Serving staff show visitors to their seats and take their orders. The menu offers a small, curated selection of quality wines and non-alcoholic drinks together with twelve accounts of sexual biographies. In the first section of the evening listeners can choose two longer stories and then, after the interval, another two shorter ones.
The serving staff will then deliver the order to the table on an iPod, everyone puts on their headphones and there is silence in the room for a good 45 minutes: everyone listens for themselves but can also observe the others listening and sense how their neighbours at the table are reacting. Though sex is omnipresent in the media, talking about it honestly and accurately is rare.
In this long-term project, the author and director Anna Papst and Mats Staub have looked for people whose sex lives have undergone an abrupt change and who want to reflect and talk about this. Many of those taking part did so only on condition that they remain entirely unrecognised. In these cases, Mats Staub edited a raw audio version down from sometimes hours of stories that Anna Papst then condensed into a text which would be rerecorded, voiced by a speaker of a similar age.
Since the work was first presented, visitors to the audio wine bar have also taken part and their stories can be heard in their own voices, with the menu becoming more varied from one location to the next. Intimate Revolution.
