Paula Linke

In the artist's words:

As an assistant director, I watched production after production as others became creative and wrote along attentively. As a theater educator, I guided others to become creative. As a dramaturge, I developed concepts within which one could become creative - for others. I only got creative myself at home, on my guitar, writing my songs - for myself.

In small moments, as the moderator of a matinée, an author's talk after the performance, I felt what great joy it gave me to sit on a stage and hold the reins for a varied, charming, dense program in my hands.

At some point, it was no longer enough for me to watch others sweating, spraying and fiddling with the lights, taking an audience into thought experiments and stories and releasing them into the night with fresh images and lost associations and memories. I wanted that too!

Before that, I had already performed my songs on stages, as an interlude at poetry slams, in small cafés and pubs. But always just to try things out, as a thrill alongside my theoretical studies in theater studies, sociology and theater pedagogy.

In the summer of 2019, I left the theater and all its spectacle behind me and went back to Leipzig. I started to sit on stages again and slowly feel my way back to that feeling of being there myself, in the spotlight, with a view of a half-blurred, but breathing and reacting audience. It felt good.

After putting a few of the songs on Bandcamp in 2018 without editing as single-track onetakes as the album DEN TOD IN WEISHEIT UND EIN VERRÜCKTES LEBEN, I went into a studio in spring 2020 and recorded DAS WAR DAS. I had made up my mind: I was going to tackle songwriting with all its positive and negative sides, lock, stock and barrel, and see where it took me - and more importantly, how far.

I entered the singer-songwriter scene, met people, got inspired, played concerts, put my music on Spotify, set up a Patreon page, wrote to promoters and built a tour schedule. Then I won the Audience Award at HOYSCHRECKE 2020 and shortly afterwards DAS WAR DAS was released on CD. I came first in the LIEDERMACHER*INNEN LIGA twice, founded the DUO ADRIANA with Thekla Apitz and built a website. Within six months, everything suddenly happened very quickly and by the end of 2020 I was under contract with the Leipzig publishing house KICK THE FLAME.