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constanza macras

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INDEX CONSTANZA MACRAS Biography

PIECES FOR TOURING

SHOWS Big in Bombay Back to the Present Scratch Neukölln MIR – a Love Story PORNOsotros

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CONTACT

3 kevin slavin

C O N S TANZA MACRAS Constanza Macras was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, w h e re she studied dance and fashion design, developing her own work and dancing with various groups. She continued her dance education in New York at Merc e Cunningham Studio and Movement Research. She then moved to Amsterdam where she presented her own work at Dans Werkplaats (Enter-tainment Inc., 1995) and made performances for different clubs. Macras moved to Berlin in 1995, dancing for various companies, and in 1997, she founded her own company ‘Tamagotchi Y2K’ (originally ‘Lonely Tamagotchi’). Between 1998 and 2000, Tamagotchi Y2K presented four pieces: ‘Wild Switzerland’ (1998), ‘Face One’ (1999), ‘In Between’ (2000) and ‘Dolce Vita 2000,’ all of which have been seen in various venues in Berlin and across Europe. From 2001 to 2002, Macras (in collaboration with Theater am Halleschen Ufer, Sophiensæle, and the ‘Tanz im August’ festival) developed and presented the ‘MIR - A Love Story’ trilogy (‘Prologue’, ‘The Conquer’, and ‘Endurance’) which has since played in London at The Place Theater. Her work ‘PORNOsotros’ (2002) was presented at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, a coproduction of Tamagotchi Y2K, Grand Theatre Groningen, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz and ‘TanzNacht Berlin 2002.’

KILL TIME OR IT´S DEAD TIME

In 2003, Macras founded ‘Dorky Park’ which has thus far realized two substantial projects in Berlin. In the summer of 2003, Dorky Park´s ‘Back to the Present’ was integrated into a derelict early 20th century department store in the middle of Berlin. Almost four hours long, Back to the Present was presented to audiences throughout the house, including two bars and a tea salon. Macras was subsequently invited by the Saarländisches Staatstheater in 2003 as a guest choreographer. Working together with the company, she presented ‘Happiness’ in Saarbrucken in November 2003. Macras and Dorky Park´s then created ‘Scratch Neukölln’, the first production of the newly founded HAU 123 theater. Scratch Neukölln integrates her company with ten pre-teen kids, primarily from recently immigrated families living in Neukölln. The work premiered at HAU 1 in December of 2003. Macras has had her premiere with the stage version of Back to the Present at the Schaubühne Am Lehniner Platz in Berlin on February 27th, 2004. She continues to work with Berlin´s major venues, including the Volksbühne (RRS), Sophiensæle, the HAU theaters, and the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. 5

PIECES FOR TOURING BIG IN BOMBAY 2005. spielzeit Europa, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz Berlin, Sophiensæle Berlin. 12 Performers, 7 Staff. Minimum Stage 15 x 15 m BACK TO THE PRESENT (Stage Version) 2004. Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz Berlin, Sophiensæle Berlin. 12 Performers, 6 Staff. Minimum Stage 15 x 15m BACK TO THE PRESENT (Site Specific Version) 2003. Sophiensæle Berlin. 12 Performers, 6 Staff MIR A LOVE STORY 2002. Endurance. Sophiensæle Berlin, Tanz im August Berlin 2003. 10 Performers, 5 Staff. Minimum Stage 11 x 11 m SCRATCH NEUKÖLLN 2003. Hebbel am Ufer. 7 Performers, 7 Staff and 6 local kids. Minimum Stage 11 x 12 m Note: the cast of Scratch Neukölln includes 6 kids. It is also possible to work with local kids COCINA EROTICA 2002. Berlin. 2 Performers, 1 Staff. Minimum Stage: the piece can be performed in a kitchen, a cantina or a TV-studio equipped as a kitchen

1. A doctorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s waiting room: each one of the people waiting seems to be there for different doctors. 2. A waiting-hall at a train station: each person has another destination. Each person has another direction. 3. A waiting room in a foreignerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s authority: each one has problems to settle in the country (different laws of immigration and restrictions all over the world: not only countries of the First World have restrictive laws of immigration). 8

BIG IN BOMBAY IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL BE FAMOUS FOR 15 MINUTES In the USA, singers of Latin-American origin like Jennifer Lopez or Shakira became big stars. Their cultural identity is not insignificant to their success in the United States. The recognition of cultural identity and the origin of immigrants in the USA play a central role for the development of the nation. Foreign cultures are integrated and contributed to the creation of the American identity. How do the ways to fame differ in different nations? What happens if a blond American girl goes to a casting in Bollywood? Which national recognized ideas exist of pop stars and in what way do they d i ffer? Does the artist adapt himself to the other cultures or is there a similar development like in the USA? Does the influence of the world power USA change the cultural independence of “old” countries in Europe or that in India? The cultural anthropologist Stuart Hall describes the effects of the globalization, (the diminution of distances and the acceleration of global processes) as “space-time-compression”. The connection between time and space, with in each system of representation has an effect on the change of position and representation of identities. SUMMARY: A waiting room, which at first sight looks like a waiting room for an audition. Twelve people are waiting to be engaged. It is not clear what they are supposed to be engaged with; for a TVadvertising-spot, for a musical, a pop video, or an artistic piece of film or theatre? Each one of them seems to be waiting for something else. They all have different expectations, but their aim “to be chosen” is connecting them all. They want to be catapulted out of their sad reality as fast as possible. They are waiting impatiently for the possibility to stand out against the crowd. They want to escape from the reality of their everyday-life, which is characterized by their arduous efforts to make their dreams come true. But the planning it takes to realize their huge dreams is all consuming.

What does it mean to be famous? Which force leads a human to fight for the recognition of anonymous crowds? Although these twelve people are in one room, they seem to be at different places in the world. They are not introduced in an appropriate context, instead they are imitating what they believe a foreign culture would recognize as a ‘pop star’. They are trying to imitate the pictures, which are sold to them as reliable pictures of pop stars. They are trying to reproduce themselves to be these images. They want to become famous or at least get some work far away from their own cultural identity in a completely produced acquisition of being foreign. Now the room begins to become not only a waiting room for an audition, but simply a waiting room. The realization of their own person and the finding of their own identity is a way to transcend their own cultural backgrounds. The privilege of been a foreigner, to become something special somewhere else gives strength to each one of them. Finally they are able to accept it could be an end for the waiting. In her project ‘Big in Bombay’ Constanza Macras will explore with her international team of dancers, singers, and actors the issues of cultural identity and star culture and the paranoia of the public space. 10

BACK to the PRESENT

With her site-specific performance ‘Back to the Present’, which was performed in June and September 2003 in a former department store in the center of Berlin, Constanza Macras goes for a journey into the past. Memory as looped feedback. Where do you go when you don’t want to deal with the past or the future? The performers of Back to the Present find themselves in a common space; a casting for a reality show like Big Brother, Survivor or Miss Right. These shows are constantly recreated around the world sometimes with different names and they all have in common that they only exist in the present, in the flatness of everyday little struggles. In the end, every mission - ancient Rome, old relationships, the space station MIR - every mission ends in garbage, ruin, and debris. Often, the debris lasts far longer than the original project. There is garbage orbiting the earth from 35 years ago, from a mission that lasted a day. Getting back to the present means living on top of layers of yesterday‘s throwaways, or underneath them, or between them. Back to the Present: How do you recycle the stuff that never decomposes, like love letters, flags, old props, old ideas? As history becomes increasingly digital, what is the difference between storage and memory? Can you use memory - with all of its faults and imprecision - to make life experiences richer rather than poorer? Back to the Present lives in a sort of limbo between the layers of its own history. Like the MIR itself, like the sweet life itself, it will be leaving behind medals, uniforms and costumes, old props and programs, video recordings, broken and useless pieces of the set. Extend this further, the debris of past self destructive relationships: Torn cinema tickets, old phone numbers, love letters, cards from Valentine's Day; all of these build the ruins that are the context and physical setting for Back to the Present. After the success of the site-specific in Kaufhaus Jandorf, an old department store, Constanza Macras in collaboration with the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz made a stage version of Back to the Present.

Anke Dürr in Kulturspiegel, September 2003 "…one could only divines that one find a lot biographical themes are mixed into this performance (Back to the Present) - in any case this scene is performed in a very convincing way, following Macras’ credo that only a perfect artificiality on stage creates authenticity. The same thing is also true concerning the esthetics, which is taken from silent movies, slapstick, horror movies, MTV, reality-TV and the classics of the modern dance-theater. This vast mixture is formed by the choreographer into an independent oeuvre.""… the enthusiasm of the spectator is transformed directly onto the stage. One can feel the charm of improvisation as well as the determination to achieve perfection. Six months of intensive rehearsals, condensed on four hours of performance. Hard work and energy alone are not sufficient to turn it into the secret tip of this season. Using this theme Macras hit the nerve: her public, mostly in the early thirties is dressed in a young Berlin off-design chic - […] people who claim to keep the right of a collective memory for themselves, even if for them - lucky as they are it is just a pop song, and not a battle in Russia. Or in a more self ironic way, as written by the choreographer in her short biography: 'The most traumatic event in my suburban youth was the loss of our family’s swimming pool." “Hall of Garbage” in Theater Heute, Yearbook 2003 “And sometimes one wishes that the free theatre scene, the one in the city or even the capital, will get a slap in it’s face. A piece that one needs to see. An evening that even a young public must need to wait in line for, and not only for the premiere. A performance people will talk about and discuss at parties, and not only the theatre-crowd. A performance that grew from a well-kept secret to a must-haveseen event on the top of the list. An occasion whose amplitude one understands and that becomes a myth only, when it has been played and cannot be seen anymore.[…] This chaotic, trashy and romantic playground reflects exactly the scene of Berlin-bohemia - It is a space where the difference dissolves, between show-off and presentation or ego and everyday-experts. Above all sits Constanza Macras using trash-culture and old hits to dominate the youth-culture and the scene."

SCRATCH NEUKÖLLN

Erroll Morris interviews a man who went through high school in its most difficult form, as a suburban genius with pimples and a sunken chest. His IQ tests in the 1 percentile, but when high school ends, he wants only one thing, and that is to do it again. He breaks into school, steals his own records, changes his name and even his grades, changing them from A to B-. He does this so that he can go back to high school, and „this time do it right, to be the cool guy, not the smart guy.“ He enters a new high school and repeats his senior ye a r, graduates again, and then goes back again to a new school, with a different name. He goes to high school until he is 27 years old, shaving three times a day in order to appear young. He experiences this as time travel ,,and the only landscape in it is his own ego.” ‘Scratch Neukölln’, the project by Constanza Macras, absorbs these experiences into an exploration of the longing to fit in, about dreams and small attempts to escape from everyday life. 2003, and globalization is both the disease and the cure. A group of people - some younger, some older converge in Neukölln. They are there to start over, to start from scratch. They are there to escape and erase the past. No one knows who they were, where they came from, what language they belong to. Neukölln is already full of these people. This new group does not know that they all have the same agenda, the same purpose. They will start over where they started once before. With a new language comes new stories, and from stories, history starts over. They bring languages to the table, they bring CDs that have been copied from copies of CDs, they bring dance moves that have traveled from one street to another, beamed by a SAT1 satellite. These copies of copies get copied further, written over as they start again. At no point should it ever be clear what comes from what, or in which direction. The project is called ’Scratch Neukölln’ as in scratch paper, scratch disk, as in starting from scratch. As in a long-standing itch, relieved.

Michaela Schlagenwerth, Berliner Zeitung from 03/12/17: "In the Scratch Neukölln a muscular dancer screams a shrill, gay song, angrily pushing the kids, chasing them off stage before he collapses and the kids conquer his fallen body like a landscape. Homophobia is a widespread within the Arabic scene in Neukölln. Constanza Macras is reversing the story. The gay dancer plays the brutal macho and later after having gotten up, he does ballet moves with his naked torso. The boys then accompany him with their hip-hop moves. This is how the entire piece works: Macras takes the kids and her stories serious." Peter Laudenbach in tip 25/03: "A quick ascent from underground star into the first league of dance-theater – it looks like Macras' 'dirty aesthetics' hit the nerve. […] The mixture of styles, the pirated copies of existing material ranging from high-culture to trash perfectly fit the theme of her new piece [scratch Neukölln]. 'Scratch Neukölln' is about the 'Cultural Highway' (Macras), about people reinventing themselves by piecing together their identities for diverging elements. The same is perceived by the kids of immigrants that grow up in Neukölln, somewhere in the cultural no-mans-land between Arabic parents, German white trash, Turkish-Arabic-German school classes, the American music industry and French-Arabic Rai stars."

MIR - A LOVE STORY

MIR – a love story uses the conditions and experiences aboard the space station MIR as an allegory for love. Like an astronaut, the lover endures miscommunication, dependencies and the vibrant but fragile energy; unstable and imperfect, they experience sleeplessness, disorientation, and loss of gravity. The lover is dependent on an undependable central command - the other. Today one of the few remaining luxuries is devotion to an original cause as in the Soviet’s MIR – even its malfunctions. The Mission begins with discovery, goes on with subsistence and ends in a nostalgic caricature. Resolute survival reinforces what the lover knows witout any further truth. Love as stubborn persistence. Love as the mission to rediscover what the goal of the mission was. The MIR space station is the culmination of the Russian space program’s effort to endure human presence in space. When asked about his daily life, a Russian cosmonaut explained: "I survive. This is my full time job, and I consider myself successful." MIR’s main purpose is survival and heroism is no longer based on conquest but on endurance and persistence. In 'MIR a Love Story #3: Endurance' a cast of 5 dancers, a musician and 4 elderly ladies cohabitate in space.

Gabriela Walde, Berliner Morgenpost, 02/08/23: "The most beautiful thing on the stage is a happy collection of strange everyday utensils stemming from former times: The old GDR (German Democratic Republic) is everywhere: Hammer and sickle are participating in the dance. A Russian matrioschka looking for her owner, blow up hair drying hoods hopping through the air, flying wigs, somewhere videos of the MIR interior perished long ago are being shown. MIR #3: Endurance”, this is the title Constanza Macras gives to the finale of her spaceship-trilogy, which she is now presenting at ‘Dance in August’. Without any problems we manage to endure sitting on yellow pillows. 96 minutes are vanishing into thin air. No wonder, MIR is as fast as a rocket; funny, energetic, and weightless. With it’s deep humor the choreography evokes memories of Sasha Waltz’s ‘Allee der Kosmonauten’. Macras is a 21 real discovery."

P O R N OS O T R O S For the project PORNOsotros Constanza Macras has asked four different artists to create short scenes of about 15 minutes length for herself and the dancer Elizabeth Estarás. The pieces form one performance evening. Consisting of dramatic scenes and dance sequences. The driving force for these p rojects was the collaboration and exchange between artists of different disciplines. 'Cocina Erotica' is one of the four pieces realized within PORNOsotros when it was first presented in the 'ChoreografenWerkstatt' (choreographer’s workshop) at the 'Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz' in 2002. In 'Cocina Erotica' Constanza Macras and Lizi Estaras explain the preparation of aphrodisiacs whilst vigorously mixing egg dishes. The two former porn industry workers set about their task without the heedfulness of real cooking enthusiasts, to the great enjoyment of the spectators. Co-directed by Ronald Kukulies and David Gieselmann, who’s regular show 'Kukulistisches Night Café' is well known in Berlin, 'Cocina Erotica' is the first of a series in which Macras is dealing with the compulsions and neuroses of the present day.

NO WONDER No Wonder is another colaboration between Lisi Estaras and Constanza Macras. Based on the image of the female American super heroines : Wonder Woman and the 6 million dollar Woman. Estaras and Macras bring the image of the super woman down to the misery of every day little struggles. COMING UP 2005 23

kevin slavin

contact dorkypark

Sophienstrasse 18, 10178 Berlin +49 30 280 42420 www.dorkypark.org office@dorkypark.org DIRECTOR CONSTANZA MACRAS Lychenerstrasse 37, 10437 Berlin +49 30 4405 3988 macras@dorkypark.org MANAGEMENT Aurel Thurn +49 160 9209 3071 office@dorkypark.org ASSISTENT assistent@dorkypark.org

PERFORMERS, COLLABORATORS, DORKS Claus Erbskorn, Arik Hayut, Rahel Savoldelli, Knut Berger, Jo Stone, Diane Busuttil, Angela Schubot, Stephane Lalloz, Jill Emerson, Jared Gradinger, Kevin Slavin, Maike Möller, Joris Camelin, Nir de-Volff, Yeri Anarika Vargas Sanchez, Hiltrud Ellert, Margaretha Barck, Christel Friedrich, Ingeborg Ide, Lizi Estarás, Kater, Maradona, Hassan Akkouch, Ahmad, Assem, Fatma, Muhammed El-Moustapha, Jonas Kilian, Mayk Marinkovic, Sandra Mlodzianowski, Lisa Rennebaum, Ivan Stevanovic, Dave Taylor, Paolo Castro, Abel Navarro, Matias Zanotti, Carmen Mehnert, Gilvan Coelho de Oliveira, Patrice Wisniewski, Paul Keller, Anna Rosa Hiort, Jörg Bittner, Veit Griess, Julia Weiss, Tal Shacham, Anton Lukas, Stephan Wöhrmann, Nabih Amaraoul, Margrét Sara Gudjónsdóttir, Lars Müller, Sangita Shresthova, Nadine Stich, Andres Castoldi.

notes

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MEMORY IS FRA GILE GARBAGE LASTS FOREVER

C O N S TA N Z A M A C R A S / D O R K Y PA R K