for this experience, which resulted in something that I think could’ve been an order of magnitude more enjoyable.

Anyway — this is not a review (I didn’t even mention what piece it was) but rather an examination of my own perspective on it all.

Entertainment:

  • The Conversation2 has the tense air of paranoia and loneliness. Its musical theme is clearly an inspiration for the main theme of Severance.3 Also: it is a little odd to realize that most of the actors have died by now.

  • The Mastermind4 is superbly and delicately acted by Josh O’Connor, with an amount of space to breathe that few films achieve, though I find the film a little thin on substance.

Links:

Tech links:

  1. Figuratively and literally. ↩︎

  2. The Conversation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola (The Directors Company, The Coppola Company, American Zoetrope, 1974). ↩︎

  3. Severance, directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, written by Dan Erickson (Fifth Season, Red Hour Films, 2022). ↩︎

  4. The Mastermind, directed by Kelly Reichardt (Film Science, MUBI, 2025). ↩︎

  5. The moment was embarrassing. Not the falafel. Important distinction. (There’s probably a hyphen missing somewhere, come to think of it.) ↩︎

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