I wish someone had told me about the chairs. When I announced that I was going to become an arts administrator, I wish someone had taken me aside and told me that if I went through with this, my relationship with chairs was never going to be the same again. I really used to be on good terms with chairs. They are, after all, very useful for sitting, and as a person who really likes to sit down, I had always had a certain fondness for them. Also, they are a constant source of cheap entertainment if an Austrian speaks to a German because what the Austrian calls a chair would be sofa in Germany and what the German calls a chair is, among other things, a fancy word for poop. I am sure you can now see why chairs and I used to be great friends. Unfortunately, what I believed to be a solid and reliable relationship of many years changed when I started to work in arts administration and they became my enemy. If you think that chairs really cannot be all that bad, let me enlighten you about the many ways chairs can ruin the day of an arts administrator.
First of all, chairs can be unspeakably heavy and unwieldy. But even if they aren’t, once you’re past the 20-chair mark, they will begin to feel heavy and unwieldy even if they are lightweight and super easy to put up. Which they are usually not. This means that not only will you get awfully tired and sweaty before the audience arrives and you need to look presentable, but you also end up with lots of bruises because the moment you let go of them for the fraction of a second, they will jump at you like a boxer and try to knock you out. After an especially bad evening for my legs, I tried to emulate the way my colleague carries the chairs only to find out that her way of carrying – while keeping your legs safe – gives you bruises all over your arms. Being physically inferior to the chairs, I finally did what I always do in terms of distress: I resorted to verbal aggression and taught my colleague the sentence ‘Sessel sind blöd!’ (Chairs are stupid!). I chose to teach her the sentence because not only does speaking German make you seem more sophisticated, but also because it goes well with the other sentence she can say in German, ‘Darf ich bitte meine Jacke ausziehen’ (Can I take off my jacket, please?).
Should you have managed to get all the chairs to their places, you can be sure of two things: a) your’re going to be desperate for some praise and b) someone will come along, take a quick look at the chairs, throw you the glance your parents threw you when you had put on your jumper the wrong way round YET AGAIN, and will start to rearrange them. No matter how much thought and heart and soul I put into getting the chairs in the right places, you can be sure they are going to be in the wrong place. Even on the day I proofsat 50 of the chairs I had just put up to make sure that sightlines were okay and had a flashback to my primary school days in which the teacher made us do endless squats, someone found fault with the arrangement of the chairs. And that’s only the chairs for the audience. It all becomes a lot worse when I am supposed to set up the stage for the musicians because I never seem to be able to get the chairs in the right spot. That was, until I developed my special technique by which I wander around the stage, chair in hand and pretend to be engaged in serious thought until a musician tries to sit down and I gently sweep the chair under his/her behind while giving him/her the ‘I was going to put the chair in that exact same place anyway – prove me wrong’-look.
And have you ever noticed how incredibly noisy chairs can be? If not, just wait for a quiet passage in a symphony, the moment before the singer starts her beautiful aria or literally any other moment that would benefit from a little peace and quiet, and I am sure you’ll hear the chair make its grand appearance. There is a reason why pieces including squeaky chair have mushroomed recently. I do realize that it must be tremendously frustrating to be taken for granted to the extent chairs are taken for granted, but why do they always have to ruin the best of moments? And that is only if everyone sits really still. Should you have a more fidgety audience, say a room full of children, there is no stopping the chairs. Together with the constant words of children and the shushes of the parents, the chairs raise their voices in an endless symphony of equally surprising and unpleasant sounds.
I really thought that after a prolonged period of fighting, there would eventually be a truce with the chairs. But one day I realized that it was too late for that because I had already lost. The concert was over and I was sitting in a nearly empty church, staring into space. Colleague J didn’t fare any better. She had had to lie down on a carpet, a kneeler under her tired head. Colleague D came to find us, curious to know what had happened. ‘The chairs’, I said. He understood and sat down. On that particular day, after having successfully taken the chairs to their places and shushed them into obedience during the concert, we had been too slow to stack them away again and thus had to sit on the floor of the church we had played in, waiting for Evensong to be over so we could proceed with our work. Evensong was a holy affair and the chairs made a hellish amount of noise when being folded and put on their racks. The chairs had deprived me of my right to go home after a very long day. I hated them so much that I refused to sit on them and sat the floor instead. ‘Sessel sind blöd’, I said to myself. ‘Sessel sind wirklich sowas von blöd.’
