Breakfasting with Barty

There is a very exciting part of my life concerning Martin M Bartelt. Is it hearing about his years working alongside Pina Bausch, I hear you cry? Or when he talks about touring his dance shows all over the world? ....Maybe. Yeah, well, no, no it's not. It's not that. By far the most exciting part of my time with Bartelt is finding myself on the cusp of breakfasting with him and wondering how on earth it will go.
There is no doubt we have both worked hard with this show, but I feel my still being on the planet, as well as the show itself, of course, to be a collaboration. From my family's acceptance that I was going to make it in the first place, to the endless hospitality we have been offered over the years, via free rehearsal spaces and that house in France where we did the major edit of the show back in 2009. Oh, that house in France. It was in the Frenchest of towns, small, but with two cafes and various independent stores. And French people largely ignoring us. And the town hall where there was a jumble sale....
Two cafes though, two. Possibly the world's most distressing dilemma: where should Barty breakfast? And I'm not even going to go into the fact that it's possible that neither of them will be in the sun at the requisite breakfasting hour.
Bartelt himself is a work of all-knowing, brilliantly idiotic, behaviours, travelling around in the body of a broken lizard with the mentality of a five-year-old or a zen master, depending on... well, mostly depending on the quality of any given day's breakfast. Get it wrong and he will suffer. And when I say he will suffer, I of course, mean I will suffer.
In this little French town we hit the cafe-elect, sometimes together, sometimes apart, both sleeping until we needed to, both working late to suit Bartelt's working hours. He is, after all, the one in constant pain who mostly cannot taste or smell anything, though he maintains he can tell the quality of coffee from its texture. I choose to believe this, it would be to my detriment not to. And he's the one who had had his heart valve replaced just two months previously. In fact, let's add some collaborators to that list of those who have got us here: Jacques and Jean who have nursed this creature, my collaborator, back to... existence, after his operation to replace his heart valve, and the bonus death-on-the-operating table that he got for free as part of the experience. He has a sophisticated heart monitor with him which has to be taken out, together with his heart and astonished body, for a walk of exactly the right kind every day. We talk work as we walk, and life, and about his poor, poor heart, so overwrought that the doctors wondered how he was alive at all. He is, my friends, an enigma wrapped up in a corpus unsound, engulfed every day by a tidal wave of irrational emotion concerning breakfast.
And so it is one day that we find ourselves breakfasting, sharing thoughts about how he is a connoisseur of the coffee with several sugars and the pain au chocolate and I am, essentially, a food disposal unit. I am desperately unrefined. He feeds my his croissant crumbs when he has finished doing his thang - I'm a sucker for Crispy Bits. Obviously I have already had my own croissant, or similar: not my usual breakfast choice, but when with Barty I find I often do as Barty does.
If this were a business consultation we would be bottoming out the problem of why breakfast affects him so much, and it seems to be that he feels that if it goes well, everything will go well, and if not, then not only will it be a bad day, but everything will be a disaster. And it is here, at this moment, outside this French cafe that we discover The Truth: a good chocolate croissant doth not make a good day and a bad cup of coffee doth not a day ruin. We laugh like drains. And we quote ourselves endlessly. I'm sure we exclude many people over the subsequent years and breakfasts with our clever cleverness, but, we have both to admit, we are tremendously funny.
Back in South Africa it is morning, early morning for Bartelt - anything before 9am being the early hours. Outside our room there are horses in the morning mist. It is cold and, what is more, it is time to leave for breakfast. Following breakfast we will have 350 schools students around us for two whole days: I don't know about Bartelt, but I am feeling for our poor chosen-cafe owners - they have no idea of the pressure on them, but they really are going to have to deliver.