Diary slam

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A diary slam is an event where people read from their diaries in front of an audience . At an event, several speakers usually appear in the style of a poetry slam . The selected diary passages mostly date from youth and puberty of the presenter and allow a corresponding temporal and biographical distance to the often unintentionally funny content. The first diary slam in the narrower sense took place in 2005 under the name Cringe Night ( dt .: "Schäm-Abend") in Brooklyn ; since then, such events have taken place regularly in North American and European cities.

Content and process

Diary slams usually take place as an evening series of events in cafes, bars or clubs that already serve as venues for other spoken word performances. The core of the Diary Slam is the presentation of excerpts from the diary by the authors themselves. Most of the time, the organizers moderate and the presenters provide some context for the respective excerpts, which should not, however, be changed or edited. Evaluation by applause or a jury in the style of a slam poetry competition is optional.

Most of the speakers are female. The focus of the excerpts presented are typical teenage topics such as first love, puberty and sexuality, parents and siblings and the circle of friends. The minimum time between writing the diary and the presentation in the Diary Slam is usually greater than ten years, the age of the presenter ranges from mid-twenties to late thirties. Some organizers of diary slams suspect that the way teenagers deal with privacy changed from the turn of the millennium with the advent of Myspace , blogs and Facebook to such an extent that teenage diaries suitable for diary slams are now a historical text genre.

The unauthorized reading of someone else's diaries is considered a taboo ; accordingly, a public lecture on what was previously secret offers the attraction of the forbidden, and allows empathy . In the best case, the presented texts amuse through involuntary comedy, which manifests itself in abrupt thematic breaks, inappropriate emotional fluctuations and blooms of style . The tension between the audience and presenters with exhibitionism and voyeurism insufficiently described, at best, experience lecturers a " catharsis " experience by revelation of her former angst-ridden adolescent I , while the audience can show solidarity.

History and dissemination

As a forerunner of the Diary Slam is the series Mortified ( dt .: "Ashamed" or "humiliated") by the American comedian David Nadelberg. In this live format, people have been presenting private objects such as calendars, photos or diaries on stage since 2001 and telling stories about them. The first Mortified sessions took place in Los Angeles , and later in other cities on the west coast . This resulted in the TV series The Mortified Sessions , broadcast on the Sundance Channel in 2011 , in which celebrities talk about their childhood. Nadelberg also published two books with extracts from diaries.

The American student Sarah Brown began in Oklahoma in 2001 , sending embarrassing or otherwise worth reading excerpts from her own teenage diaries to friends. These emails caught on and became widespread, with Brown devising a live version in 2005 after moving from Tulsa to New York. The first Diary Slam under the title Cringe Night (or just Cringe , so "ashamed") took place on April 6, 2005 in Freddy's Bar & Backroom in Brooklyn , and was repeated monthly thereafter. Usually ten to twelve diary writers appear in one evening; the event lasts two to three hours. After national media reported on the success of the monthly series, Brown produced a pilot film for a television series for the broadcaster TLC . In 2008 she published a book and organized the first Cringe Night in Europe while on vacation in London . There this event now takes place monthly in a pub on The Strand .

In July 2011 Ella Carina Werner and Nadine Wedel organized the first Diary Slam in Germany, which took place in a bar in Hamburg-Altona . Two years later, the two women published a book with contributions from their monthly series of events. At the end of 2011, the first Diary Slam took place in Münster , inspired by the London Cringe Night . As a result, further diary slam series of events were held in Munich (since 2012) and in Frankfurt and Cologne (both since 2013).

literature

  • Sarah Brown (Ed.): Cringe: Toe-Curlingly Embarrassing Teenage Diaries, Letters and Bad Poetry . Crown Archetype, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0307393586 . (British edition: Michael O'Mara, London 2009, ISBN 978-1843173458 .)
  • David Nadelberg (Ed.): Mortified: Real Words, Real People, Real Pathetic . Simon & Schuster, New York 2006, ISBN 978-1-4169-2807-2 .
  • Ella Carina Werner, Nadine Wedel: I think I'm with Nils now: the best of youth diaries that have been unearthed . Fischer Scherz, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-651-00061-2 .

Web links

  • Sarah Brown's cringe blog , with appointments in New York and London
  • Get Mortified - Website of the American event series
  • Diary slam blog by Nadine Wedel and Ella Carina Werner, with appointments in German-speaking countries
  • Dear Diary - series of events in Munich

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Eva Eusterhus: Reading out secrets without blushing . In: Die Welt from August 9, 2011.
  2. ↑ Christoph Bungartz (editor): Embarrassment meets poetry - diary slams conquer Germany ( Memento from April 11, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) . Article in the NDR-Kulturjournal, first broadcast on April 2, 2012. ( Video Online )
  3. ^ A b Liz Miller: An Interview with David Nadelberg . In: Bookslut , March 2008
  4. ↑ Dirk Schneider: Dear Diary  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Toter Link / Wissen.dradio.de   . In: Spielraum , series on Deutschlandradio , first broadcast on December 1, 2011.
  5. ↑ "Diary Slam": Reading from diaries ( memento of the original from March 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: SAT 1, regional television Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, first broadcast on July 9, 2012. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hamburg.1730sat1.de
  6. ↑ a b Erika Hayasaki: Teen diary readings offer a Cringe binge . In: Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2007.
  7. ↑ Neil Genzliger: Stars Peruse a Shoebox's Worth of Childhood Memories . In: New York Times, December 4, 2011.
  8. ^ Robert Smith: Sharing Private Shame for Public Laughs . First aired on NPR on July 15, 2007.
  9. ↑ a b Sarah Brown's Cringe Blog . (Accessed March 2013.)
  10. ↑ Veronica Lee: Cringe at your teenage diaries . In: The London Evening Standard of December 14, 2009.
  11. ↑ I think I'm now together with Nils on the book site at Fischerverlag.
  12. ↑ Kathrin Breer: Puberty Confessions: “Dear Diary, I'm in love. Definitely! " . In: Unispiegel from December 19, 2011.
  13. ↑ Kathrin Hollmer: "The coming week will be ultimate cool" . In: Jetzt.de from October 30, 2012.