passages
Performance Body, Time and Space Dan Bau Meets Schwyzerรถrgeli: A Swiss-Vietnamese Premiere in Giswil Instant Composition: Schaerer and Oester On Tour in Grahamstown Genius or Craft: Can Creative Writing Be Taught? THE CU LTU RAL MAG AZI NE O F PR O H E LV E T IA, NO . 5 7 , ISSU E 3 / 2 0 1 1
4 – 27 DOSSIER
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Performance: Body, Time and Space
LOCAL TIME New Delhi: Conversations With Puppets By Elizabeth Kuruvilla Cape Town: “The eeriest music I’ve ever heard” By Chris Kabwato
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REPORTAGE Swiss Rhythms and Asian Melodies By Christian Hubschmid (text) and Niklaus Spoerri (photos)
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PRO HELVETIA NEWSFLASH Award-winning Swiss Computer Games / New Board of Trustees for Pro Helvetia / Swiss Art in Prime Location / Pro Helvetia Takes on the Biennials
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PARTNER PROFILE Migros Culture Percentage By Christoph Lenz
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To Inform or to Provoke? Performance and Politics A performance cannot start a revolution. But this form of artistic practice can wield provocative power in the political realm. By Eva Behrendt
CARTE BLANCHE Can Creative Writing Be Taught? By Michel Layaz
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How to Move with Words A visit with Simone Aughterlony, choreographer and dancer, during a rehearsal. By Julia Wehren
GALLERY A Showcase for Artists Catwalk By Sandrine Pelletier
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READER SURVEY RESULTS
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IMPRESSUM PASSAGES ONLINE NEXT ISSUE
Playful, personal, pedagogical: our dossier offers insights into the contemporary performance art scene. Pictured here: Martin Schick and Laura Kalauz with their Common Sense Project. 6
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What Is a Performance Anyway? Today almost everything can be called a performance. How does a Cultural Studies professor define this form of artistic practice? By Gabriele Klein
“Can you trust the people sitting next to you?” Contact with the audience is central to the work of the experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment. Dagmar Walser talks to artistic director Tim Etchells
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Switzerland’s Performance Scene A new generation, new media and new platforms are making things happen here. By Sibylle Omlin
Cover: gate c, Victorine Müller, 2003; Photo: David Aebi Photo page 2: Gerhard F. Ludwig Photo page 4: Simon Egli
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C O NT E NT 2
Crossing the Boundaries Art is dynamic – it is constantly renewing itself and offering new perspectives on its social context. Artists are often ahead of their time, which is why artistic phenomena are hard to evaluate using existing funding criteria. This is particularly true of performance art. Since it bursts the boundaries of traditional genres and mixes elements of dance, theatre, visual art, music, literature and new media, performance can fall between the cracks of funding policy – because it is frequently unclear what category it belongs to, and thus which funding budget should cover it. For this reason, Pro Helvetia deploys a flexible promotional practice and has performance projects evaluated jointly by those responsible for the various artistic genres. What counts is that good art receive the necessary support. The pioneering role that this interdisciplinary art form has always played whetted our appetite for its current incarnations. Over the past few years and across the various artistic disciplines, a young and lively performance scene has grown up that experiments with new forms, venues and themes. Organizers from all genres have increasingly been including performance projects in their programmes or even devoting showcases to them. In Switzerland there are currently more than half a dozen festivals dedicated explicitly to performance art. All of which is reason enough for Passages to take a look at the Swiss performance scene, as well as to investigate the political potential of performance and the pivotal role played by its audience. After all, in an era in which everything, from sporting events to shareholders’ meetings, counts as performance, the performative, and its artistic potential, demand closer examination. Andrew Holland Acting Director and Head of Promotion Pro Helvetia
E dIT O R IAL 3
Performance The play of appearance and reality, staging and authenticity, is the key to the provocative power of performance. But what artistic potential can performance provide today, when the term is used in all fields, from sporting events to town hall debates and shareholder meetings? In this dossier we also look at performance’s political potential, at the role played by the audience, and at contemporary currents in the Swiss performance scene.
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With her meditative shows, artist Victorine M端ller stands out in the Swiss performance scene. Enveloping herself in a second skin made of fantasy forms, she creates living installations of unusual beauty. Pictured here: the performance return (Swiss Institute for Art Research, 2008). http://victorinemueller.com
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erformances are fundamental to the habits, practices and rituals of cultures, and they are part of everyday cultural experience: for example, how we wear clothes, practice personal hygiene, have parties or organize demonstrations. This cultural-anthropological thesis was formulated in the 1960s by the ethnologist Milton Singer, the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner and the performance theorist Richard Schechner; it was the starting point for vibrant research on the various social, cultural and aesthetic manifestations of performances. The primary object of this research was what Singer called “cultural performances”, those performances that shape everyday life. For Turner, performance is a practice in which a culture can recognize itself.
ing agencies are dubbed “active performance” or “performance advertising”. BMW calls its sports-car accessories “BMW Performance”. Porsche uses the advertising slogan “Porsche Intelligent Performance”, and a Mercedes Benz ad asks, “What is performance?” Artistic performance as resistance
If performances can be anything these days, whether potentially profitable businesses, political speeches, scholarly lectures, pure entertainment, everyday rituals, or stagings of the body and the self, the political and aesthetic potential of performance as an art form needs to be distinguished from all that. For while performances have been increasingly present in social space since the 1960s, they were first and foremost established as a scenic art pracThe omnipresence of performance tice. Here, performance stands for a format that destabilizes many While an anthropological perspective sees performances as a fun- boundaries, such as those between popular culture and art, creadamental feature of human cultures and cultural practices, a tive process and art work, author and object, or actors and audisociological perspective emphasizes the meaning of performance ence. Artistic performance addresses the social position of art itself in the recent history of (post-) and calls the distinctions bemodern society. Performances tween artistic genres into queshave become even more signifition. It may not be possible to cant since the radical restruccome up with a good definition turing of society in the 1960s. A of performance, but the theatersocial world focused on events studies scholar Hans-Thies Lehand theatricality has come to be mann describes its lowest comcharacterized by information, mon denominator as follows: virtual reality, and the media, “Performance is what those who which has fostered a new conperform it call performance.” cept of society: Baz Kershaw’s Although the actions of the “performance society”, or ZygDadaists in the 1920s might alFrom the sporting event to the town hall mont Bauman’s “liquid moderready be called performances, nity”, the basic idea goes, favors performance in Western art only debate and the shareholder meeting: flexibility over rigidity, opposes came to be an emblematic art today almost anything can be called a fragmentation and cohesion, form in the 1960s, as Performing performance. Cultural Studies professor prioritizes plurality over unity, Art, Action Art or Performance Gabriele Klein defines the term, and and establishes cultural diverTheater. It was a decade in which sity rather than a homogenous industrial society began to be discusses the aesthetic and political potential culture. fundamentally transformed and of performance as an art form. The increasing importance the new paradigm of (post-) of the performative is manistructuralist thought was estabBy Gabriele Klein fested in all social spheres, in lished in the academy. business, politics, culture, sciPerformance as an art form ence and sports. Sports events, began with revolutions in the public trials, talk shows, political conventions or shareholder fine arts and the performing arts. As a way of resisting the art marmeetings: many public events are staged as performances. Not only ket, artists such as Allan Kaprow, Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, Yoko do politicians, managers, lawyers or even defendants put on per- Ono, Nam June Paik and the Viennese Actionists developed perforformances, their success and failure are measured according to mance-like forms in Happenings, Fluxus, or Body Art. They altered how “good” their performance is. In this, they resemble media the canon of forms in the fine arts through the integration of time: stars. In advertising, too, the concept is omnipresent and has many duration and the moment; simultaneity, unrepeatability and bodmeanings, ranging from function and accomplishment to appear- ily presence. The entrance of the performative into fine arts also ance, behaviour and presentation, as well as result, output and suc- changed where it was exhibited. It moved out of the studio to the cess. Utterly distinct products, including the computer mouse, audience, where it presented the process of the creation of imagery loudspeakers, and a magazine for financial information, are called as a theatrical event. Feminist performance, above all, became an “Performance”, while an anti-aging skin lotion promises “3D Per- important instrument to stage political art with the body for such formance” and sporting-goods labels and marketing or advertis- artists as Marina Abramovic´, Valie Export or Yoko Ono.
What Is a Performance Anyway?
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dissolved fixed boundaries between genres. In contrast, the performance art of the 1980s increasingly rediscovered the specific characteristics of the individual arts. The once-powerful assertion of boundary transgressions was followed by a revival: a transformed awareness of each art’s own medium, of objects in fine art and texts in the performing arts. The performance art of the 1980s primarily worked with a heteronomy of the subject opposed to the self-determination of the artist and the spectator. At the same time, performance was transformed from an action into a production focused on perfectionism, the role of technology, a new closeness to the text, an increasingly dramaturgical structure, and a growing distance from the audience. The 1980s avant-garde, such as the Wooster Contemporary performance art is obliged to find an Group, Forced Entertainment, and Needcompany, transformed text into a general aesthetic strategy that can explore the increasingly intertextuality appropriate to authorless or subtle social boundaries between play and seriousness, multi-author discourses; it was only one between seeming and being, and between the element in the scenic presentation. At the imaginary and the real, so as to be able to make itself the same time, Poetry Slam marked the emerOther that un-settles and dis-solves those boundaries. gence of a new, literary performance art in which anything that could be done with the voice and the body could be called a the classical theatrical context that seeks out new spaces in the “reading”. In the fine arts, analogously, a new faith in painting public sphere. This has made it possible to play with the customs could be found in works by such artists as the “Neue Wilde” (“New of bourgeois theater and to call the relationships of actors and Wild Ones”). In the countries of the Eastern bloc, where it was audience, text and interpretation, or self and role into question, mostly forbidden, performance art developed into a medium critthus turning the theatre of representation into a public spectacle ical of society. of presence. This scenic art addresses and reflects everyday social In the 1990s, performance art experienced a renewed boom practice as a theatrical form. Theatre is no longer just a site of characterized by collective work (like that of the Gob Squad or the bourgeois representation but rather an immediately intended ex- Rimini Protokoll), the use of set pieces from the artists’ biograperience of the real, a staging of authenticity. Here, the theatri- phies, and scenic, autobiographical narration, as in the work of the cal performance takes place beyond a psychological unfolding of group She She Pop. In his actions, Christoph Schlingensief, arguplot and character. Even the theatrical “text” is no longer based ably the best-known performance artist in the German-speaking on a literary original interpreted by the director and then in turn world, picked up on the trends of the 1970s and radically erased by the audience; instead, it only emerges in the performance pro- the boundaries between art and politics. An aesthetic critique of cess. The members of the audience are increasingly and actively representation was the focus of European conceptual dance, as drawn into the performance as it progresses, so they lose their practised by choreographers like Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Boris classical role as passive consumers and interpreters of the pro- Charmatz and Thomas Lehmen. At the same time, performance duction and become what Jacques Rancière calls “emancipated art underwent rapid developments in the former Communist spectators”. countries and became an important channel for the new democSuch “de-dramatization” brings theatre closer to dance racies, while in countries like China and Cuba artistic performance while, since the 1970s, dance has been addressing the theatrical was adopted as a medium for political messages. framing of choreography, for example in the dance theatre of Pina Bausch, Johann Kresnik, Susanne Linke and Reinhild Hoffmann. The politics of performance In the theatre as a site of what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls “the With the focus on collective work, the common creative process, production of presence”, the contemporaneity and transience that and the interaction between actors and audience, performance art were once the specific characteristics of dance as an art of the body aims to be a democratic artistic practice that, as the examples have become features of the theatrical happening and, at the same above have shown, establishes itself as a political-critical authortime, symbols of the inconstancy of the social in the “liquid” mod- ity in opposition to the art market and social relationships. It is reern era. garded as a reflective art form that contributes to the understanding of the social position of contemporary art by calling its basic Artistic performance since the 1970s conditions into question and making them the content of its repPerformance changes according to its aesthetic, political and so- resentations. Because its production practice is radically connected cial context. In the artistic performances of the 1960s and 1970s to contemporaneity and unrepeatability, to embodiment and presin the West, for example, the individual arts interpenetrated and ence, it problematizes the status of the museum and of the theatre Analogous to the fine artists, theatre directors like Peter Stein and Peter Zadek also experimented with new concepts in the 1960s. With the growth of skepticism about mimetic representation, the theatre became what Lehmann calls “postdramatic”. That is, a work understood as a repeatable product was replaced by an unrepeatable act of communication, a process, a “theater of situations”. Performance in postdramatic theater also tries to treat time and space differently. It is a practice that defines theatrical space only through the actual presentation of the work itself. Unsurprisingly, then, ever since its early days, the new genre of performance art has defined itself as an artistic practice beyond
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The German performance collective She She Pop works with auto足 biographical elements. In Testament (2010) members appear on stage with their own fathers to negotiate love, inheritance, and the question of who owes what to whom. www.sheshepop.de
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as sites of supposed reality and bourgeois representation. That is can only be determined with reference to its frame, that is, to its precisely why the performance theorists Baz Kershaw and Peggy interpretive context and to the particular situation in which the Phelan see it as political art: it does not depict the idea of freedom performance takes place. but rather reveals how freedom is produced. According to Phelan, performance resists objectifications; useless in an economic sense, it is a “transient” art form that cannot be integrated into the cycle of copying, representation and reproduction. But how can performance art be critPerformance can thus be seen not only as a critique ical when the transient, the contempoof a neoliberal economy but also as its aesthetic rary, the ephemeral and the theatrical counterpart. After all, it is a practice which rehearses have themselves become central characthe new values of the globalized world, like teristics of contemporary societies?
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The political aspect of performance cannot be identified in itself but only recognized in its relationship to something – and this relationship is its social and artistic context. In contrast to the 1960s, artistic performances at the beginning of the 21st century are confronted with the omnipresence of theatricality. The social situation itself is characterized by the dis-placement and dis-solution of social orders, cultural conventions and signs, as well as by political and aesthetic provocation, the search for utopias and heterotopian spaces, the depiction of the absent, and the tracing of what is repressed and forgotten. As a result of all this the theatricality of performance is no longer easy to generate aesthetically. Contemporary performance art is obliged to find an aesthetic strategy that can explore the increasingly subtle social boundaries between play and seriousness, between seeming and being, and between the imaginary and the real, so as to be able to make itself the Other that un-settles and dis-solves those boundaries. Jean-Luc Nancy sees the desire for presence as a sign of a longing for the production of “somewhat more meaning” – and this surplus of meaning is produced by the constant generation of meaningfully interpretable material in a society of media and staging. From the perspective of media theory, this leads to a conclusion opposed to Phelan’s thesis: when body and presence, aura and authenticity, and incident and event become social imperatives of self-fashioning and the global laws of neoliberalism demand the permanent production of new products, the very irreproducibility of performance ends up actually corresponding to the new laws of neoliberal politics and the global market. Or to put it even more strongly, as an avant-garde art, performance positively explores such principles. Performance can thus be seen not only as a critique of a neoliberal economy but also as its aesthetic counterpart. After all, it is a practice which rehearses the new values of the globalized world, like mobility, transience, placelessness and flexibility, as well as the permanent reinvention of the self. For performance – like dance – to realize its critical power as a transient and thus contemporary art form with new artistic visions, it must develop aesthetic strategies that distinguish it from what Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle”. Here, refusal can involve standing still, or moving slowly, or even staging a representation of absence. In the end, how socially critical, oppositional or aesthetically innovative an artistic performance is
mobility, transience, placelessness and flexibility, as well as the permanent reinvention of the self.
Gabriele Klein is a Cultural Studies professor and director of the Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Hamburg. www.performance.uni-hamburg.de Translated from the German by Andrew Shields
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Photo page 8: Dorothea Tuch ; page 11: Katrin Schoof
The social context of aesthetic critique
Xavier Le Roy’s choreographic works are characterized by an experimental attitude toward bodies and art. Still from Giszelle (2001), created by Le Roy and danced by Eszter Salamon. www.xavierleroy.com
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n a suburb of Düsseldorf on a sunny June morning in 2002, cause the artist-protagonist wore a coat and sunglasses, Action 18 the director Christoph Schlingensief, wearing a full-length also recalled the work of Joseph Beuys. coat and sunglasses, unloaded a piano in front of the offices But even Beuys’s 1974 coyote performance I like America, of a company called Web/Tec, covered it with detergent, and America likes me was more than an esoteric artistic exercise. spread a sack of feathers in the front yard of the building, put The live coyote that Beuys spent several days with in a New York a live chicken on the piano and set fire to a straw effigy with a pho- gallery represented the America of its indigenous inhabitants, and tocopied picture of Israel’s then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon taped the artist’s emphasis on having contact solely with this animal duron its face, as well as to a pile of books that included several copies ing his visit to the US was a clear political statement. of Martin Walser’s Death of a Critic. This performance, Action 18, Schlingensief’s Action 18 referred to Germany’s own political attracted a small troop of spectators and journalists and was reality both in its language and in the site of the action, while also adopting procedures with antieven filmed by local and federal police, for Schlingensief’s Semitic connotations, such as voodoo-like “purification ritthe burning of books. Appropriual” was aimed at Jürgen Mölately, throughout the perforlemann, the owner of Web/ mance, a spectator was holding Tec, as well as at his business up a sign reading “Is Schlinpartners in the Arab world. At gensief crazy? No! Fascistic? the time, Möllemann was the Yes!” – though it was not clear head of Germany’s Free Demwhether he was part of the ocrats, a party that had just event or acting on his own. been making headlines by All in all, the blending of taking anti-Semitic positions reality and fiction, seriousness in an election campaign. and silliness, “left” and “right,” The action lasted only ten art and non-art, seems to be minutes and was relatively essential to the irritating power quiet. The only people who of performance in the realm of Political performances cannot exactly launch were nervous were the police the political. It may also lead to revolutions. But this form of artistic officers assigned to protect legal consequences for some practice can wield provocative power in the the building (and its yard). performances – although it is political realm. While Christoph Schlingensief Perhaps Schlingensief’s cry of unclear at times whether those “Kill Möllemann” in a Duisin power want to silence disawas once able to stir up public debate with his burg theater a few days earlier greeable critics or whether controversial performances, the younger universal application of the had made them especially vigprotagonists of this genre take their positions laws is being invoked. From ilant. Of course, whoever was more quietly. Performers like Rimini Protokoll, familiar with the artist and his the artists’ side, the transgreswork knew that even his shout sion of the boundary between Milo Rau and Gob Squad see their works of “Kill Helmut Kohl!” at docart and reality can also have as a form of both research and education. umenta X was not part of any ethically unsavory implications real plan to commit murder. – such as when composer KarlBy Eva Behrendt For Schlingensief, however, Heinz Stockhausen called the those ten minutes in Düsselattack on the World Trade dorf had painful consequenCenter a work of art. ces: he was sued and had to pay a sizeable fine, even though he de- In Schlingensief’s action art, this irritation involved not criminal fended himself by maintaining that his action was in an artistic but political strategy. To name but a few examples, he founded a context. political party (Chance 2000) and ran for Chancellor himself (even managing to get 60,000 Germans to vote for him), had his audiPerformance as political statement ence vote on the deportation of asylum seekers, and cast a Zurich Action 18 can be seen as a classic example of political performance. production of Hamlet with neo-Nazis who supposedly wanted to Unlike in traditional theater, such a performance is not focused on leave the movement. The reactions of the media and the public a dramatic text for whose presentation actors take on roles and confirmed that his strategies regularly succeeded. Schlingensief’s startlingly up-to-date immediacy and his repretend to be someone else. Instead, as in a religious ritual, the focus is more on the performer’s real actions. In the case of Schlin- peated success at making headlines with his performances are ungensief’s Action 18, a series of actions taken out of their usual equaled in the German-speaking theatre world these days. It is not contextonly acquired a meaning of their own through their com- that there is no longer any political theatre or performance art. But position and the location of the performance. At least in part be- in general, positions have been quieter and ambitions more modPer fo r m ance 12
Photos: David Baltzer (top); IIPM – International Institute of Political Murder (bottom)
To Inform or to Provoke? Performance and Politics
Christoph Schlingensief’s art actions always took political aim. With the show Ausländer raus! (“Foreigners, Get Out!”) in Vienna (2000), he had television viewers vote on which asylum seekers to deport, leading to public controversy on the subject. www.schlingensief.com
For his play Die letzten Tage der Ceausescus (“The Last Days of the Ceausescus”) Swiss writer Milo Rau conducted interviews with eyewitnesses and reconstructed the Romanian dictator couple’s show trial in scrupulous detail on stage. http://international-institute.de
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The performance artist as educator
The production drew on a hobby that artists and theatre people have borrowed in the last few years from history buffs: in “reenactments,” lay people restage battles or strikes in the original locations. Such reconstructions can have a downright cathartic effect on their participants, especially when the historical events are not too far back in the past, as Jeremy Diller and Mike Figgis showed in their documentary film The Battle of Orgreave. In their reenactment of the 1984 battles between striking miners and the British police, the original participants traded roles and gained new insight into the events they had gone through. The Last Days of the Ceausescus also had a special explosiveness, at least at its performance in Bucharest (although it was in a
In any case, it is striking that many performance artists currently active in the theatre sector tend to behave like (apparently) objective researchers or teachers rather than radical artistic subjects. They prefer to present posiAll in all, the blending of reality and fiction, serioustions rather than publicly assert them, leaving ness and silliness, “left” and “right,” art and non-art, it to the spectators to form opinions or take a political stance on the basis of what they see. seems to be essential to the irritating power of Such artists aim to educate. They use the tools performance in the realm of the political. It may also of journalists, historians and social psychololead to legal consequences for some performances. gists, such as conducting interviews, writing questionnaires and doing research on sources. Working with lay actors is part of this, although the lay participants theatre and not in the original location): one of the Ceausescus’ are not asked to demonstrate their artistic skills. Instead, they pro- sons filed and lost a suit against the use of his family’s name. Above vide biographical information about their everyday lives, their pro- all, though, the production gave the spectators and actors a chance fession or their religion. to get a new perspective on their recent past, their images of hisSo when the director Hans-Werner Kroesinger, who was born tory, and their interpretations of them. In a country like Romania, in Bonn in 1962, plans a new performance, he might read up to which, like most of the former members of the Eastern bloc, does 2,000 pages in preparation. Since the end of the 1990s, his spec- not have time to cultivate a culture of memory or to come to terms trum of themes has ranged from the crimes of colonialism to his- with its past, even this is an act of provocation. torical genocides like the murder of the Armenians by the Turks (with a special focus on the role of the Germans), as well as repre- Capitulating to the revolution sentative family histories like that of the industrialist family Flick, But neither Kroesinger’s productions nor Rau’s reenactment are who rather unscrupulously supported whatever German political political performances in the narrow sense; they rely too much on party had the say at any given time. Like a historian, Kroesinger the protective realm of the theatre. The literary theatre of the first finds his material in primary texts and sources, but then, more like decade of the 21st century repeatedly took political positions, too, a dramatist, he assembles it in a many-voiced collage. As the often leaving dramatic theatre far behind. Examples include Volker sources are not named in the production, and the actors do not Lösch’s productions of classics with choruses of welfare recipients perform clearly defined roles, Kroesinger’s theatrical works force or prostitutes, Elfriede Jelinek’s biting social and political comthe audience to think. They are quite the opposite of “histotain- mentaries, and René Pollesch’s shrewd complaints about the egoment”: the spectators have to pay extremely close attention if they istic aspects of capitalism. But few have dared to forsake the prowant to understand from what perspective a particular event is be- tection of the theatre, museum or exhibition for the risks of ing talked about at any given moment. They are often rewarded spontaneous, even aggressive outside influences. The German-British performance group Gob Squad is aware with new insights into mainstream historical understanding, or even a complete displacement of it. of this dilemma and, in almost all of its works, tries to cross the boundary between the art world and the street. Its members don’t Reconstruction with a cathartic effect have any illusions, though, about the extent of their artistic imThe Swiss author and dramatist Milo Rau, who was born in 1977, pact. In Revolution now! (2010), one of their latest performances takes a different approach. For his performance The Last Days of at the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, the perthe Ceausescus, he conducted numerous interviews with partici- formers left the theatre to interview passersby and encourage them pants in the Romanian revolution of 1989, including General Stan- to take revolutionary action – while all of this was being broadcast culescu, who betrayed the Ceausescus, and the soldier Dorin Ca- live back inside the theatre. Presumably, the end result of this selflan, who carried out their execution. On the basis of this material, ironic game was clear in advance. The participants themselves did historical films and the assistance of professional actors, Rau and not really believe that social change can be realized – and certainly his team staged a historically meticulous reconstruction of the not as the result of an artistic intervention. The “people” on the show trial and execution of the Ceausescus in a military barracks. street agreed with them, with a healthy dose of humour and good
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Photo: Manuel Reinartz
est. Ideologically, too, times have changed. The avant-garde art of the 1960s and 70s, which Schlingensief drew on repeatedly, is no longer romanticized but often criticized by those working in theater today. For no matter how exciting and influential the new forms often proved to be, their ideological context often seems quite dubious now. The theatre generation born after 1970 (that is, the children of the rebels of 1968) might not be able to draw on that work as unselfconsciously as Schlingensief, who died in 2010.
They tried to encourage passersby to revolt: the BritishGerman collective Gob Squad with Revolution Now! (2010). www.gobsquad.com
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sense. So the group briskly quoted their way through the iconography of revolution and capitulated before the great change. Perhaps they made things too easy on themselves. But wouldn’t that also be rather symptomatic? Effective change of perspective In contrast, the collective Rimini Protokoll succeeded at least in generating some unease among the board members of the Daimler corporation. Chairman Manfred Bischoff welcomed shareholders to the Daimler general meeting in Berlin in April 2009 with an unusual remark: “This is neither a theatre nor a play!” It was apparently necessary to make that clear after Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel of Rimini Protokoll – just in time for the financial crisis – came up with the idea of declaring the shareholder meeting a “readymade” entitled Hauptversammlung (“General Meeting”). With the help of the Hebbel am Ufer theatre in Berlin, they transferred voting rights to about 150 spectators and thus managed to get them into the meeting. This was a tiny minority, given that there were about 7,000 shareholders at the meeting. But the chairman of the board clearly recognized the risk that anyone looking at this event not as a participant but as what Clifford Geertz would have called “a participatant observer” might well come to different conclusions about it, and even see through its pseudodemocratic rituals. That was the effect the Riminis had sought. After all, they always examine the issue of the relationship between appearance and reality in their work. Their artistic act consisted only in an extremely effective displacement of perspective. They did not want to “denounce the self-presentation of a global player as a show”; instead, they sought to make it possible to experience it “as the ritual of a meeting of different interests”. They succeeded brilliantly by leaving the spectators to their own devices and only offering more information in “niche talks” with experts. For some of the spectators, a routine event with business magnates became a crash course in economics, marketing and manipulation: education in the best sense of the word. These days, one cannot expect more.
Eva Behrendt (b. 1973) is a theatre critic and freelance contributor to Theater heute. She lives in Berlin. Translated from the German by Andrew Shields
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ehearsing, organizing, answering questions, nursing She is indeed wild and unsettling; both these qualities quickly her baby: the Zurich-based dancer and choreographer made this dancer well-known right from the start. Born in New Simone Aughterlony has a lot to do this hot August Zealand of English parents, she joined Meg Stuart’s company Damday. She is at the Dampfzentrale in Bern, working on aged Goods in 2000 and then followed the group when it moved her new piece We Need to Talk. A few stories up, her from Brussels to the Schauspielhaus in Zurich. There, she danced, family is waiting in the artists’ residence, while on stage, the lights trembled and sang as if her life depended on it, first in Highway and music for the last scenes to be run through today are being 101 (2000–01), and then in Alibi (2001) and Visitors Only (2004). tested. Aughterlony may be tired, but she is full of energy and in She quickly became the central protagonist in Stuart’s works and an excellent mood. A few minutes ago, she lay under a stifling, stiff finally even learned a new version of Stuart’s congenial 1991 solo plastic cover on the stage, her muffled voice barely audible: “In ten Disfigure Study. Stuart and her company worked with Christoph Marminutes, my air’s going to run out,” she said. “Forgot my oxygen tank.” Later, sitting on a music box, she will tell the story of the thaler’s Schauspielhaus team for four years. That was enough time alien. The listener, spellbound at first, drifts away after a while and for Aughterlony to make friends and establish contacts in Zurich. comes back right when the mood grows darker. The alien is no Alongside her engagements as a performer and choreographer in theatre productions by Stephan longer protected and cared for by Pucher and Falk Richter, she bethe community but is beaten, and gan her own choreographic exthe performer is creating images plorations in 2003. She was given of strange landscapes of bodies. the necessary platform for them Here, she breaks off and sits down by the Theaterhaus Gessnerallee, with her dramaturge at the edge of where her first solo, Public Propthe stage. Good. It was epic this erty, had its premiere. Further time. Twenty minutes of storytellwork with the Hebbel am Ufer ing, a little trip to the world of Dance or performance? For the dancer theater in Berlin, the Schouwscience fiction and back. and choreographer Simone burg in Rotterdam, and the * Aughterlony, the two genres cannot be Dampfzentrale in Bern followed; separated aesthetically. Both deal all these collaborations continue Much earlier in the piece, the today. By now, she has created plastic cover was a giant, blown-up with time, space and the presence of an nine works in all, duets and globe. A distant planet. Mother audience. And also, of course, group pieces, as well as joint Earth. It’s not yet clear, and may the presence of bodies. A portrait. works with other artists, such as never be. Aughterlony does not Isabelle Schad and Jorge León, want to give the audience any fixed who also often collaborates with images; she prefers to let them do By Julia Wehren her as a dramaturge. In 2010 she their own thinking. She regards Photo by Fabian Unternährer worked on a large project with them as communication partners Léon: To Serve, a trilogy of film, on the same level as herself. Even in her first work, Public Property (2004), she moved her chair play and curated performance programme on the contemporary right up next to the rows of the audience and tested the connec- situation of domestic workers, which was both a success and a tour tions between the audience and the performer. “How can the au- de force. With the birth of her second child, Aughterlony now dience sit there and watch me if I don’t address them directly?” wants to return to the small form, the solo, and thus to the beginAughterlony’s trademarks are: direct confrontation, a challenging ning of her career. gaze into the eyes of others, laughter and storytelling, and the rep* etition and variation of what is always the same. She connects scene after scene in long dramaturgical arcs, which can be quite She is now going through all her previous pieces, writing short trying for both the performer and the audience. Both sides must texts, considering patterns that keep coming up in her work and endure it for quite a long time, until small transformations occur, themes that she wants to keep exploring. She sees this not as realmost unnoticeably leading to a shift. For example, the mood at jecting what is familiar but as exploring it anew in different conthe birthday party in The Best and the Worst of Us (2008) turns texts, or as she puts it, “making ghosts into guests”. Mostly, her into a requiem for lost happiness before finding the way back to own works have addressed issues of representation and disguise it. Or, with more and more groaning, the airy dance steps in Per- on stage, the boundary between fiction and reality, or the truth formers on Trial (2005) turn out to be mere codes. Most of the content of gestures and emotions. Now, in We Need to Talk, refertime this happens with a great deal of energy, although it takes ences to her biography are beginning to crop up in her work. Aughterlony was born in New Zealand in 1977. She graduated place over a long stretch of time. Aughterlony is a strong performer. She seems wild and self-confident, and at the same time, from the New Zealand School of Dance in 1995. 1977 was also the year the United States sent the Voyager 1 and 2 probes into space. something vulnerable and wounded shimmers through.
How to Move with Words
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Direct confrontation, eye contact with the spectators, laughter, storytelling and variations on a theme: all part of Simone Aughterlony’s signature performance style.
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Each of them carried a gift from the earth: the Golden Record, a disc with pictures and recordings as signs of human life. It might someday testify to the achievements of humanity, an interstellar code, as it were. Among other things, it includes 90 minutes of music, from Beethoven, Bach and Chuck Berry to folk music. Aughterlony has chosen it as the frame for her solo, as a matrix that is both limiting and inspiring. The idea of a future in the far reaches of space connects her with science fiction, whose constructions of time and space have long fascinated her. “Science fiction always carries the past into the future,” she says. “It doesn’t really create anything new.” For what is outside the present is ultimately inconceivable, regardless of what we may imagine. * Aughterlony always devotes a great deal of time to doing extensive research for her projects. She reads and goes to the theatre, although she regrets that she manages the latter less often of late. She at least tries to keep up with the most important dance pieces, such as Jérôme Bel’s latest solos, or the works of Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, whom she helped out by taking on a part in Bloody Mess in 2007. Her network is quite important to her. She keeps working with the same artists, with her partner Thomas Wodianka, with Nic Lloyd, Kate McIntosh and Phil Hayes. They are musicians, performers and actors. Aughterlony likes working with artists whose bodies have specifically dance-oriented training. This creates a special closeness to the audience, who can better identify with the way such bodies communicate, how they manage to do something or not. As a choreographer, she also likes to be inspired by the other artistic qualities of her collaborators. A kind of knowledge transfer takes place: “We compare notes, discuss things, learn from each other.” Still, the responsibility always remains with the choreographer. She suggests themes for improvisations and decides what will finally be seen on stage. She sees her activity as “arranging and juxtaposing”, and she calls her profession “choreographer and performance maker”. She sees her own dancer’s body, trained in classical ballet and contemporary dance, how it has been formed and “educated”, as she calls it, as a welcome opportunity to explore movements. In her new solo, she will put it to more use again. “Inspired by the classical music, I have been remembering earlier experiences I had while dancing,” she says, and laughs: she is delighted that her body still works so well.
Dance or performance? For Aughterlony, the two genres can no longer be aesthetically distinguished. The contemporary dance scene borrows performative strategies from everywhere, she says, from theatre or the fine arts. In the end, the artists’ own sense of themselves determines which scene they belong to, as does how they would like to be seen, or the market and the sponsorship and promotion context they want to be active in. At the same time, it is necessary for institutions to create particular categories and put artists into them. “In the end, though, it’s about the same thing in both dance and performance: time, space, and the presence of an audience,” she says. And of course the presence of bodies. “Perhaps the dancer’s body is more likely to generate meaning, perhaps it is more expressive,” she adds. But the body definitely makes each artist’s training clear. And that’s precisely what makes the mixing and crossing of different forms of expression so fascinating for Aughterlony, the trained dancer.
* After this week of rehearsal, though, she will still have to plough through a huge amount of text and hours of video material: notes from the dramaturge and recordings of her improvisations, which will gradually take shape as fixed forms. Aughterlony will arrange almost all the parts in advance, the movements as well as the texts. “At every moment, I know exactly what I am going to do,” she says. Everything has to be clear enough that she can approach it with the necessary freedom on stage. Whether she is dancing, speaking or singing does not really make a difference to her. Sometimes, the words simply come more quickly than the movements. “Words, babbling to myself, help me find any movements at all,” she says.
www.aughterlony.com Julia Wehren (b. 1975) trained as a dancer and studied dance theory. She worked as a culture journalist until 2007, when she became an assistant at the Institute for Dance Studies in Bern. She is currently working on a dissertation project with a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Fabian Unternährer (b. 1981) is a freelance photographer based in Bern. He studied at the University of the Arts in Zurich (ZHdK) and the Ecole Supérieure d’Arts Appliqués in Vevey. His works have been shown at a number of solo and group shows, mostly in Switzerland. www.fu-photo.ch Translated from the German by Andrew Shields
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ing what the performers were doing up there on stage. You cer tainly keep the audience busy… What I am interested in is engaging people in this more fully present and attentive way, so that we can draw them into another kind of watching which is seductive and troubling, pleasurable and confronting. I think we always have to start with the basics though, this very simple notion of presentness. And then these processes of fictionalizing, flirting, lying, pretending what you speak of can take us on journeys away from the here and now. It’s as if each performance might be a process of unpacking what now could be. For all my fascination with states of present-ness and transparency, I’m also gripped by the way that performers can be distant, private, incomprehensible or unknowable. This presents another interesting part of the spectator’s relationship with the stage – because to encounter performers in these more distant guises can really have us guessing and wondering. It might also have us an-noyed or puzzled or bored! But what’s interesting is that these states of uncertainty For the internationally acclaimed or unclarity have the potenBritish performance group Forced Entertaintial to be transformed, to ment, contact with the audience is become clear in a new way, crucial. The group constantly negotiates the to open up to another possibility on the other side. boundary between stage and spectators,
If there were a tangible contract between the performers and the audience, what in your opinion is the most important thing this contract would include? For me the most important thing as an audience member is an openness to being there – to watching and experiencing what is actually happening. That sounds very simple, but I think for most of us, myself included, that’s hard, because you come with other things on your mind, with expectations and preoccupations and it’s very easy to get confused between what you’re looking at and what you wish you were seeing. I suppose that in some way every performance strives to create that quite fundamental contact, that contract, which is to say: We are here, you are there, and this is the moment we are engaged in together.
And as part of the stage, how do you create that engagement? There is also some kind of effort from the performer – an effort towards being there, being in that space, being with those people who are present that evening, negotiating what is actually unfolding between you and them, and between you and the other performers on stage. As a performer, the biggest trap that you can find yourself in is being bound up in and occasionally subjects the relationship between routine or in some fantasy Did your perspective on the performers and audiences to a serious test. about what you’re doing, audience change through A conversation with artistic director and author rather than recognizing out these 25plus years of Tim Etchells. what you’re actually doing. work with Forced Enter tainment? Especially as touring perIt changed a lot over the formers – moving from Interview: Dagmar Walser years. I think in the very beone kind of theatre space to another, which we’ve ginning, in the 1980s, the done a lot of – it’s easy to work was really shy about find yourself bound up in the technical issues or concerns of yes- the audience, we didn’t really acknowledge the public, we were beterday’s performance rather than today’s. You really need to be hind a wall in a way. We were very interested in cinema; we would there with the actual audience that is there. This focus on engage- have liked to make films. I think the idea that there was an audiment – on presentness – is a struggle against the idea of the audi- ence was a bit embarrassing somehow. We were in a bubble, until ence as a passive consumer of spectacle, against performances in we started to open up a bit. And then over the next years it came which those watching are not implicated, not truly present. I know, to be that we just couldn’t stop with the audience. Everything was this is a cruel way to think about an audience: a hungry animal going to them. We were in a line at the front and the lights were that needs something to happen, bloodthirsty, eager for quick on and we wanted to talk pretty directly. This relationship has gone through different moods – from First Night, which is playfully pleasures. aggressive and has quite a bit of fun causing problems with the auWhen I think of the performances of Forced Entertainment, I dience. It explores a conception of the audience as a tyrannical remember that the audience was often addressed directly: they monster, terrifying and oppressive. Maybe a year or two later, we were flirted with, teased, rejected and the whole time wonder made the long story-telling piece, And on the Thousandth Night…, Per fo r m ance 20
Fotos: Hugo Glendinning
“Can you trust the people sitting next to you?”
“It’s important to remember that there are more of you than of us. So if it does come to a fight, you will undoubtedly win...” In Showtime Richard Lowdon directly addresses the audience, thus calling attention to the power relations between performers and the public.
Every theatre performance creates a sense of community, because the spectators are brought together through a common experience. In Speak Bitterness, however, the performers attempt to disturb this sense of unity and split the audience.
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which in contrast is pretty warm and generous with the audience. So our treatment and portrayal of the audience has definitely shifted, and continues to shift. I feel like probably the long-term mission is about to explore all of the different ways in which one can inhabit that relation, and to keep changing the times that one inhabits that relation, keep changing the temperature or texture of it.
power relations, to put it under scrutiny, and to try to problematize it in all sorts of different ways - which you can do if you know what the rules of the situation are. There is this sentence, again in Showtime, where Richard says to the audience: “We’re gonna do what we’re gonna do, and you’re gonna do what you’re gonna do.” There are the rules, the expectations, but the night is always fragile. Anyything can happen.
In your performances you’ve often worked with the exhaustion of the performers, especially in the Durational Performances. But there’s also Thrill of it All, for example, which starts with a 20minute dance, by the end of which the performers are ex hausted, which is interesting because it also seems to have an effect on the audience. How do what’s happening on stage and what’s happening to or in the audience relate? Each piece is always constructed as a deployment of energy, and when you push the performers through something physically exhausting or exhilarating or use language that is exhausting or exhilarating, their defences crumble – to a certain extent. An alert and rested performer is usually controlling what they do, managing and controlling how they appear, but if they get tired, whether physically or intellectually, they become more ragged, less able to control, and as a spectator you start to see things that the performers might otherwise have edited out. The tiredness opens them up. As this happens to the performers, what’s interesting is that your own defences as the audience get a little worn down too. It’s as if you were a bit punch drunk, defences down, and that creates a possibility that wasn’t there when you first sat down. In this way the audience “mirrors” the state of the stage.
What do you want to happen? Are you looking for a confronta tion with the audience? No, it would be very easy to provoke a fight, but I am much more interested in the process of tension and seduction, making propositions and making problems of those propositions. It is an architectural or musical process much more than a chance to create a fight! There is a collective thing happening. The conventional theatre desire is to bring everybody together. What we’ve been working on for such a long time is to question this entity at the same time as forming a group of the separate individuals who arrive. In theatre performance, you’re always dealing with the constitution of the community; you’re always building up that social space of the auditorium, creating an experience which binds and links it. But it’s also very interesting to divide the audience. Many of our pieces create a problem around this idea of the collective spectatorial WE. Who are we as we sit here? What are we here for? In Speak Bitterness the performers make all kinds of confessions – and put the audience in a situation where they have to decide whether to belong to the WE that is spoken of or not. When the performers say “We never washed up properly, we never took the dogs out for a walk,” the audience generally accepts this. It’s not such a terrible set of things to admit. However, when the performers say “We pushed dog shit through foreigners’ doors,” the audience will probably try to alienate itself from the situation – the social ‘we’ becomes a problem. The assumption in theatre is often that the audience is good and decent but can you trust the people
In Showtime you focus on this line between audience and stage very directly. Richard Lowdon tells the audience: “There is a word for people like you: audience. An audience comes to a theatre perhaps to see something which, if they saw it in real life, they might find offensive… Perhaps you’ve come here this evening because The audience is a tyrannous monster! It has demands! you want to see something you’ve only done in the privacy of your own homes or And the unfolding of the evening is always, on some something that you dreamed about doing level, about how those demands are negotiated, in the privacy of your own homes. An au managed, met or refused. dience likes to sit in the dark and watch other people do it. Well, if you’ve paid your money – good luck to you. However, from this end of the telescope things look somewhat different. sitting next to you in the auditorium? Can you be sure they are Yyou all look very small, and very far away, and there’s a lot of not racist vigilantes on the nights they’re not watching plays? Of you. It’s important to remember that there are more of you course not. than of us. So, if it does come to a fight, you will undoubtedly win.” Sounds very much like a power game… Can you say what you might wish a spectator to say or think As I said before, the audience is a tyrannous monster! It has de- when they leave the show? mands! And the unfolding of the evening is always, on some level, Not concretely in that way, because I think what interests me is to about how those demands are negotiated, managed, met or re- open a contradictory and ambiguous space. I like it best when the fused. Of course the work that we’ve made is hugely based on ex- whole ground seems uneven, unpredictable – when the perforploring a whole set of power dynamics about the audience: the mance can’t quite be resolved. It’s not that I want people to feel this power of the stage over the audience, the power of the audience or that. It’s more that I want them to feel the tension between over the stage. The important thing is to acknowledge that set of possibilities, I want them to stay in a kind of unresolved space. I
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like this idea that you make a work that, when it’s over and the audience leave the performance, is still unfinished business. It’s like the fishhook’s got into your skin. There is a tendency in the performing arts today to leave the theatrical space, and break theatrical conventions. For exam ple: sitespecific work, or involving people in the performance who didn’t decide themselves to participate. Most of your per formances take place in art spaces, theatres or galleries. Why? I’ve done projects that break these frames. But I’m mostly interested in structures, encounters, in cultural forms, where the rules are known for both sides. For me, having accepted the conven-
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ally. At the heart of what we do on stage there’s a no-bullshit way of being there. We didn’t develop a highly artificial, symbolic performance language in Sheffield, where you have to know a whole lot about the history of contemporary performance to grasp it. Mostly what you’ll see is a bunch of fairly ordinary-looking people walking onto the stage and starting to talk to you, you know what I mean? It’s not rarefied – and I think the audience appreciates that.
The work that we’ve made is hugely based on exploring a whole set of power dynamics about the audience: the power of the stage over the audience, the power of the audience over the stage. The important thing is to acknowledge that set of power relations, to put it under scrutiny, and to try to problematize it in all sorts of different ways.
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tional frame that there is an audience constituted in an auditorium and that there is a stage and that what we are watching is on the stage, I can start to open space and possibilities. For me, working within this initial set of accepted formal constraints sets useful limits and parameters inside which I can work on the audience.
Illustration: Elizabeth Traynor
Is there a moral reason you want to have clear rules for every body? Maybe yes. It’s connected to this idea that we all should know the ground we are standing on. I don’t like cheap, deceitful, apparent undermining of rules – or what seems to be the undermining of rules, but really isn’t. The thing I struggle with most is where theatre pretends not to be theatre, pretends not to have these kinds of rules or frames, but in fact still does. You see it a lot: in immersive theatre or promenade or one-on-one performance, where there’s a pantomime of ‘rule breaking’ or ‘newness’ but there the reality is just as conventional, just as power-based as a regular play. Fundamentally it is, as we said, about power. But when we know what the rules are, power can be addressed, questioned and pushed at. Would you say this perspective on the audience is a political attitude? Of course to me that’s hugely political. I’ve seen a lot of work that declares itself political but the way that it treats its audience it is actually just very reactionary, or deceitful. What interests me more is that the politics are deeply integrated in the form: the nature of relationship to the audience, the integrity and transparency of the things we spoke of before. It’s in the nature of how performance opens up space in the audience, of how it deals with the collaborative authorship of the audience. Perhaps also this idea of clear rules and a very straightforward, simple presence in front of the audience is something that makes the work transparent internation-
Tim Etchells is an author, visual artist, director and performer. He is best known for his work as author and artistic director of the British performance group Forced Entertainment. For more than 25 years, in books, essays, exhibitions and performances, Etchells has been reflecting on the art of performance. His latest novel, The Broken World, was published by Heinemann in 2008. www.forcedentertainment.com; www.timetchells.com Dagmar Walser is a radio journalist and theatre critic for the Swiss public broadcaster SRF.
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Today, the practice of performance art has become widespread, as it can take place anywhere, and does not necessarily require a stage or white cube. With the economic pressure on urban spaces, and public spaces increasingly being opened up for event culture, performance art’s diverse projects would seem to be an ideal way to utilize every possible gap, theme and space. A new generation: the use of dramaturgy and elaborate technology
Ten years ago, the Swiss art schools started offering courses in performance practice, and subsequently developed the ACT network, a performance platform for students that was founded in 2003. This caters tor an active young The move into the landscape generation, and ensures a susand the use of new media tained interest in the medium. The conditions and tendencies Today it’s often not just the artthat provided the impetus for ists themselves who develop this movement are many and performance initiatives, but also varied. The trend for blowing curators and directors. Younger open traditional artistic media protagonists have taken over and presentation spaces has from the old pioneer generation. been clearly discernable since Amongst these are the highly 2000. For a long time now, artpromising artists Anne Rochat, ists who use performance have Simon Kindle, Sophie Hofer, Donot simply worked within the menico Billari, Mio Chareteau, format of the body-centred reMélodie Mousset, Michael KimThe performance art scene in Switzerland cital: they have worked with ber, and many others. They form has been picking up the pace over internal and external spaces, the new generation of Swiss the past ten years. Some have even claimed and with different temporal performance artists, for whom that it is booming. A move out into specifications. Performance art the use of dramaturgy and elabnow scales the highest peaks orate material, in situations the landscape, elaborate technical settings, of the Alps and sounds out the which are often technologically installations, and the use of new media deepest shafts of sewer systems. complex, is a matter of course. are just a few features of the new generation. One example of this is the Even a helicopter can be put to work of artist Katja Schenker. good use, as the work of the BaBy Sibylle Omlin Her performances are a skilful sel performer Domenico Billari combination of her own bodily shows. For his work o.T. (2007), strength andh the physical a helicopter carrying a large conproperties of materials. She devises situations in which she can tainer of water emptied its load directly above the performer. This create a paper landscape that fills a room, dig trenches in the earth, piece, however, also clearly demonstrates that in spite of new meor lift large pieces of asphalt by hand. Unsurprisingly, new media dia and new locations, the live use of a physical body remains the and interactivity have also begun to be included in performances. pivotal point of the performance work. The artist Gaspard Buma from Lausanne, for instance, uses measuring and data-transfer devices from the realms of medical tech- Research projects, and the ability to commercialize, increase nology and communications in such a way that during the actions your chances of survival he performs, his body becomes an electronically alienated musical There are many different formats within which today’s artistic instrument. performances can be seen: from festivals, which take place reguAs an art form that employs physical creativity and acting, per- larly, to temporary platforms like Kunstexpander in Aarau, all the formance has admittedly always been closely linked to the picto- way to longstanding performance laboratories like the Kaskadenrial qualities of visual art and the staged performances of the thea- kondensator in Basel or the Progr in Bern. Looking at this develtre, but it is also just as close to music, dance, spoken word, and opment – the abundance of performances, protagonists and scenes process-oriented art.1 New performance-specific art forms, such – it’s not hard to recognize a real “boom,” as the performance artas interactions in public places, performative installations in pro- ist Muda Mathis has put it. ject spaces, and long-duration performances, to name just a few, Many of the initiatives started by performance artists have disalso increasingly call for new event formats. appeared again over the last decade (such as Der längste Tag [The
Switzerland’s Performance Scene
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Photos: Martin Stollenwerk (top); Raoul Gilibert (bottom)
A
nyone attempting an overview of performance art in Switzerland will be astounded by the variety of forms it takes here. Several important centres for performance developed in the 1980s, including Geneva’s Festival La Bâtie, Zurich’s Theater Spektakel, Fribourg’s Belluard Festival, the BONE Festival in Bern organized by Norbert Klassen, and Ruedi Schill and Monika Günther’s work in Lucerne. Since then, the scene has grown in both size and variety. And over the last ten years, new festivals and project spaces like the Kaskadenkondensator in Basel, Stromereien in Zurich, International Performance Art in Giswil and Les Urbaines in Lausanne have given the medium an enormous boost.
For Partition for 8 Muscles and 1 Sampler (2004) Gaspard Buma uses a computer, electrodes, adapters and cables, an amplifier and a loudspeaker. With the help of modern technology, the Lausannebased performance artist transforms his body into an electronicallywired musical instrument. www.gaspardbuma.org
Culture shock, identity and intercultural misunderstandings: these phenomena inspired Yan Duyvendak and Omar Ghayatt to create Made in Paradise. In their piece, the artists address Islamic culture and European perceptions of Muslims as the Other. www.duyvendak.com
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Longest Day] in Zurich’s Kunsthof). However, this is not out of keeping with the character of the medium, which has always been ephemeral. It has become apparent that those festivals or institutions that survive are primarily the ones that have achieved a clear focus for their content, along with a stable source of finances and a sufficiently high public profile. The ‘sustainable’ festivals are linked to community structures, public funds or publicly financed institutions (La Bâtie in Geneva; Theater Spektakel in Zurich; Belluard Festival in Fribourg). In recent years the medium has undergone a degree of stabilization and institutionalization, and there are a number of research projects being undertaken by performers and academics: for example, the Perform Space project led by the School of Art and Design in Basel, or Andrea Saemann and Katrin Grögel’s Performance Saga project. Performance art has now also gained entry to galleries, art exhibitions and museum collections, and thereby access to the market. The Zurich performer San Keller, for instance, produces a sticker, an object or a flyer for all his projects, which can then be sold. The pioneer generation turned performance into lasting pictures suitable for galleries and museums through photography and video. Today, performance art is seeking out new forms of marketing and communication. In connection with this I would like to speak about two of the current trends in Swiss performance art which I find interesting.
– the location, the space and the audience – immediately helps to create the performance. “Immediate” in this context means more quickly, more reactively, and more unrelentingly than in other art forms like painting, music or theatre. This also brings to light the fact that the broad field of performance makes a degree of differentiation necessary. Historical and contextual aspects, and the media used, are becoming ever more important ways to create a clear position amongst the mass of projects. “Whether something is a spontaneous initiative by artists in temporary spaces, or a performance by established institutions like theatres or theatre festivals, influences how it is perceived, which in turn feeds back into the work,” explains the performance artist Dorothea Rust, who also organizes these events. Performance art has always been an artistic strategy with which the performer creates surprises, intense moments, wonder and confusion, even incomprehension. In situations and surroundings that are often positioned outside of conventional institutions, performance moves and challenges its audience. It will be interesting to watch this agile and flexible medium playfully breaking new ground in terms of marketing and communicating with audiences.
Performative installations and performance in social spaces
The most important addresses for performance art in Switzerland: Festival La Bâtie, Genf: www.batie.ch Théâtre de l’Usine, Genf: www.usine.ch Théâtre Arsenic, Lausanne: www.theatre-arsenic.ch Festival Les Urbaines, Lausanne: www.urbaines.ch Festival des Arts Vivants, Far°, Nyon: www.festival-far.ch Festival Belluard Bollwerk International Fribourg: www.belluard.ch Festival International Performance Art, Giswil: www.performanceart.ch Festival Migma, Luzern: www.migma.ch Festival Stromereien, Zürich: www.stromereien.ch Theater Spektakel, Zürich www.theaterspektakel.ch Festival Perform Now!, Winterthur: perform-now.ch Festival Bone, Bern: www.bone-performance.com Progr/Stadtgalerie, Bern: www.stadtgalerie.ch; www.progr.ch Kaskadenkondensator Basel: www.kasko.ch Kaserne Basel: www.kaserne-basel.ch 1 Performative! Performance Arts in Switzerland, ed. Sibylle Omlin, Pro Helvetia, Zurich 2004. Sibylle Omlin is an art historian, curator and author. Since 2009 she has headed the Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais. Translated from the German by Ruth Martin
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Photo: Viktor Kolibàl
Angelika Nollert and Silvia Eiblmayr produced a groundbreaking exhibition of performative installations in Germany and Austria in 2003, and in recent years Swiss institutions like the Migros Museum or the CentrePasquArt have also begun to explore performance art. As a result, seeing performance art outside of the moment of live experience has become more commonplace: the performance focuses on the space and in the created object. The Zurich-based artist Victorine Müller is known for her performances, lasting up to an hour, inside transparent inflatable objects, and she then exhibits these poetic pieces in museums. Today, even architectural art projects integrate performance art. This can be seen at the Kantonsspital Zug, where Susann Wintsch has created a permanent installation of eight exhibits by Swiss-German artists produced using performance. Performance art is a field for situational and site-specific activities, which play out in all areas of life. As such, participation is also an important aspect of performance, and this is reflected in the theory surrounding it; the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of “art relationnel” is used in a positively inflationary way. These artists aim to create social integration with their performances, within groups, neighbourhoods, social environments and societies. The Zurich performer Anne Lorenz worked with the 140 inhabitants of a village in Upper Austria for her 2005 project Auf dem Hinweg (“On the way there”), to turn small everyday gestures into a physical performance on the streets. The performative act is a social act. This fact has also been used as an argument for funding bodies. The live element of the performance brings together art education and the integration of various groups of visitors. One of this medium’s greatest challenges is to ensure that the context
Artist rising: in his performance Walking On The Moon But On Earth at Basel’s market hall, Domenico Billari takes flight thanks to a bunch of helium balloons. Live physical performance as well as the experience of the “lightness of being” are central and recurring elements in Billari’s work. www.domenicobillari.com
Pe r fo r m ance 27
L o CA L T i m e
san francisco
new york
paris
rome
warsaw
cairo
cape Town
new deLhi
shanghai
Conversations with Puppets
Bangalore, Kolkata and New Delhi were the stops on margrit Gysin’s indian tour. in the Swiss puppeteer’s workshops, she showed local colleagues how she breathes life into everyday objects.
the hole). Then, the mother and the father died (blowing out the candle) and the girl was all alone. She would walk out of the house weeping (tiny pieces of clay fall like tears). one day, a storm came and tore down her house (picks off the house and throws it aside). only her bed was left. Soon, a goose came and chased her away from the place where her house used to stand. The girl started walking (up her arm) and walking, turning to look back, but never to return…” There’s silence around the rectangular table as Gysin folds up the clay on her arm. The group of about 15 indian educators and puppeteers attending Gysin’s puppetry workshop, organized by Pro Helvetia in its office in New Delhi in the last week of July, are clearly moved by the story and her performance. But the unspoken question hangs in the air: where is the happy ending?
By Elizabeth Kuruvilla, New Delhi – There’s a story in every ball of clay, says Swiss puppeteer margrit Gysin. She gathers some in her hand, presses it down unevenly on the top of her right arm and starts, “once upon a time (sprinkling torn bits of pink bougainvillea petals), it was winter and snowing heavily. in this place, there was a lonely tree (placing a twig in one corner) and a house (raising a section of the clay) where a girl lived with her family. The house had a window (pinching a hole in the middle) through which one could see a fire burning (she lights a tiny candle so we see a light flickering through
The therapeutic aspect is important As the sweltering afternoon progresses and Gysin, 62, a trained mime, puppeteer and kindergarten teacher, shows the gathering how to breathe life into clay, twigs, a sheet of paper, or anything within reach, one begins to understand the reasons for the darkness in her tale. it has a lot to do with her fascination with fairytales, which appeal to children’s souls. “it gives them the force to confront uncomfortable truths in their lives, which a real story can never do. once, during a performance about a child who lived alone with her mother, a little girl piped up that her father, too, visited them only once a year. Her teachers had no clue that the father didn’t live with the child,” she says. Puppetry for therapeutic purposes is still a key motivation for Gysin,
new deLhi
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who started her work around 40 years ago after studying at Jacques Lecoq’s School of Theatre in Paris. Gysin’s workshop on puppetry for the young – and the three-city tour of india with her glove-puppet show, Mimi and Brumm are Having a Party, about a mouse and a bear who live in a book – comes appropriately at a time when many
Photos: mridul Batra
Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, maintains a global network of branch offices, which serve cultural exchange with Switzerland and support worldwide cultural contact.
Local puppeteers and teachers showed great
indian schools and parents are exploring alternative methods of education that allow students creative and emotional freedom to discover their world. New-age schools are breaking free of textbookoriented, rote methods of learning, and are discovering the ease with which broad concepts can be explained to kindergarten students with the help of puppets. At the workshop, thus, there is an enthusiastic turnout of teachers from the experimental Heritage School and the Delhi Public School, as well members of Dadi Pudumjee’s ishara Puppet Theatre Trust and Anurupa Roy’s Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust, two well known names in the circuit of contemporary puppeteers in india who conduct puppetry workshops in schools as well. “margrit has a wealth of experience. Young puppeteers have a lot to learn from her. Besides her innovative story-telling methods, she also shared her adroitness to deal with audience responses and with child psychology,” says Chandrika Grover Ralleigh, Director, Pro Helvetia in-
dia, about her reasons for inviting teachers to learn from Gysin at the workshop.
From the Mahabharata to Bollywood For the teachers from The Heritage School, this was a continuation of the process started by indian puppeteer Varun Narain – incidentally also the first beneficiary of Pro Helvetia’s artist-in-residence programme in Switzerland – who has been tu“Fairy tales help children deal with difficulties in real life,” says Margrit Gysin. toring them in using puppets as an educational tool for the past several months. Trupti Khanna, a Grade 3 teacher at the school, dren. Their reactions are amazing. They was more interested in Gysin’s experiences share things with the muppet. They behave using puppets to connect with children as though the muppet is listening to them, emotionally. “We use puppets to teach chil- feeling with them,” says Khanna. dren, but we also have something called india has a formidable history in pupcircle time in school, where a muppet is pet theatre, but the process that Gysin used to facilitate interaction with the chil- worked with in Switzerland is obviously only making its inroads here now. “Gysin’s performances are for smaller groups, an intimate theatre. in india, playing for such small groups is a luxury. The concept of just puppet theatre for children or for adults has come from the West, and our modern puppeteers have imbibed it,” says Pudumjee. indeed, traditional indian puppet theatre, with its deep religious ethos, was largely performed for audiences, men, women and children included, at religious fairs and festivals. An important component of the oral form of storytelling in india, it drew its major themes from epics like the mahabharata and Ramayana and religious texts like the Puranas. “margrit is aware of the rich cultural heritage of folk puppet theatre. But during this visit she had the opportunity to interact with contemporary puppeteers and learnt how they are evolving contemporary puppetry in the current art landscape,” says Ralleigh. Current generations of puppeteer families may be unwilling to continue with this economically unviable profession, but puppetry as performance art has grown in stature, with contemporary puppeteers working with themes ranging from gender to Bollywood. “india is culturally more extrovert than Switzerland, so the influences are stark and loud,” says Narain. The interest in Margrit Gysin’s workshops. In India, puppets are increasingly used as teaching tools. themes of the Swiss puppet theatre he witLo caL T im e 29
www.prohelvetia.in www.figurentheater-margrit-gysin.ch elizabeth Kuruvilla is books and arts editor at Open, a weekly indian magazine (www.openthemagazine.com). She lives in New Delhi.
“The eeriest music i have ever heard” cape Town
“Fantastic and definitely avant-garde” was the audience’s verdict when the Swiss jazz musicians Andreas Schaerer and Bänz oester played at the South African National Arts Festival. The event in Grahamstown led to inspiring collaborations. By Chris Kabwato, Grahamstown – i live in a strange little place that looks more like a Victorian village than an African town. Grahamstown is located between east London and Port elizabeth in the eastern Cape of South Africa. As the name denotes, it is a creation of a colonial past. Now it prides itself on a number of things: it has one of Africa’s best universities (Rhodes University), an amazing literary culture and, for the last 37 years, it has hosted the National Arts Festival. The festival is a dizzying 10-day array of the best in South African and world theatre, dance, poetry, visual arts and, of course, music. At the heart of the music programme is the Standard Bank Jazz Festival, which caters for a variety of jazz
styles. As the organizers state, “it brings together 250 of the top young jazz musicians in the country, 35 jazz educators and 80 jazz performers from South Africa and around the world.” For 25 years the Standard Bank Jazz Festival has been a ground-breaking space that accentuates the very collaborative nature of jazz. it is into this space of various acts – live performances, jam sessions, workshops and intense socialization – that Swiss vocal acrobat Andreas Schaerer and his compatriot, double-bassist Bänz oester, stepped on a cold week in July. Grahamstown was their first port of call on a tour that would take them to Johannesburg, Cape Town and maputo (mozambique).
Improvisation and spontaneity are the basis for their music: Andreas Schaerer (left) and Bänz Oester (right).
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Photos: Chris Kabwato
nessed during his visit were more personal, such as the relationship between a father and child, the paranoia of perfection or even colour prejudices. Take mimi and Brumm, for instance. Two bedraggled friends, a mouse and a bear, live in a book. Brumm, the bear, is obviously the older of the two and is sometimes protective of young mimi. Promising to stay by her side throughout the night as she sleeps, Brumm reassures her that “there’s a star for every child who keeps an eye on her”. But sometimes he is neglectful: “When he’s having his coffee, he doesn’t pay attention to me,” whines poor mimi. The show is fun, has the audience in giggles, and every child enthusiastically raising a hand for the privilege of being the next person to help Gysin on stage. But without saying it out loud, there are also undertones of homelessness, loneliness, parental neglect in the conversations that take place between the puppet friends, and with the audience. earlier in the day, Gysin had held up a child’s scribble, saying, “Children don’t want to make a nice picture. They want to be inside of an emotion.” She knows that her puppets will be having quiet conversations with each child listening to them.
Accompanying the Swiss duo was Capetonian mark Fransman, an accomplished tenor saxophonist and pianist. The opportunity for Schaerer and Fransman to collaborate had been hatched by Pro Helvetia Cape Town, the liaison office of the Swiss Arts Council. Schaerer and Fransman had spoken over the phone and corresponded via e-mail. each had taken a listen to the other’s music and they felt the chemistry was just right. Their first appearance on stage in Grahamstown was preceded by just one rehearsal session in the spirit of improvisation, which was the hallmark of the music project. Schaerer is a successful, active jazz musician and improviser, and he calls his way of working “composition on the instant”. The key elements of jazz – improvisation and spontaneity – provide him with the flexibility to produce music that ranges from the highly-structured to improvised, energetic collaborations. oester is one of the most famous double-bass players in Switzerland, and has worked with South African musicians before. Joining Schaerer, oester and Fransman in the debut Grahamstown concert was Deborah Tanguy, a Parisian vocalist. on a stage bathed in a strange purple light, the quartet kick off their opening piece: a good 22 minutes of the eeriest music i have ever heard. it starts with Schaerer sounding like a creaking door, before he and Tanguy move into grunts, chants and humming, transitioning after a good eight minutes to standard jazz with Fransman doing a solo riff. i later understand from Schaerer that he got into his kind of vocal act by deliberately wanting to irritate: “When you irritate people, they pay attention. As they react you change the nature of performance – the audience becomes the performer.” over the next few days i will witness him doing just that. if in the first performance Tanguy’s vocals seem to overshadow Andreas’ beatboxing, he has regained his space and energy the following day in a performance alongside British jazz saxophonist and singer Soweto Kinch. Schaerer’s voice starts off indistinguishable from Kinch’s saxophone, but as Kinch moves into a freestyle rap, Schaerer provides the beatbox background music with his voice. Then it’s Schaerer’s turn to do his own piece called Knock Code 3, an energetic and rhythmic
song that mocks sound testing (1-2-3-4) and brings the house down. on stage Schaerer is like a tiger in a cage. There is energy pumping in his veins and he wants to let it out. He prowls on stage listening
Young South Africans experiment with vocal percussion during a workshop.
to the instruments, gathering his vocal strength, drinking in the rhythm (and a lot of water too) and then unleashes his energy. After the show Schaerer said he felt an incredible energy from the audience and from the supporting musicians, and all he could do was step outside and watch the stars. “Collaborations like this bring new ideas and add new energy to a musician’s mind. We both are truly inspired by the experiences we had,” says Schaerer. “it was very interesting to see how musicians approach music and improvisation differently. We got the impression that the jazz scene in South Africa is very supportive and musicians encourage each other a lot.” Composition without sheet music Being the teachers they are, Schaerer and oester also did two training workshops, one vocal and the other on instrumental composition. The first workshop was with a diverse group of youth. in typical Schaerer style it is an unconventional kind of training. Twenty or so youngsters spread out in horseshoe arrangement and he divides them into groups by pitches of voice: tenor, bass and soprano. Without a single coherent word uttered, the young people get into a fun-filled and energetic 30-minute session of human sounds and mouth percussion. The rest of the time is dedicated to a question-and-answer session in which the curious youths probe Schaerer with questions ranging from his stamina, how he rests his voice, practice, why he chose Lo caL T im e 31
to do his unique vocal act, whether beatboxing could ever become part of a music curriculum to whether his body movements on stage are done consciously. The second training workshop was, in the words of a University of Witwatersrand music teacher, “how music should be taught”. Without formally addressing the 20 or so youths armed with a variety of instruments – clarinet, trumpet, saxophone, drumsticks – Schaerer and oester start a beat on stage and then Schaerer just walks up to a musician, imitates a sound with his mouth and the musician plays along. He then gently guides the musician to the stage. 45 minutes later an ensemble has composed a piece without any sheet music. Schaerer and oester left Grahamstown with many fans. “Fantastic, different and definitely avant garde” was the response from music teacher Cameron Andrews and student Thembinkosi mavimbela, who participated in the workshops. Praise for Schaerer also came from local South African musician Bokani Dyer, winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award, who in a radio interview admitted, “People i would like to collaborate with include Andreas Schaerer – an amazing talent.” Fransman later told me he felt the collaboration with Schaerer and oester would go beyond the tour into a joint recording. For his part, Schaerer was equally complimentary of the South African musicians: “i can very well imagine building a band that is half Swiss and half South African and such an ensemble composing and touring europe. i am sure both sides would benefit immensely in terms of music and exploring new spaces.” www.schaerer-oester.com www.prohelvetia.org.za Chris Kabwato is a journalist and photographer. He is the founder of Zimbabwe in Pictures Trust and writes a weekly column for NewsDay, a Zimbabwean daily. He also coordinates Africa’s premier journalism conference, Highway Africa. www.highwayafrica.com
Swiss Rhythms and Asian Melodies For the Swiss roots revival group Siidhang, folk music is as much a part of everyday life as the pitchfork or the Subaru parked outside their farmhouse. At the Folk Culture Festival in Obwalden, their “Future Ländler” songs merged onstage with traditional music from Vietnam. A Eurasian premiere in a forest clearing near Giswil. By Christian Hubschmid (text) and Niklaus Spoerri (photos)
A hush spreads to the very back row when Thu Thuy (seated, front left) plays the first notes of “Eliah,” a lyrical composition by Dani Wallimann (on clarinet, at right).
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R EP OR TAGE Thu Thuy hangs on for dear life. The Stäfeli-Usser Äbnet cable car is descending into the valley. To the left and right, waterfalls hurl themselves over cliffs and boulders; through the window there is a view up into the glaciers. The car dangles over the abyss. Just don’t look down. A soft cry escapes Thu Thuy’s lips. Half afraid, half delighted, she calls out: “Switzerland, I am ready!” This evening the first rehearsal will take place in Giswil, in the canton of Obwalden: three Vietnamese musicians are meeting the local Ländler group, Siidhang. The Vietnamese women have travelled to Central Switzerland for the Obwald Folk Culture Festival. It’s a festival that brings together folk music from various regions of the world, and from different Swiss cantons. Its goal is to track down authentic, living folk music, outside of folklore and patriotic sentimentality. And to discover the essence of folk culture, which is shared right across the globe. A picture-postcard idyll Alp Usser Äbnet, 1673 metres above sea level. Thu Thuy and her friends are spending the afternoon under a picture-postcard blue sky, eating cheese, bacon and ham. They wolf down the cheese, rind and all, excited by this dairy product which is so unusual in Vietnam. They take photos of everything: the alpine flowers; the panoramic views; the Pinzgau cattle outside the chalets. Under the yellow Eichhof beer umbrellas, Thu Thuy and the other Vietnamese women start up a gentle song. The hikers at the other tables listen entranced to the deft harmonies of the centuries-old music of Vietnam. The picture-postcard idyll suddenly takes on foreign features – and is emphasized all the more clearly because of them. In the sixth year of its existence, the Obwald Folk Culture Festival is featuring a true cultural mix for the first time. Normally the individual groups, who live many thousands of kilometres away from each other, play one after the other. First an orchestra from that year’s featured country – in 2011, Vietnam. Then a choir or an ensemble from a featured region of Switzerland, which this year is Toggenburg. But
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The sensitive playing of the Vietnamese lends the rough Ländler music a depth and emotionality it didn’t have before. The key now is not to practise too much. So the group moves on to the pub in Giswil. now the names on the programme sound special: Siidhang with Thu Thuy, Thuy Anh & Le Giang. The Ländler group Siidhang can only rehearse in the evening. Dani Wallimann, the clarinettist, works in construction. The accordion players Michi Wallimann and Hugo Barmettler are farmers. For them, folk music is as much a part of everyday life as the pitchfork and the Subaru outside their farmhouse. At six o’clock, Michi still has to feed the pigs. Amidst the deafening squeals of the happy swine, he loves nothing better than to yodel. And as he does so, melodies come to him; their origins in everyday life can be heard clearly. It is music that has not been artificially structured; more oblique and refined than the traditional Ländler folk tunes. The Festival Director, Martin Hess, describes it as “Future Ländler music”. The ingredients for Pho soup The 63-year-old from Engelberg has been to Hanoi several times over the last few months. He brought the Vietnamese musicians sheet music and DVDs of Siidhang. Swiss folk music is vastly different from the Vietnamese form. It’s jaunty and made for dancing, while Vietnamese folk music is gentle and always has a narrative undertone. The musicians from Hanoi have never heard Swiss folk music before, but this isn’t a problem for them. They play polkas and waltzes from the sheet music and set them in their own arrangements. Martin Hess was already excited having visited the rehearsals in Hanoi. Now he has just got back from the butcher’s in Giswil. The founder of the Obwald Folk Culture Festival has been
discussing the menu plans for the 11strong Vietnamese troop. He has had to order pigs’ tongues and hearts. Nobody eats these in Switzerland any more, and they are available at a knock-down price. They are, however, essential for a proper Vietnamese Pho soup. The Vietnamese women who are spending a week in Giswil, at what the Swiss press has termed the “strangest festival in Switzerland”, cook for themselves in the hotel kitchen. Thu Thuy and her fellow musicians come from a country whose millennia-old culture has been sharpened under French and other imperial influences. Although Vietnam is ruled by a Communist government, it is oriented towards a market-based economy in the same way as China. The gross national product is growing at a rate of knots. In the capital, Hanoi, people travel on sleek scooters, mobile phones to
their ears. Traditional folk music is in a difficult position. Thu Thuy and her friends hardly get to perform, since people prefer modern Vietnamese pop music and hit songs. Folk music in Vietnam is a strongly academic affair. Thu Thuy teaches at the academy of music in Hanoi and is often sent abroad by the Vietnamese government to represent traditional music. She has eight years of study behind her, has mastered several instruments, and is a real virtuoso. In Switzerland it’s the other way around: folk music is not well-supported academically, and is therefore a living art form which can be seen in Switzerland’s many yodelling festivals, and the local music events known as Stubeten. In Giswil the Vietnamese musicians will play alongside men who can barely read music. Professionals meet amateurs; the cultivated Vietnamese artists and the Swiss “diamonds in the rough”. Tradition and cultural exchange The first rehearsal on this Monday evening is also the last. The Siidhang members arrive a little late at the clearing where the festival is taking place. The greetings between the rugged Swiss and the Vietnamese ladiesare brief. Both parties speak only rudimentary English. Michi Wallimann says: “I thought everything of theirs would
Swiss folk tunes are jaunty and rhythmic, Vietnamese melodies gentle and lyrical.
Re po Rtag e 34
Before the concert: a visit to the picturesque Alp Usser Äbnet.
be made of wood, but this instrument has electronics!” The Dan Bau is the most typical Vietnamese instrument. It is a singlestringed zither, with a sound-box made of bamboo or wood. For the concert it has to be amplified. The Vietnamese kneel on the floor. The Swiss sit on chairs, legs apart. Thuy Anh simply starts to play. Her two-stringed violin has a human tone, like a woman’s voice. It’s breathtakingly beautiful, but together with the accordion, Dan Bau and double-bass, the piece by Dani Wallimann which they are playing from sheet music sounds too unwieldy, with too much going on at once. The women begin to giggle. Dani Wallimann holds onto his clarinet and says: “We’ll hold back a bit to start with.” In Switzerland there is an open quarrel over folk culture. One side claims there is no longer a real tradition: it’s just folklore. A nostalgic longing for an ideal world; sentimental kitsch, without any meaning or relation to modern reality. Martin Hess thinks otherwise. In the foreword to the festival programme he writes: “For Obwald Folk Culture Festival, tradition is a living thing we want to pass on to future generations. Here, in the exchange with other parts of the country and with foreign cultures, our tradition will be deepened, sharpened and further developed.”
In Giswil it soon becomes clear who is wearing the trousers. It’s the Vietnamese women. Gently but firmly, Thu Thuy begins to arrange the piece. The Vietnamese dulcimer will begin, then the violin and accordion, the double-bass and Dan Bau should take turns joining in. The plan works. Suddenly the energy level rises. The sedate Ländler tune starts to swing, and the diverse instruments wind themselves around the curves of the natural melody. Hardly a word is spoken. The instruments flirt with each other. An hour later, the mountain in the background is tinged with pink. The clearing is plunged into darkness. On the stage, the motley group is playing as naturally and smoothly as if it had never done anything else. The sensitive playing of the Vietnamese lends the rough Ländler music a depth and emotionality that it didn’t have before. The key now is not to practise too much, otherwise the magical spontaneity will be lost. So the group moves on to the pub in Giswil. Sitting around the locals’ table, it quickly gets late. The men make their farewells to the Vietnamese ladies with a yodel into the night. Once the festival begins, nothing can go wrong. The Vietnamese ambassador is there, and has brought his Indonesian and Thai colleagues with him. The canton of R e po Rtag e 35
Obwalden, which subsidises the festival, has sent a delegate. Josef Gnos, the president of the canton’s culture commission, outs himself as a fan of the festival. In Autumn 2011 it will be decided whether the three-year grant for the Folk Culture Festival, which is also supported by Pro Helvetia, will be extended. He is confident that it will go through. Siidhang with Thu Thuy, Thuy Anh & Le Giang is a triumph. The tables are mainly occupied by local people, but there are also some visitors from the city. They stamp their feet on the floorboards, calling for an encore. The group doesn’t have one, as they have only practised three pieces. And so Thu Thuy begins the dreamy intro to Dani Wallimann’s piece “Eliah” for the second time. She is wearing a long yellow dress, her headdress atop her head like a halo. There is silence all the way to the back row. www.obwald.ch Christian Hubschmid is a culture journalist for the Swiss-German Sunday paper SonntagsZeitung. He writes about all forms of popular music, from Lady Gaga to yodelling, as well as about theatre, cabaret and show business. He lives in Zurich with his wife and two children. Niklaus Spoerri is a Zurich-based photographer. He trained in photography at Zurich’s School of Applied Arts (today the ZHdK). Since then he has worked professionally in documentary photography, portraits and reportage. In September, his book of portraits of professional doubles, who is who? was published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg. www.niklausspoerri.ch Translated from the German by Ruth Martin
Pro H elv e t i a N e w sf l a sH
award-w awardward-winning swiss s Computer Games
Krautscape: an action-packed multiplayer racing game for Mac and PC
Midway through its run, Pro Helvetia’s GameCulture programme is doing very well. in september the international jury awarded up to 50,000 francs to each of seven swiss computer-game developers to enable them to produce prototypes. the games have potential, says Guillaume de fondaumière, president of the jury and co-Ceo of french game studio Quantic Dream: “sooner or later they will all make it onto the market.” Games for the computer, for the iPhone, iPod and iPad have been created that experiment with the medium, whether by means of 3D-like, handpainted landscapes or a multiplayer racing game in which the course develops during play. it’s good news that the first “call for projects” enjoyed such a promising response. the arts Council is already planning the next call for 2012, when it will make a decision regarding its future policy for supporting work in the field.
the GameCulture programme, which has been in effect since 2010, is to run for two years with the aim of supporting sophisticated design. the winners: • Daina: The Herbarium by Dario Hardmeier and raffaele de lauretis • Feist by florian faller and adrian stutz • Jump N Roll by Games2Be (Gerhard oester) • Krautscape by Mario von rickenbach, Michael Burgdorfer • Macrocosm by Klaas Kaat • MokMok by t twobeats (samim winiger, Marc lauper) • POP by Bitforge (reto senn, andreas Hüppi) www.gameculture.ch
New Board of t trustees for Pro Helvetia in 2012 Pro Helvetia will be restructured to separate strategy and operations. this far-ranging change has its roots in the new Culture Promotion act passed by parliament in 2009. in its smaller form, the Board of t trustees is exclusively responsible for the Council’s strategic direction. it comprises nine figures from the cultural scene, with all linguistic regions represented. Board President Mario annoni will remain in office for another two years. the federal Council has appointed the following members of the Board for a term of four years: Marco franciolli, director of the Museo Cantonale d’arte lugano; Guillaume Juppin de fondaumière, co-Ceo of Quantic Dream; Claudia Knapp, curator, freelance jour journalist; Johannes schmid-Kunz, cultural manager, managing director of the schweizerische trachtenvereinigung; t Nicole seiler, dancer and choreographer; Peter siegenthaler, financial expert, president of the verband v schweizerchweizer chweizerischer Kantonalbanken; anne-Catherine sutermeister (incumbent), Haute école de théâtre la Manufacture; felix Uhlmann (incumbent), professor for state and adminsitrative law, University of Zurich. on the operational level, a 13-member expert commission will assist management with the assessment of applications for funding and the Council’s own projects. the interdisciplinary body will make recommendations on all projects with funding over CHf f 50,000. addiditional independent experts are available for consultation. www.prohelvetia.ch
Pro Helv e t ia Ne w sflas H 36
swiss art in Prime location
At the Swiss Institute New York (SINY): Frédéric Schnyder’s Schnapsparade
the swiss institute has found a prime location in soHo in the middle of the Big apple, with excellent walk-in custom. to help it hold its own amid the cultural variety of New York, swiss art has been granted generously proportioned viewing rooms on the ground floor, where the siNY can show a sophisticated New York public what switzerland has to offer in the way of contemporary art: for example the self-taught artist Jean-frédéric schnyder (born 1945).
Poto (bottom): Davide legittimo
Pro Helvetia takes on the Biennials the last bit of adhesive tape has now been removed from the swiss Pavilion in venice. with his expansive installation, thomas Hirschhorn represented switzerland at this year’s venice Biennale. as of 2012 Pro Helvetia will select the swiss representative. the new Culture Promotion act assigns responsibility for representation at the art and architecture Biennales in venice as well as the art Biennial in Cairo to the swiss arts Council; the federal office of Culture (foC) had previously made the decisions. this means a strengthening of one of the traditional core duties of Pro Helvetia – the distribution of swiss culture abroad – by a key mandate. in 2012 the venice show will be devoted to its second focus, architecture: the 13th architecture Biennale will take place from august to December. to do justice to its international renown, the jury of experts has nominated an influential architect and theorist: Miroslav Šik, who runs his own firm in
although this is schnyder’s very first exhibition in the Us, the Basel native who has lived in Zug since 1966 has been wrongly overlooked by the international scene, says siNY Director Gianni Jetzer. the New York show, to run until 19 february, features Landschaft I-XXXV (1991): 35 landscapes offering a unique glimpse of switzerland, at once homey and uncanny. the artist’s most recent video, Schnapsparade, will also be on view: a dozen little schnaps bottles parading by on wooden wagons carved by hand by schnyder. the scene is accompanied by marching music that tips the entire piece into the realm of the absurd. www.swissinstitute.net the siNY’s new address: 18 wooster street, New York, NY 10013
Zurich and teaches at etH Zurich, will represent a position of importance to contemporary swiss architecture in the floating City. with its choice, the jury aims to spur a discussion of contemporary architectural theory. a seven-member jury composed of representatives of both disciplines is responsible for the nomination of artists and architects for the three biennials. Project managers at Pro Helvetia are art historian sandi Paucic and culture manager rachele Giudici legittimo. www.prohelvetia.ch
Installation view of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Crystal of Resistance at the Swiss Pavilion.
Pr o H e lv e t ia Ne w sflasH 37
Equal rights for commerce and culture Continuity is a rare commodity in cultural funding. It’s even more remarkable that a private company, moreover one facing stiff competition, should provide exactly that. For 54 years the orange giant has been investing a percentage of its sales revenue in projects with cultural and social value. And this is no mere marketing ploy. The Migros Culture Percentage, according to the cooperative’s statutes, is a company objective on an equal footing with the retail business. The Percentage currently has a budget of around 115 million Swiss Francs. But only around a third will be used for cultural projects in the narrower sense: Migros takes a wider view of its social engagement, and also supports access to education and leisure activities. This task falls to the ten regional cooperatives within the Percentage, like Migros Aare or Migros Eastern Switzerland. These are autonomous supporters of regional initiatives. Club School facilities, integration projects, and the management of local recreation areas, the so-called “Green Meadow” parks, fall under their remit.
PA R T N E R
Migros Culture Percentage The Migros Culture Percentage supports education, leisure activities, dialogues and contemporary culture: in some cases with substantial grants, in others simply by lending out a set of wheels.
for financial aid come not only from the fields of visual arts, comics, children’s and youth theatre, and film, to name just a few, but also from the organizers and promoters of health projects. As varied as these areas are, for Hedy Graber three aspects are key to dealing with applications: they must be “relevant, current and innovative”. Evaluating applications is just one part of the Percentage’s activities. When necessary, the orange giant also takes a directly creative role in the Swiss cultural landscape. The biennial Steps festival, which offers a nationwide stage for contemporary dance every other spring, has its origins in one such initiative. The same goes for the three-day event m4music, which has very quickly established itself as a forum and laboratory for Swiss pop music. These examples illustrate where the strengths of the Migros Culture Percentage lie: it is more independent than public institutions, and thus braver, defter, and more consistent. Migros entered uncharted territory when it began supporting pop music recordings in the nineties. Now there is hardly a single municipality that doesn’t offer grants for producing CDs. The Migros Culture Percentage has now turned its attention to alleviating bands’ little emergencies: anyone who needs a camera to film a video clip, a copier to print a flyer, or a lavish bus to travel to a concert can get assistance from the four Culture Bureaus Migros helps to finance in Basel, Bern, Geneva and Zurich. And what would he think of this? He’d probably say that many great stories began with a simple van. www.migros-kulturprozent.ch Christoph Lenz writes about culture and media for the Bern daily newspaper Der Bund.
Braver, defter, more consistent The Zurich-based Federation of Migros Cooperatives is responsible for numerous activities at a national level. It manages the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, which aims to fuel a broad, academically-grounded dialogue on social and economic issues. The Directorate of Cultural and Social Affairs also has its home in Migros’ Zurich headquarters. The core of its business goes beyond the support of culture. Applications
PARTNER: Mig Ro s CU LT U R E PE R CE NTAg E 38
Translated from the German by Ruth Martin
Illustration: Raffinerie
By Christoph Lenz – No, there’s no portrait of him in her office. But then, who would want to hang a founding father on the wall, when he is still such a shining figure in the present day? I’ve already switched off the dictaphone when Hedy Graber, who heads the Directorate of Cultural and Social Affairs at the Federation of Migros Cooperatives, confesses that the conversation around her boardroom table returns to him again and again. Usually in connection with the question of what he’d think of one project or another. He is, of course, Gottlieb Duttweiler, founder of Migros; politician; citoyen. And this idea goes back to Dutti too: in 1950 the patron issued a watchword for his company, that “with increasing material power, [it] should constantly foster even greater social and cultural achievements”. In 1957 the Migros Culture Percentage was enshrined in the statutes of the Migros Cooperatives. Since then, the institution has established itself as a mainstay for Swiss cultural production.
CA RTE BL A NCHE
Can Creative Writing Be Taught? By Michel Layaz – What kind of writing? Literature, of course. After all, school is supposed to teach us to write in our native language. But writing literature from our language (as Karl Kraus said: I do not write in German but from German) makes the business a bit more complicated. Why? It makes it necessary to define what can be considered literature today. And in an era when everyone thinks that what he thinks is justifiable simply because he thinks it, such a debate would be quite long, contradictory, and noisy. Who can learn to write literature? People who are possessed by writing, people ready to become involved in what they are passionate about. And ready for others to follow them down their path. With this clear, let us try to answer the question. The arguments are familiar; both sides repeat themselves, defend an ideology, indeed a philosophy. On my right, the “French school”, dominated by the idea of the inspired genius, the writer as a medium who, as soon as he is asked a question about his art, always paradoxically finds himself obliged to outline the entire history of literature, from its origins to today. The idea that writing could be taught even just a little bit would reduce the writer’s glory, brilliance and genius. On my left, the “American school”, uninhibited, open to the most varied experiments, but not afraid to talk about effective, efficient and conventional frameworks for structuring a story. A belief in apprenticeship, in progress. Why should writers differ from plastic surgeons, musicians or actors, who have long been perfecting their arts in schools? If there are days when I feel very American about this, there are others when I almost feel French. But I am sure that there are young and wonderful people with magnificent potential who have chosen to make writing the center of their lives. When a lit-
erary institute reaches out to them, that is surely a great opportunity. In such a place (beyond just the writing workshops with their stimulating constraints), they will be able to make the work closest to their heart a priority, while also learning from the remarks and questions of the school’s other students, and above all from the comments of writers, that is, people whose legitimacy derives from their own practice of writing. The latter will remind them, for example, how important it is to be uncompromising with themselves about the quality of a text they have written. They will have to put their egos aside and develop a healthy reflexivity. Confronted with sustained, constructive criticism that highlights pitfalls and dysfunctions while also emphasizing what is particularly successful, the students develop better eyes for the malleability, instability and perfectibility of their texts. Clearly, this is not at all about submitting to authority; rather, the students learn from privileged encounters where everything can be said and where they are accountable only to literature itself. The writer who respectfully follows the work students give him can incite them to discover all kinds of incoherencies that prevent the text from taking shape; he can make them aware of the quicksand that CAR T E bLANCh E 39
must be quickly avoided or they will sink, and he can also remind them to never forget that, as Erri de Luca put it, “writing is an island, not the infinite ocean.” All that is worth a great deal, but even so, the teacher’s primary role will always be to serve as a stimulus. Everything that invites you to be yourself is a stimulus. Michel Layaz is a writer whose books are published by Zoé and Points-Seuil. He teaches at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel. Deux sœurs, his most recent work, came out in February 2011. Translated from the French by Andrew Shields Illustration: Rahel Nicole Eisenring
ScH Perafo Ufe r mnST ance er 40
GA LLEry
Sandrine Pelletier Catwalk, 2005 In-site installation comprising 60 cat figures (nylon, cloth, glass, acrylic, plasticine, carpet material), various sizes Sandrine Pelletier works with a variety of media, including sculpture, textiles, drawings, installations, performance and music. In addition, she uses techniques borrowed from folk art and diverse handicrafts. Optical illusions are fundamental elements of her work, and her installations incarnate themes such as metamorphosis, ritual and legend. Catwalk is one of Pelletier’s first largescale installations and was commissioned by Tsumori Chisato. The artist combined cloth from the Japanese designer’s collection with other materials to create a swarm of cats hovering surrealistically over the room. Sandrine Pelletier (b. 1976) lives and works in Geneva. She is a graduate of the University of Art and Design Lausanne (ECAL) and has been teaching at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) since 2010.
Each issue, Gallery presents a work by a Swiss artist.
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From the survey:
The lucky winner of the photo print by Tom Huber is Passages reader Peter T Niklaus of Olten. W We congratulate him on the prize!
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Browsing, Blogging, Tweeting, Tagging Cultural Journalism in Flux World Traveller with Sketchpad: Cosey in India | Swiss Game Design in San Francisco | CoNCa: Fresh Breeze on the Catalan Cultural Scene THE CULTURA L MA GA ZINE OF PRO HE LVE TIA , NO. 56, ISSUE 2/ 2011
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NExT ISSUE
Egypt in Transition How did the Egyptian revolution affect the country’s arts and culture sector? What influence do artists have on Egyptian politics? Can art help to bring about social change? In the next issue of Passages we pay a visit to Egypt. We ask Egyptian artists how they see their role in the current process of social transformation, and find out what changes the revolution has brought to the art world. We report on the country’s cultural politics and funding policies, and take a look at the work of international funding institutions in Egypt. The next issue of Passages will appear in May 2012. Passages Recent Issues:
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Browsing, Blogging, Tweeting, Tagging No. 56
Browsing, Blogging, Tweeting, Tagging Cultural Journalism in Flux World Traveller with Sketchpad: Cosey in India | Swiss Game Design in San Francisco | CoNCa: Fresh Breeze on the Catalan Cultural Scene T HE CU LT U R AL MAGAZIN E OF PR O HE LVE T IA, N O. 5 6 , ISSU E 2 /2 0 1 1
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Creativity and Culture Shock No. 55
Creativity and Culture Shock Cultural Exchange around the Globe By the Suez: Artist in Quest of Evidence | Design: Objects That Testify to Human Creativity | Experiment: Musicologists Meet Sonic Tinkerers T HE CU LT U R AL MAGAZIN E OF PR O HE LVE T IA, N O. 5 5 , ISSU E 1 /2 0 1 1
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Computer Games: The Art of the Future No. 54
Computer Games: The Art of the Future Gäuerle and Chlefele: Swiss Folk Culture in Argentina p. 6 Exoticism with a Twist: Chopin as Modern Opera p. 36 On the Heels of a Poet: Writer-in-Residence in Buenos Aires p. 41 T H E C ULT UR AL MAG AZ I N E OF P R O H ELVET I A, N O. 54, I SSUE 3/ 2010
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impres s u m / passag e s o nline / ne x t issu e 43
It is striking that many performance artists currently active in the theatre sector tend to behave like (apparently) objective researchers or teachers rather than radical artistic subjects. To Inform or to Provoke? Performance and Politics Eva Behrendt, p. 12
Contemporary performance art is obliged to find an aesthetic strategy that can explore the increasingly subtle social boundaries between play and seriousness, between seeming and being, and between the imaginary and the real, so as to be able to make itself the Other that un-settles What Is a Performance Anyway? and dis-solves those boundaries. p. 6 Gabriele Klein,
The audience is a tyrannous monster! It has demands! And the unfolding of the evening is always, on some level, about how those demands are negotiated, managed, “Can you trust the people sitting next to you?� Tim Etchells, interviewed by Dagmar Walser, p. 20 met or refused. www.prohelvetia.ch/passages/en
Pro Helvetia supports and promotes Swiss culture in Switzerland and throughout the world.