One word: perfection. Four more words: food for the soul.

As Blixa Bargeld said in his welcome to us, he set up Rede/Speech as a way of not having to do readings, readings being pre-scripted, pre-determined and dull. He created Rede/Speech so that he would have a forum where he would not know what he was going to do, where there would be challenges to face, where he could work through the stage fright the situation engenders in him and turn it to good use... Rede/Speech is billed as performance art, but this differed from the vast majority of performance art, which in my experience tends to get swallowed up by concepts for the performers to hide behind. More performance than art. In contrast, Rede/Speech was intensely human, an exhibition of the art of life. Blixa Bargeld was very present on stage, sometimes shockingly so, as when he built his model of the Solar System. He rapidly set up an intimate relationship between himself and his audience, partly due to the immense honesty of his performance and partly, I think, due to the fact that he was not performing in his native language. Throughout the evening he asked us questions, and these were not rhetorical: he expected answers. For those of you who've never seen Rede/Speech, or who haven't read about it before, I should explain the basic set up. And it is very basic. A microphone, four foot pedals, which are connected to a machine that can loop 31 seconds of sound, said machine presumably being part of the sound desk manned by Boris Wilsdorf, two speakers, and, in Blixa Bargeld's pocket, a small notebook with concepts & notes for pieces to perform. Apart from the prompts from his notebook it is improvised, and only limited by his imagination, which is to say that it isn't very limited at all...
He told us a lot of stories and did what he calls his pseudo-scientific performances. For example the Hopeful Monsters piece: It's based on the discovery by a Swiss geneticist of Hoax genes, genes that control the growth of certain parts of the body. The Hoax genes are the same in all creatures, what determines whether an appendage is an arm or a fin is another gene sequence that decides for how long the Hoax gene will be turned on. Blixa Bargeld created the idea of looping a DNA sequence "from a human, because that is illegal" and then altering it by adding a DNA sequence from another animal to fool the Hoax genes into growing wings instead of arms, thus creating an angel...
The second pseudo-scientific performance was heart-stopping. Indeed, if I had to pick one piece out of the many performed here and say that it was the best, this is the one I'd choose... This was the piece where Blixa Bargeld builds his model of the Solar System, it is an incredibly challenging piece requiring perfect timing, and he was visibly frightened throughout it. It was so inspiring to see him working with his fear, not pushing it away, but living with it, using it. Though at times it looked like it might eat him up, he always managed to stay with it, and his warmth and his humour and his long daffy anecdotes about things such as the German astronomer who tried to name Uranus "George" after the English King, and how you can read history in the names of asteroids, were marvellous. What he does is to create his own universe on stage. We see it vertically, so the order of the planets is: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus, Mercury, Sun ("the Sun is here" gesturing towards the mike stand "of course"), Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. He has a chart with the distances between the planets expressed as proportions of the 31 seconds his loop machine will allow him, so that he leaves a much bigger gap between Saturn & Jupiter, say, than he does between Earth and Venus. This is why he can't include Uranus, Neptune or Pluto: they are so far away that if he kept to the same time scale there wouldn't be enough time to finish the piece. So to create the loop that forms the base of the piece he has to keep a close eye on his stopwatch and his universal time chart, press his foot on the correct pedal, and enter all the planets into his loop at the right time. I've never seen him get it right first try and Iíve never heard from anyone who has. He started by looping a cosmic hum: "Imagine that the Big Bang happened when I stepped out onto the stage, and now the gasses are cooling, and the particles are forming into planets, and you can still see the curves where she lay... This sounds like a snake, I don't know why". Then he began on the challenge of creating the planet loop, and once he'd checked it over to see that it was right, it was time to add the asteroid belt. He said that there were too many thousands of asteroid names to add them all individually, and talked to us about going on the internet to find a list of the names … As asteroids lie mostly in a belt between Jupiter and Mars, he added the belt in so that his loops sounded like Saturn, JupiterasteroidasteroidasteroidasteroidMars, Earth, Venus, Mercury, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, MarsasteroidasteroidasteroidasteroidJupiter, Saturn. He played it back, laughed and said, "and now I have to cover up my shame with some glow from the Sun" and began to loop warm tones over it, then added what sounded like solar winds...
It was beautiful, and it was more than beautiful, because watching him in his struggle to create it had added so much humanity to his Solar System.
When he finished his performance he left the stage very abruptly, and so quickly that those of us that had brought him flowers weren't able to get to the stage in time. After a long, long wait, he came back for an encore, returned to the microphone stand and said that the beginning of the encore was just like the beginning of the show: he had no idea of what he was going to do. He was leafing through his notebook, looking for an idea: And what we got was perfect for the moment, he made a Box Fight, where two abstract concepts slug it out in a boxing ring. There was a long discussion between Blixa Bargeld and the audience, where he was calling on people, asking them to put forward a candidate for the ring. Fear was suggested and he loved that one. "Fear! The undisputed champion! Yeah? I am right? Joy is the challenger?". This was the perfect ending. The whole evening had been run through with Joy and Fear, and now here they were, fighting it out in a boxing ring. Even in the ring, the two were working together, and the match went two rounds without a winner. So Blixa Bargeld said it was up to the jury to decide. He started a new loop, just consisting of the words Joy and Fear, then he turned the volume down on it, thanked us again for coming to see him, stepped on the footpedal to bring the volume up again, and the first word that came out on the loop was Fear. "Fear won", he said. "Sorry". And then he was gone.