yesterday, we were in winterthur, watching cyclope, a wonderful show combining tinguely-like apparatuses with acrobatics and music. it was really amazing! the show, inspired by jean tinguely’s le cyclop, is performed in an old industrial hall, which creates a wonderful atmosphere. the stage, which begins directly in front of the persons sitting in the first row, is a broken up amusement park, which seems to be only inhabited by a (involuntary?) clown. when he’s eventually fed up by his surroundings and wants to leave, suddenly hell breaks loose. it was just amazing! a wide range of acrobatics, acting and music blending perfectly in the huge metal colossus, which turns more and more into a face with, well, only one eye. a pretty heavy piece of metal, so to say.

we were lucky, and our friends, who arrived very early, were offered an upgrade to sit more in the front, and so we ended up in row 9 (instead of something much higher). it looks like it wasn’t exactly sold out, and they tried to at least fill the first rows so that it doesn’t look too sad. which is really, really shameful, since such a great show deserves a much larger audience! so in case you’re somewhat close to winterthur, be sure to watch cyclope while it is still shown! (until end of may, apparently.) after that, it apparently will be shown in july in basel as well (though outdoors there). it is really something which should be seen live, and not on video or tv or anything similar.

this weekend, the apv zo visited the wildpark bruderhaus in winterthur. the weather was great, and except for the lynxes, we saw all animals we planned to see: sika deer and fallow deer, european bisons, wild boars, red deer, przewalski’s horses and gray wolves.

i haven’t felt so young on a metal concert for a pretty long time now, as on today’s dream theater show in winterthur. on the outside, i really felt dressed strangely, as the number of metal t-shirts was pretty small and most people looked pretty normal. inside, the situation looked a bit different, probably the metalheads were a bit earlier :-)
another pretty strange thing was that the wardrobe was located 100 m outside from the entrance. that means, you have to give away your jacket, queue up in the line for the entrance and stay there, freezing, just wearing a t-shirt. but at least it was not raining…
well. besides all these strange things, and also besides the insane pricing of the tickets, the concert was great. even though symphony x had just around 40 minutes to play. at least, the break for cleaning up the stange was pretty short (around 20 minutes), so one had no chance to fall asleep in between… (i remember some breaks which came near to one hour…) the stage was decorated with giant ant puppets, although i couldn’t see them, too many heads in my way… another gimmick was a traffic light hanging above the stage, which showed red, then turned to yellow when the intro music started, and changed to green when the band began to play.
well. dream theater played for almost two hours and, as usual, produced a really good show. they played a lot from their current album, systematic chaos, some other songs and, as an encore, a long medley, going through different epoches of dream theater.