Daniel Williams, composer and director, decided in a flash to leave the UK – and never to work for a university – some 20 years or more ago during an interview for a job as a lecturer, having recently completed a PhD. It was in the moment when they accused him of ‘being too intellectual’. A university. Where they grant degrees. Where they do research. Fortunately, he had a sideline in his true ambition, to make music for theatre performances. Many years of work with DEREVO produced a great many soundtracks for a huge number of shows, and hundreds of performances appearing in Russia, Germany, UK, Ireland, Latvia, Finland, Holland, Norway, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, USA, Switzerland, Greece, Spain, Belgium and France (although not Denmark, perhaps surprisingly) including many performances of a variety of shows at the Festspielhaus Hellerau in Dresden, although that now seems like it was in a different century or in a different country. Now, he is worried that the very thing that made Germany a good country for artists is slowly disappearing. Either way it is changing, as positive as signs might continue to be. In the meanwhile, in addition to other work not based on stories by Kafka, he wrote the soundtrack for ‘Der Bau‘ by Freaks und Fremde, as well as the music for Maxim Didenko’s ‘Das Schloss‘ which is in the repertory at the Staatsschauspiel in Dresden. In both of these shows, he plays the soundtracks live. He has also collaborated with many other theatre companies, especially in Dresden, but so many of those collaborations seem so long ago, as if before some great change. SLOGANS Theater was born during that weird, sludgy time of closed theatres and loose research money, in 2021 when so many were hypnotised, and when he realised that 23 seconds is much, much longer than you think it is, and four score and ten years, much, much shorter.
SLOGANS Theater 