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As Sally Potter travels around the world with 'YES'
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Who are you?

After the weekend’s speedy mini video production, it was back to the yoga of interviews and photo-sessions, starting with a shoot for the New York Times. The photographer greeted me, rather disconcertingly, with the line: ‘Tell me why I am photographing you for the New York Times. Who are you?’ Not the most flattering of opening gambits, and surely not designed to make a woman feel at ease. I crawled uneasily though the session that followed. I do not feel I have learned how to be photographed yet, despite having a fair amount of practice by now. The question keeps popping into my mind in a blur of non-thought, really, that I don’t look right, somehow. But right for what? It is as if no one has told me how to play being me.

In the afternoon, however, I did interviews for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Irish Echo, the latter two by phone. All three conversations were stimulating and intriguing. Annette Grant, in New York, sent me a surprising and beautiful poem of an email later that evening with a vivid description of a pregnant woman carrying an orange she had seen shortly after leaving the hotel. (We had briefly discussed the charged question of not having had children. Or – as on a gorgeous cartoon postcard I once saw of a woman weeping diamond-like tears whilst exclaiming: ’I don’t believe it! I forgot to have babies!”) Victoria Looseleaf (what an excellent name) of the LA Times is a dance critic and had many droll, funny things to say about The Tango Lesson, particularly her own envy at watching me dance with someone as marvelous as Pablo. It is never too late, I assured her. My tango debut on screen was at the age of 46.

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Leaving New York



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Text © Sally Potter. All pictures © Adventure Pictures unless otherwise indicated