Dasarts magazine 2013

Magazine 2013/2014

every

nerve

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Index

Every Nerve

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Editorial

‘Am I Engaged?’

p.3 Editorial

By: Barbara Van Lindt

p.4 ‘The Necessity of Live Performance has Grown’ Text: Moos van den Broek

p.6 The Art of Good Intentions Text: Saskia Monshouwer

p.8 ‘I’m a Very Curious Person’ Text: Petra Boers

p.11 Adopted Market Stands With Found Theatre Text: Simon van den Berg

p.14 On the Threshold of Fiction Text: Raymond Frenken

p.18 ‘An Expansion of What Theatre Can Be’ Text: Simon van den Berg

p.21 Participants Pages p.30 ‘Put the Urinal Back Into the Restroom!’

Text: Florian Malzacher

p.32 ‘You Can Never be an Impartial Observer’ Text: Daniël Bertina

p.36 It Won’t End in Tears, Yo Text: Lisa Skwirblies

P.39 Recommended literature By: Ant Hampton & Edit Kaldor

P.39 Colophon

Recently, lectures have been given abroad with variations on the title, ‘What can we learn from the Dutch cutbacks in culture?’ For myself, those lessons have not yet crystallised out, but never before have I asked myself so many questions as a professional, as a spectator and as a citizen as in recent times. In other countries, the cuts were mostly driven by the argument, ‘This is a time of crisis, everyone has to economise’. The special thing about the cutbacks in our country is the ideological reprimand that lay behind them: those who estrange themselves from the community for too long do not deserve any community money.

That particular lashing out has (often undeservedly) put many artists in the Netherlands on the defensive.

Nowadays, a disproportionate call is being made upon artists to account for themselves within society. This is best answered by presenting convincing figures (own income, audience numbers, number of performances…). What also works is mapping social issues, preferably in participatory settings, simulating alternative political and social structures, or making documentary theatre with communities.

Walter Bart (Wunderbaum) was angry during his State of the Theatre address1 last year because he had always been and wanted to be entrepreneurial, but now feels much less like doing that because the Secretary of State says he has to. In this way, he pointed out the loyalty conflict that has been imposed upon him (and many others along with him). How can you still remain faithful to your impulses, interests and values as an artist, when the only way to stay within the system is to strategically take advantage of the demands of the market and of politics? A growing trend of new political theatre had suddenly (also) gained the semblance of a public admission of guilt, wiedergutmachung or coquettish urge to prove the opposite: Look, I am engaged!

You see, I’m talking about things that concern everyone!

And how can you still be critical as a commentator on art when goodwill is especially what the arts seem to need right now? Some critics are sensitive to the possible underlying cynical motives and limited impact of such engaged projects (Simon van den Berg), while others above all appre-

ciate the sincere search for new forms of theatre which involve the audience in the thinking process (Anoek Nuyens).

Author and director Eric de Vroedt, who concluded his ten-part Mighty Society cycle last year, gives a glimpse into his motives: ‘The point is, I am not at all engaged. I engage myself through those performances and perhaps through that moment…. The pure theatrical moment of catharsis is what I find most important, be it engagement, life or art.…

A theatrical insight, which immediately crumbles because you cannot formulate it. That’s magic. Politicians on television can never achieve that.’2 This sort of (self) reflection is clarifying and helps you summon up the artistic courage to determine what is really important for yourself as an artist.

This is precisely the summons that went out from the block Every Nerve and its underlying question, ‘What impact can live performances have?’ Eight theatre makers from the Netherlands, Europe and other continents began this ten-week programme by formulating what they find really important as a person, what they stand for, what they want to achieve and who it is that they want to convince.

Starting from a concise position, a series of introductions to artistic practices concerned with impact, involvement, impulses and interventions began. The mentors and compilers of this programme are Edit Kaldor, a Hungarian theatre maker based in the Netherlands, and the British Ant Hampton, living in Brussels. Each in their own way, they give form in their work to what concerns and moves them. That form-giving ís their art. It is headstrong and skilled, but not in the traditional way. On the basis of their own research and questions, they have given the students the chance to try out different strategies. In practice.

Going out into the streets and yelling. Approaching market vendors. Several thresholds were to be crossed for many, and many experiences have been breakthroughs.

The pun is obvious: nerve-racking indeed.

Artists and policymakers from abroad want to learn from the Netherlands. The arts landscape has become one big laboratory. The master’s course given by DasArts in Amsterdam puts these pressing local problems into an international context.

This magazine offers a view of our experiences during the past ten weeks. Read the articles written by and about these inspiring artists, journalists, mentors and students for your information and pleasure!

Barbara Van Lindt DasArts Managing Director Amsterdam, December 2013

1. The Netherlands Theater Festival traditionally opens with the State of the Theater address, in which an expert gives his or her view of the Dutch theater climate.

2. Simon van den Berg, ‘Interview: Eric de Vroedt, Eigenlijk ben ik helemaal niet geëngageerd’, in: TM, December 2012

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Interview

Text: Moos van den Broek

‘The Necessity of Live Performance has Grown’ Where do you want to make an impact?

Or even – what are you willing to stand up for? These are the central questions in ‘Every Nerve’, this year’s intensive, tenweek programme at DasArts put together by theatre makers Edit Kaldor and Ant Hampton. A programme that explores tools, strategies and artistic practices which go beyond the usual frame of encounters between audiences and performer.

What secrets do they want to impart to the young artists?

DasArts first asked theatre maker Edit Kaldor to be a mentor for this block. She purposely sought a co-mentor she did not already know. It had to be an artist with a good feeling for dramaturgy. ‘Somebody who dares to be radical in their choices,’ according to Kaldor. She asked Ant Hampton to design the block with her. The focus in Every Nerve is on actual practice. Theory is certainly part of it, but mostly as a means of reflection and as a foundation for what comes up in practice. Dramaturgical muscle is what both theatre makers are after. The agenda of Every Nerve is daring to think outside the box and discovering what kind of impact live performance can have on society. The programme stimulates students to transform an interest or concern of theirs into a live experience that can take place in various locations. This is also why they start up conversations with people on the street and become involved in the daily lives of others.

What both Hampton and Kaldor especially focus on in this block at DasArts is the need to make theatre and how to position yourself as an artist. ‘To make art meaningful, we must look for strategies that communicate in a different way than we are used to,’ believes Hampton. Says Kaldor, ‘Young artists must learn how to take risks.’

Snowball Effect Kaldor and Hampton started the block with two assignments: make a performance that changes a person’s life, and make a performance for an audience of at least 500 people.

‘Students are often deluged with theory, but there’s no point in making theatre if

you continually censure yourself. It is much more important to develop an instinct about your own skills,’ says Kaldor. In order to practice these skills, the students worked for example with the activist group Yes Lab, which carries out interventions on the basis of political campaigns, conferences and presentations. The format of the research was set up by the Yes Men, political activists and artists who among other things made world news by pretending to be influential employees of the Dow Chemical firm and awarding compensation to the victims of the chemical disaster in Bhopal. The participants also investigated the methods of Avaaz, an organisation that deals with online petitions and campaigns.

‘To make art meaningful, we must look for strategies that communicate in a different way’ The question now is how the DasArts students can translate these kinds of methods into their artistic practice, how a live gesture can have a snowball effect. In Every Nerve, Kaldor and Hampton confronted the students with big questions about the effectiveness of their work. How do I reach people?

How do I get them to participate?

How direct can I be about my principles, and at what point do I carry them out?

Not only did the students investigate and try out the activist approach; this block also gave attention to artistic practices with social and political impact. For instance, the Argentinian theatre maker Vivi Tellas worked with the students on theatrical

inventions at the market, a perfect site for role-play, props, an audience and scenography. In her urban readymades, Tellas always looks for theatricality outside the theatre. The students also practiced other skills, for instance with theatre maker Sjoerd Wagenaar of the PeerGroup from Drenthe, which specialises in site-specific theatre and community art. Wagenaar introduced a method called ‘social mapping’, in which the students mapped their social surroundings by conducting interviews. Visual artist Matthijs de Bruijne explained his Afvalmuseum, a project he developed in colaboration with the FNV Union and workers who clean stations and offices. These are just a few of the names in the very diverse programme of Every Nerve.

Enlargement of Vulnerability What are the necessities or concerns that personally motivate Edit Kaldor, who has been working in the Netherlands for over ten years, and Ant Hampton in their own work? Kaldor was impressed by Etiquette (2007), Hampton’s first piece without actors and the beginning of a series of performances called Autoteatro. Ant Hampton and his former artistic partner Silvia Mercuriali – the two worked for years together under the name Rotozaza – experimented for a long time with performative situations in which spectators themselves are the actors. In the performance Etiquette, which took place in a café, the spectators act in accordance with the instructions given on a headset. Two people sitting across from each other follow the instructions and build up the story by personally acting it out.

Hampton always sets up his performative space anew; his ‘theatre’ can take place ­everywhere. He organises the performances all over the world, always adjusting them to the location and language. ‘I above all work with an enlargement of human vulnerability, I find that an interesting space,’ says ­Hampton, whose work particularly zooms in on the things that we accept without question.Especially the psychological effect of the voice, the voice within yourself, the

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Interview

Edit Kaldor

voice that follows us everywhere and that we actually never talk about. ‘We are living in a time when it is no longer self-evident that what we see is also actually physically present in the space we ourselves occupy.

Autoteatro anticipates this. It is vulnerable, it is risky, people don’t know exactly what will happen and yet it is detached and entirely thought-out beforehand.’

Audience as Participants Hampton, in turn, was impressed by Kaldor’s first piece, Or Press Escape (2002).

Here, the desktop of a computer was projected onto a large screen, allowing the audience to see how a woman uses her computer to organise her life. In this manner, Kaldor creates the character of an illegal alien and introduces the public to the woman’s thoughts and concerns. ‘There are similarities in our work,’ says Kaldor, ‘particularly in terms of the space given to the audience itself. Usually a performance takes up the space that is shared by performer and audience; we leave that space free.’

Says Hampton, ‘I’m above all interested in the fact that the audience is unprepared and reacts to something for which it is not ready.

The audience makes decisions in real time; that’s the framework within which I operate in Autoteatro.’ Kaldor involves her audience as participants, by selecting a specific cast of ‘ordinary’ people with whom the audience can easily identify. For instance, during C’est du Chinois (2010) the audience is not just simply given a glimpse into the lives of Chinese immigrants; Kaldor puts it in the form of a language course in Mandarin. Her performances are conceptual and have a high degree of social engagement. She is especially interested in immigrants because of her own background. ‘I want the audience to really engage with the people my performances are about. I am looking for empathy.’

Moos van den Broek is a journalist. She is member of the editorial board of the Dutch Theatre Magazine and active as an independent publisher and critic. In addition, she is a dramaturg, curator and producer.

Ant Hampton

Resonate Kaldor is very aware that the concentrated attention that exists in theatre is becoming rare nowadays. Adds Hampton, ‘That kind of concentration is precisely what I’m always seeking too, even though I don’t literally work in a theatre space.’ Theatre is one of the few places where we still can share something live with a group of people, Kaldor and Hampton find. In that sense, the function and necessity of live performance has grown; this is precisely why Hampton and Kaldor emphasize the live experience in their work and do not use the fourth wall or wish to be dramatic. Their programme specifically focuses on the intensity of the live experience and the various forms which can come out of that. ‘We don’t want to force anyone to become a politically or socially engaged artist, but the fact is that as an artist you are in dialogue with the world and your work should resonate, so your personal motivation should resonate too. What kind of gesture do I want to make, what sort of movement do I want to set into motion?

That’s what concerns us in Every Nerve.’

Hampton and Kaldor at the presentations of the workshop Urban Readymade

‘The concentrated attention that exists in theatre is becoming rare nowadays’

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Reflection

Text: Saskia Monshouwer

The Art of Good Intentions

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Reflection

Matthijs de Bruijne

Saskia Monshouwer is a curator and publicist. As a curator, she supervises and initiates projects in public space. She is interested in the reciprocal influence between people and their surroundings.

Vivi Tellas and Edit Kaldor (fltr)

Sjoerd Wagenaar

The public event Involvements

sustainability. If, like Gordon Matta-Clark, you can begin a restaurant while making installations, the road to a healthy and alternative way of eating opens up. Engaged art can also relate to other social themes. Think of the struggle for equality, and reaching out to people in different social strata and cultures. The possibilities of engaged art are huge, which is why artists as well as governments are following it with great interest right now.

How can a live performance have a deep impact on the lives of individuals, or even long-term effects within a community? This is the central question of ‘Every Nerve’.

But doesn’t something get lost when you focus too much on social engagement instead of on the other objectives of the makers?

Engaged art is not new, not even when you consider it as a modern phenomenon. The most influential changes took place in the 1960s and 70s, when the world increasingly began to show itself as a mass society. This new prospect, which was determined by the media and advertising, mass production and eager consumers, elicited fierce reactions in society, in theatre and in the world of art. Some, like Andy Warhol, devoted themselves to this superabundance of images and commodities. Others turned against the power of industries and governments. Fundamental artistic decisions were made, and many people abandoned the institutes, museums and theatres, which they called lifeless and oldfashioned. The Situationists, under the leadership of Guy Debord, discovered the street. Marina Abramovic made her first performances. And Joseph Beuys, who had already been working on an impressive oeuvre since the 1950s, did his first pieces of performance art.

The theatrical forms examined during Every Nerve can thus boast a lively, rebellious and varied past. This is theatre at the cutting edge, where it touches real life. Through its engagement, it seems to distance itself from the more traditional forms of theatre. In this way, it does generate attention, however. For example, it can be linked with

Pleasurably Imaginative When you focus so intently on engagement, you also seem to lose one thing and another. Is such theatre truly only out for engagement? Does something get lost when you only speak about good intentions and no longer about the other objectives of the makers?

The first thing that becomes clear when you take a look at the field is that political and social involvement are only a part of the whole. The theatre that Argentinian theatre maker Vivi Tellas creates, for example, is pleasurably imaginative and anarchistic. She has developed a manner of making documentary theatre which she calls ‘biodrama’, a combination of biography and drama. It involves recruiting people from her immediate surroundings and having them act. My Mom and My Aunt is an intimate and moving piece about her aunt and her mother. The three philosophers whom she put on stage in Three Philosophers with Moustaches after becoming acquainted with them during a course were also prepared to present themselves in a theatrical manner, which made them vulnerable as well.

Everything that Tellas shows is more of an ambiguous playing with emancipation and vanity than an expression of good intentions.

This is theatre at the cutting edge, where it touches real life The work of Edit Kaldor is also engaged and subtle.

Just like Tellas, she works with non-actors. Her latest play, Woe (2013), is about young people who were neglected and mistreated as children. She has the performers speak in the third person, or has them refer to scientific studies on the effects of violence. In doing so, however, she remains far removed from the sensation-seeking egoism of the pamphlet. Kaldor devotes herself to innovative ways of telling a story, hoping in that manner to generate engage-

ment. In Or Press Escape, she used a computer. An actress sits and thinks, makes lists and puts things in order, which the audience can follow by watching a large projection of the computer screen on the wall. While the actress is organising and thinking, you gain insight into her life story.

Despite the use of an intermediary, this evokes a great intimacy.

Painful and Complex The plays of Tellas and Kaldor can be understood as experiments with new narrative forms. Philosophical ideas play an important role in their work. With Tellas, for example, it is about power. She always chooses authorities: her mother and her aunt, the philosophers, driving instructors, and in Rabbi Rabino – a piece she made out of curiosity about her Jewish background – she cast two rabbis. She uses reversal in order to make the situation her own, and ‘teases’ the rabbis, who are doubtful about whether their prayer on stage is a real prayer or a performance. It seems to be a reference to Michel Foucault’s ideas on disciplining: with humour and reversal, she creates space to show power as well as to neutralise it. With Kaldor, the emphasis is on imagining oneself in a situation and empathising. Mediated by dramaturgical strategies, her performers can show painful and complex experiences. That her interest in mediation is structural can be seen in C’est du Chinois. Here, she experiments with learning a language. A group of Chinese immigrants teach the audience a basic course in Mandarin.

Being taught is a form of interaction in which presentation and representation not only converge but there is also a question of reciprocity.

The vulnerable and subtle perverting that Tellas brings about on stage and the intelligent, intimate experiments done by Kaldor are quite unlike the sturdy social ideals about art with political dimensions, which often takes place in public space. The artists who operate on this side of the spectrum are less focused on individual processes and more on group and decision-making processes. At least, that is the conclusion you come to when seeing the work of Matthijs de Bruijne and Sjoerd Wagenaar, two other guest teachers in this block.

Democratic Ideal Whereas De Bruijne’s small productions are personal and substantive, his larger productions are more ‘democratic’.

That is both an ideal and an actual practice; after receiving a commission from the FNV Union and working with cleaning people in Utrecht’s central station to make the Afvalmuseum – a yellow cloth to which the cleaners attached found objects – De Bruijne became increasingly enthralled

with commissions. In a recent article in Metropolis M, he concludes: ‘I’ve gradually become convinced that an artist can be autonomous and political at the same time. The only real question is: Who are you working for?’1 He clarified this during the audience talk for Every Nerve by explaining that during his second project for the FNV he still was the director, but with the third project he noticed that when the cleaning people made all the decisions, the results were also good.

Theatrical forms can thus boast a lively, rebellious and varied past Pragmatic, democratic and therefore somewhat split; how often has Sjoerd Wagenaar (PeerGrouP) repeated that the important thing about his projects is not the result but the process? Their spectacular execution just gets in the way.

Yet it is impossible to forget the playful and boyish castle of straw erected within the scope of All Inclusive, or the Drentse Bluesopera that he made in 2011 with a number of young farmers. His methods are similar to those of Tellas and Kaldor, but they are not visible in the performance itself.

The intensive preliminary investigation in order to derive a story from a non-setting, dealing with people from the neighbourhood, even learning meaningful skills, such as learning how to train birds on the island of Terschelling – all methods that Wagenaar employs – take place in relative invisibility. As a result, despite his tremendous personal involvement, there remains a certain doubt: Wouldn’t you achieve precisely the same thing with ordinary amateur theatre? Is this way of working actually daring and experimental?

The doubt refers to a paradox that is intrinsic in all democratic processes. A group seldom justifies its actions and usually does not stand for anything special; the individual does that. This is why the question contains a warning only in theory. In practice, involved theatre makers are what make the difference.

1. Huib Haye van der Werf, ‘Altijd Dienstbaar, Kunst in het hart van de samenleving’, in Metropolis M, 18/03/13.

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Interview

Text: Petra Boers

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Interview

‘I’m a Very Curious Person’ Vivi Tellas

Argentine theatre director Vivi Tellas is fascinated by documentary theatre.

Within the framework of the block she gave a workshop ‘Found Theatre and the Urban Readymade’. Tellas also offered a workshop ‘Family Theatre’ at Frascati.

‘I want to know where people come from, what their families are like.’

Your workshop at DasArts is about found theatre. What does ‘found theatre’ mean to you?

‘Found theatre is based on found footage.

You can find theatricality in reality everywhere. There are a lot of situations that move a little bit into fiction, because they have elements that are theatrical: a certain natural stage, an audience, repetitive texts, maybe a costume, a special character or a constructive moment of light. For the workshop at DasArts, we went to a daily market to train this sense of fiction. This mode of looking is like a channel, something you turn on in your eyes. Theatre is in your eyes.’

Can you give an example of an ‘urban readymade’ in your own work?

‘I did a small piece outside an actors’ union in Buenos Aires. Everybody who worked there was an actor, even the security guy.

So this place was strange. People were hugging, crying, talking really loud or rehearsing a text all the time. This was a site-specific urban readymade. The only thing I did as a director was framing: On Friday, from this time to that time, the audience sat for forty minutes at a specific place beside the door.

As soon as the actors stepped into this frame, you would see them come on stage.’

Is this also what you asked the participants in your DasArts workshop to do?

‘We use the market as a ready-made set, but we also organise, reorganise or do small interventions. A market has a lot of theatrical elements: the stalls are like little settings, there is an audience walking by, the vendors are a bit like actors, using certain repetitive texts. I asked the participants to look at the market as if it were a theatre piece: what gets your attention? Everyone did an interview with a vendor, asking about the history of their stalls, their private lives, where they were from. If they felt a connection, they would ask the sellers if they wanted to make a little theatre piece with them.’

To what extent were the market people asked to start ‘acting’?

‘These were people who are used to being looked at, to talking with strangers. They are trying to seduce you to buy, so they have a little show. The idea was to work with that.

The resulting pieces are just one step from reality: very low-fi or low-key theatre moments. Everybody sings, or has an interesting story, and this instantly comes out as a little performance. For instance, two of the participants worked with a girl in the bread stall. They sang a love song and the girl talked about her experiences with love.’

‘The vendors are a bit like actors, using repetitive texts’

You were the artistic director of Teatro Sarmiento, the experimental wing of the National Theatre in Argentina, where among other things you conceived and curated ‘The Biodrama Cycle’, a revolutionary project on stage biographies. What was the idea behind that series?

‘My teenage years in Argentina were during this terrible dictatorship. A really scary time: people disappeared and you couldn’t talk about things, everything was forbidden.

Basically, everyone was wearing this mask, all acting and lying. There was no respect for people, for who you are. My project in biodrama and in documentary theatre can be seen as a statement about that. I wanted to look at people closely and say, “Your biography and your experiences are really important; they count.” Besides that, I’m a very curious person. I want to know why people are like they are, where they come from, what their families are like.’

When did you decide to start doing what you call ‘documentary theatre’?

‘In 2002 I directed García Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba at the National Theatre. It was the ultimate theatre piece: a great text, working with the best actors and the best set designers on the best and biggest stage

Tellas and participants at the market during presentations of the workshop Found Theatre and the Urban Readymade

Petra Boers is a freelance journalist, editor and curator. Among other things, she is editor-in-chief of the award-winning magazine DUF and of the glossy GLAS.

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Interview

of South America. On top of that, to my surprise, it was very successful. I somehow had reached the pinnacle. And it left me empty. After this, I wanted to start again.

That’s when I started working on documentary theatre. My first real documentary piece was with my mother and my aunt on stage, about myths and rituals from my own family history.’

So you stopped working with professionally-trained actors. Why? ‘One main reason was that I got bored with control. Working with my mother and aunt was very difficult. Because working with non-trained actors is working with innocence, with mistakes. With fragile moments, uncertainty, instability. It was a whole new thing for me to do. And I felt very excited about this new way of working, and curious.

My pieces are very unstable now. Of course they are organized, they are rehearsed; they contain my ideas, there are scenes, there is a staging process. But you don’t have any guarantee that the show will go on It is very risky. I am also really attracted to mistakes. I find things that go wrong more surprising than things that go right.’

After ‘My Mom and My Aunt’ (2003) you staged ‘Three Philosophers with Moustaches’ (2004), in which you worked with three professors of philosophy. In ‘Driving School‘ (2006) your actors were driving instructors.

In ‘Rabbi Rabino’ (2011) you placed two conservative New York rabbis onstage to perform their autobiographies. How do you choose these very different subjects?

‘I always start from my own curiosity in my personal life. For instance, I did not go to a driving school because I wanted to make a piece. It was the other way around: I wanted to learn how to drive, took a course, and became fascinated. There was this fake city where every road and every sign would lead you nowhere. You would sit in a simulator, watch a video, and act as if you were driving. I found fiction everywhere in that place. After I finished the course, I asked the instructors if they wanted to work with me on a theatre piece. With Rabbi Rabino, the curiosity came from my own background: I am Jewish, but didn’t have a Jewish edu­ cation. I have always been curious about rabbis: What are they about, what are they doing?’

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What secrets of documentary theatre do you teach in your workshops?

‘I always tell a workshop group, “If you are going to work with non-actors, do not try to convince them. A person has to have a desire to do it, maybe because being on stage is something they have always wanted to do, or maybe because they expect it will bring some change in their lives.”

What I also stress is that you should become involved. You need to accept mistakes and new forms, not try to control everything.

This is a big difference from working with trained actors where the director says what to do all the time.’

What do you hope is the effect of your documentary theatre on the audience?

‘With documentary theatre, the audience feels insecure and uncomfortable. They know and feel that it’s a fragile situation, since they are watching real people.

They also feel more involved. For me, these are very interesting effects. The instability of the situation makes you think again, and you are more likely to get new ideas.

And that is exactly what I hope to achieve with theatre: that somebody who watches will have a new idea about society, or about his or her life. This is the ultimate you can achieve with theatre.’

Last instructions by Tellas before the presentations of the workshop Family Theatre

‘I found fiction everywhere in that place’

Reportage

Text: Simon van den Berg

Adopted Market Stands With Found Theatre A woman scoops soil into an envelope.

The soil is pitch black, the envelope virginal white. She scoops with her hands; the amount of soil that goes into the envelope seems remarkable. At the end she sticks a sliced roseval potato in the envelope and seals it. With a thick-tipped marker she writes ‘Iran’ on the address side, ‘Holland’ as the sender. When she has finished these intensely focused actions, both you and she are surprised by the cries of the vendors, the throngs of people moving from stand to stand, and the goods spread out everywhere. Although you may have forgotten for a moment, you are standing in the midst of the Dapper Market in Amsterdam.

‘Urban readymades’ is what Vivi Tellas calls this form of theatre. Within the framework of her workshop she sent the participants and their mentors to the Dapper Market with the assignment to look at the market as if it is theatre and to make a short performance with the people you meet there.

From Stand to Stand And so a small group of people shuffles from stand to stand. Every student has ‘adopted’ a stand of their own and has made a short performance with the vendors; eight performances in total, which go by in less than two hours. At the sausage and fries stand of Jan and Ans, Margo van de Linde sings a song; students Ana Wild and Agusta Muñoz compare their love lives with that of Marjan the baker’s girl; the Turkish candy vendor illustrates his life story with the four colours of his confectionery; and at the potato stand, there is the simple action with the envelopes and the soil.

Not all of the students use the stands as a stage. While Bojan Djordjev helps break down the vegetable stand, one of the saleswomen walks through the market in his stead, asking customers what the world would be like without money. Orion Maxted has bound a large white arrow to his head and passes out flyers explaining the water cycle and self-organizing systems. Hampton and Kaldor pose as self-appointed gallery

owners for one of the extraordinary characters who frequent the market: Iema Acrata, a big black man who balances sticks on his nose as a simple circus act.

Fragile Nor are all of the performances totally successful. Leila Anderson spent a day helping out at the stand of the treacle waffle seller, who had promised to tell her a story about the origins of her name. But on the day itself he does not want to read the text out loud (in French); her contact with him turns out to be more fragile than she had thought.

Some of the artists, like Van de Linde, take centre stage in their performances, while others, like Mladen Alexiev, who worked with the Turkish candy vendor, act more as directors in the background.

What would the world be like without money?

In the evening, the students create their own ‘market’ at DasArts. Everyone sits behind a table of their own, covered with products they have taken from their adopted stand. The visitors can walk around and converse with them. The students tell about their experiences, what they chose to do and the problems they encountered. At the back is a separate space where videos of the entire series of performances can be seen.

Especially interesting to see is the remarkable connection between Djordjev and his substitute from the vegetable stand. While making a copious fruit salad with fruit from the stand, he talks about how easily she went along with his thinking and carried out his assignment. On the video, you see her walking through the market and having intense discussions with people.

At least as interesting is Hampton and Kaldor’s intervention with the balancing artist, Iema Acrata. Their decision to view this odd

city character as a performance artist and broaden his sphere of action (at the market he sells postcards of himself; at DasArts, Hampton and Kaldor blew up the photos to A4 size and sell them at a much higher prices) is an uncomfortable appropriation which simultaneously suppresses and enlarges him. And which is in curious contradiction to Acrata’s motto: ‘be independent’.

On a Micro Level In the end, Maxted leaves the visitor with the most enduring questions. Even the assignment itself is full of questions for him.

It begins with the impossible questions he poses in regard to the assignment itself: He is supposed to look at the market as if it is were theatre, but what does theatre actually look like? During the evening he does not have a stand but only a few stools upon which visitors sit, leaning forward with increasingly serious expressions as they listen to his arguments. He sees the market as a system, a convergence of goods from all over the world and a procession of people who all follow their own paths. His explanation of the water cycle and the theory of ‘autopoiesis’ (on self-reproducing and selforganising systems) makes you look at the market in yet another manner.

The idea that theatre can be a great way to gain glimpses of the city and to tell the stories of its inhabitants and users is not new. What is intriguing about this series of performances is the diversity of the artists’ attitudes towards these ‘urban readymades’.

Do you take an artisan approach in service of the person whose story you’re using?

Are you going to make a personal connection? Do you use your power as a member of the cultural elite? Or will you place yourself outside the world as a detached observer?

On a micro level, these performances pose the question most important for the arts at this moment: How do you relate to the world?

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Reportage

Simon van den Berg is the theatre critic for the Amsterdam-based newspaper Het Parool. In addition, he is one of the editors of the performing arts magazine TM-Theatermaker and co-founder of the theatre criticism websites www.moose.nl and www.theaterkrant.nl.

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When looking for dramatic themes, what better place to search than your own family?

The baker’s girl, Agustina Muùoz and Ana Wild (fltr) share their love life

Sara Behrad (l) at the potato stand

Vivi Tellas

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Reflection

Text: Raymond Frenken

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Reflection

Raymond Frenken is an independent art critic and researcher; he also acts as consulting editor to a variety of arts institutions and artists. In addition, he is programme manager of the Domein voor Kunstkritiek.

On the Threshold of Fiction Whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes.

Maurice Blanchot1 If you call something a memoir, it really has to be true everywhere. You change genres the moment you change one fact. If you claim that something happened a week later, and it really didn’t happen a week later, you’ve left memoir and entered the realm of fiction.

Nicholson Baker2 Seeing a car on the driveway of their secluded farmhouse near Holmestrand, Southern Norway, Cecilie Solberg Knudsrød thinks it’s the friends she and her sister are planning to meet on this August morning. She rushes downstairs, opens the door and instead finds a stranger shouting, ‘Haven’t you noticed? Your barn’s on fire! By the time she gets to the barn, filled with equipment and harvested carrots, the flames are bursting from the windows.

Cecilie turns back and runs upstairs to the bathroom where her father is shaving. ‘Dad! Dad! The barn’s on fire!’

Without bothering to put on his clothes, he dashes outside and somehow manages to rescue a tractor from the flames.

By the time a local journalist finally made it to the site, the fire brigade had already given up hope of saving the barn.

All that was left to photograph was a pile of smouldering ruins. Pasted in the family photo album, the newspaper article he wrote seems out of place between the cheerful pictures of holidays, birthdays and other celebrations.3 Next to the article is written: Så kom den triste dagen. ‘Then the sad day came,’ translates Cecilie to the audience gathered in an Amsterdam theatre, almost 20 years after the fire.

The past is treated as the scene of a crime Cecilie Solberg’s telling of this tragedy is one of the presentations that grew out of the Family Theatre workshop led by theatre maker Vivi Tellas and organised by DasArts and Frascati. In Tellas’ opinion, people and objects serve

as archives: they carry a reserve of experience, knowledge, texts, and images.4 During a one-week workshop, she taught a group of seven young international theatre professionals how to investigate their own archives.

When looking for dramatic themes like love, death, appearances, deception, secrets and betrayal, what better place to search than your own family? The nuclear family is the nucleus for fundamental emotions and concepts of the self.

Your parents are the first authorities you learn to obey – and resist. That is why Tellas asked the participants to delve into their family histories and see what stories would lend themselves for staging as performances.

Cecilie Solberg Knudsrød

The stories we tell about our past, serve as personal myths Karlijn Kistemaker and her mother

Memory Work The stories we tell about our past are not only to be taken literally; they also serve as personal myths that shape the ways we think about ourselves and the world that surrounds us today. As the British film scholar Annette Kuhn shows in her book Family Secrets, what is included in the stories we tell over and over again is as important as the family secrets and notions about power play that are excluded. Investigating these stories will not lead us to the truth, but it will result in greater knowledge and maybe a sense of truthfulness.

To activate their memories, Tellas asked the participants to bring family pictures and some cherished objects to the workshop. These were treated as ‘evidence’, as she calls it, which of course is reminiscent of detective work. Instead of staging a complete story with an anecdotal plot line illustrated with props, Tellas likes to work backwards. The stories grow out of the evidence. The past is treated as the

Eilit Marom

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Reflection

17

Reflection

Anne-Charlotte Bisoux and Arthur Kneepkens

scene of a crime; exactly what has happened is unknown, but some traces remain. You need to interpret these clues, decipher signs, make deductions and attempt to reconstruct the ‘past present’.5 This process of memory work may be even more important than the resulting story itself.

Therefore, browsing through family photo albums, discussing pictures of birthday parties or the organisation of the household formed a major part of the workshop.

Special contributions were made by Karlijn Kistemaker’s mother, who had agreed to participate, and Ariadna Rubio Lleo’s parents and sister, who were eager to join as a family.

This mix of people from different generations gathered round a table to share their personal stories definitely added to the idea of an impromptu family. Because the stage was used as living space, in the course of a few days the theatre gradually filled with homey smells of orange peels, cinnamon and wood.

Threshold of Fiction When interviewed about her work, Vivi Tellas once recalled what Thomas Bernhard said about yesterday’s newspapers: they lose their efficacy, their reason for being, and go on to form part of a poetic world, part of an archive.6 It is exactly this subtle shifting from fact to fiction that lies at the heart of Tellas’ poetics. Unlike most other theatre makers who use documentary material, she is not particularly interested in everyday life itself, or in the overtly theatrical. Rather, she is occupied with the threshold between document and fiction. Her work distinguishes itself by its articulation of how the ordinary is extraordinary and how the extraordinary is, in fact, often part of the ordinary.7 Discerning these fleeting instances and their potential is a rather intuitive practice. Tellas had asked the participants to look for moments that had changed their lives, that have left scars and may still be dangerous today. While discussing the material they brought as evidence, she trained the young artists to recognise these possible thresholds between fact and fiction. The defining action is to carefully frame a situation and choose what needs to be shown, not to direct or stage it. When you push too hard, the ordinary and the commonplace will evaporate and you will move directly into the realm of the extraordinary and the spectacular.

‘This theatricality is not cleaned up for presentation but presented “as is”, as incongruous as that might be,’ Carol Martin remarks on the work of Tellas.8 In a time when even everyday personal life is permeated with a penchant for the spectacle, it is admirable that Tellas chooses to present daily situations in a non-spectacular way. It is also challenging on various levels. Artists are accustomed to transforming their material into something new, to shape it the way they want to. In Tellas’ poetics, however, the artist has to adopt a much more reticent approach. One has to operate more as a dramaturge than as a director. At the same time, it requires an audience that is receptive to this subtle approach to theatricality. All of which leads to an art that is vulnerable, sometimes uncomfortable and ideally truthful.

Love and Loss As stated, investigating family history has a lot in common with unravelling an enigma in a detective novel. Except that in a novel, there is always an ending, and usually a

resolution. Memory-work, however, is potentially interminable: at every turn, further questions are raised, and there is always something else to look into.9 The resulting projects were essentially open-ended, with a lot of questions left unanswered – as in real life. Why did Eilit Marom’s parents get divorced twice? Why did Karlijn Kistemaker end up practicing clarinet in an African beach village? Why does Cecilie Solberg’s twin sister claim it was she who opened the door, rushed to the barn and warned her father in the bathroom – not Cecilie? Apparently, it’s possible to share memories that are either true or false.

The ‘close readings’ of family history and everyday life that are the result of this workshop confront you with uncertainty about your own past, raise questions about your own memories and make you wonder about the ways you act differently inside and outside of your family circle. It all builds up to the notion that each individual is a conjunction of different desires, aspirations, assumptions and codes – not a fixed entity but a fluid one.

Bound by the underlying themes of love and loss, these stories prove to be very personal and universal at the same time. They remind us that the way we live together is not limited by assumptions about our ‘own’ culture. We can empathise with an Israeli girl who feels disappointed with her macho dad, a young man coping with his rather traditional family where the conversation has to be kept superficial in order to maintain peace, the life-changing decisions of a Dutch mother enchanted by a love in Senegal, or the predictability of lives that pulsate to the rhythm of the seasons on a family farm in the Norwegian countryside.

Ariadna Rubio Lleo and her family

Apart from the stories, the presentations offered many images that unintentionally proved to be theatrical, disclosing glimpses of the truth: a sheet of paper held by trembling hands, a golden-brown cloud of ground cinnamon in the rays of a theatre spotlight, a mother sinking her teeth into an orange and sucking out its juice like a hungry animal.

Participants in the Family Theatre workshop led by Vivi Tellas: Anne-Charlotte Bisoux, Elina Cerpa, Karlijn Kistemaker, Arthur Kneepkens, Eilit Marom, Ariadna Rubio Lleo, Cecilie Solberg Knudsrød

1. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, translated

by Susan Hanson, in: Yale French Studies, No. 73 Everyday Life (Yale University Press, 1987), p 14 2. Sam Anderson, ‘Interview: Nicholson Baker, The Art of Fiction No. 212’, in: The Paris Review, No. 198, 2011 3. Ernst M. Aas, ‘Store verdier gikk tapt i brann’, in: Tønsbergs Blad, August 9, 1995 4. Alan Pauls, ‘Kidnapping Reality: an interview with Vivi Tellas’, in: Martin, 2010, p 247 5. Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets. Acts of Memory and Imagination (Verso, 2002, new edition), p 4 6. Alan Pauls, ‘Kidnapping Reality: an interview with Vivi Tellas’, in: Martin, 2010, p 252 7. Carol Martin (ed.), Dramaturgy of the Real on the Word Stage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p 11-12 8. ibid, p 12 9. Kuhn, Family Secrets (op. cit), p 6

Elina Cerpa calls her grandmother in Lithuania

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Interview

Text: Simon van den Berg

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Interview

‘An Expansion of What Theatre Can Be’ In architecture, designing imaginary or even unrealizable buildings is an honourable tradition. How would this translate to the performing arts? Ant Hampton and Edit Kaldor invited the New York-based curator and producer Gavin Kroeber to give a workshop on ‘Imaginary Interventions’.

‘Can you write a description of a site-specific show that is so fantastic that you don’t have to do it?’

The day after watching eight DasArts participants give a public showing of their work, Ant Hampton and Gavin Kroeber look back on their work and express their ideas on interventions and alternatives for the ‘show’. ‘The presentation was the result of two days work with Gavin, starting from a one-page prompt he wrote for us’, explains Hampton. ‘We wanted to create a sort of charrette, a term from the design field meaning an intense, responsive working environment that opens things up to a lot of new ideas. Besides small, quick projects on the market or other sites in the city, we wanted the participants to work with slightly fewer restrictions in terms of time and resources.’

The results were eight proposals for speculative performances and interventions.

Imaginary performances of course have a strong utopian dimension. ‘I like this Steve Lambert quote: “Utopia is not a destination but a direction”’, says Kroeber. ‘We try and stimulate the students to use the utopian aspects of this exercise as a critique, not as a model. During the working sessions, it turned out we had to calm the utopian impulse. Participants would think up worlds in which the performance would take place that would render the proposal moot. Yet the starting point should be that the proposed performance reveals something about thís world.’

Something Palpable Kroeber emphasizes that this kind of work has two aspects: ‘First you have to create an imaginary work of art, and secondly you must write and present it in such a way that it resonates with the audience; you have to make it into something palpable.’

‘Use the utopian aspects of this exercise as a critique, not as a model’ Hampton praises Kroeber’s wide expertise in the fields of socially-engaged arts and outright activist practice. ‘When we met to discuss his contribution, our conversation turned to the concept of unrealised art, unrealised performance, or speculative performance as Gavin prefers to call it.

I had already led a workshop called ‘fantasy interventions’, where I would use a specific urban site for imaging and sketching performances. Using an actual site as a handhold, participants could reflect on site-specific work, allowing this very immediate crystallisation of vision: you can easily imagine what might actually happen.

I completely agree with Gavin that this second aspect of speculative performance, the writing of a convincing presentation of the idea to an audience, is very important. It’s about using language to make an idea palpable, and we’re trying to look into some of the tricks used by novelists in our presentation.

The question really is: How can you write a description of a site-specific show that is so effective that you don’t have to do it?’

Killed the Drama Kroeber’s extensive experience in various fields comes from what he calls ‘the odd trajectory of my practice’. Kroeber started out as a stage designer and became more interested in performing arts and later in urbanism. ‘As a designer I was working in an industry that was based on touring a project from theatre to theatre – similar spaces where the show is supposed to have the same meaning within the same context.

Besides, the economy of it wasn’t rewarding for me: load-in and load-out have to happen so fast that all the work had to be done on

paper beforehand. I had a desire for a different pace, and for sites and context to matter.

So I wound up working as a producer in the social performative wing of the performing arts. There I found that in the shadow of conceptualism, artists have become formally very promiscuous. They are doing everything from stage performances to street actions, to organising dinners, to protests.

I was interested in working in extra-institutional spaces and through that I became interested in cities, so much so that I took a master’s degree in urbanism at the Harvard School of Design.

In the last year and a half I came back to the performing arts, in the experimental theatre scene in New York. And there I discovered that this formal promiscuity was pretty much absent. Theatre artists celebrate that they have killed the drama and embraced performance, and yet we all continue to make ‘shows’. The embrace of performance art was supposed to open doors, but it seems to me we didn’t get far enough.

And I wonder why that is.

So my interest in working with the DasArts students comes from the desire to shed the form of the show, and to affirm the right of theatre to inhabit other cultural forms. For me that’s very exciting.’

Hampton has a slightly more ambiguous take on this matter: ‘In our conversation in New York, I found myself more or less defending the show, and I will defend the need for darkness and the captive audience.

I don’t think it’s a solution to work completely outside the show market. However, six weeks into the block I’m less sure. There is a great sense of urgency in working in and with the city. There is a rising literacy for decoding cultural urban spaces, from graffiti to overheard conversations and the use of social media. It has become infinitely more complex than twenty years ago, and as a performing artist it’s fun and energising and enormously empowering; all the more because we have new, great tools for subversion. So I’m wondering: Aren’t we potentially wasting our time making shows in black boxes?’

Simon van den Berg is the theatre critic for the Amsterdam-based newspaper Het Parool. In addition, he is one of the editors of the performing arts magazine TM-Theatermaker and co-founder of the theatre criticism websites www.moose.nl and www.theaterkrant.nl.

Gavin Kroeber during the public presentation of the workshop Imaginary Interventions

Cacophonous Kroeber: ‘To make myself clear: I’m not against shows. And I think there are many artists today who do great work within theatre spaces. It’s just that for me the black box for theatre and the white cube for visual arts are profoundly disorienting perceptual technologies. I find myself looking for sites that are cacophonous, in the way that cities are cacophonous. The city is often seen as this mad, tangled, disorienting space, but actually I understand it more. If I encounter images of the city, it’s somehow more resonant, concrete and tactile for me.

I agree with Ant that there is a rising literacy in understanding cities. And interestingly, it comes at the exact moment our cities are transformed into theme parks. The thinking of urban developers is about turning the city into something legible, fun, safe, sterilized and incredibly unequal. We shouldn’t celebrate that legibility. Being out in the city doesn’t free an artist from an institutional framework. On the contrary: in many ways you feed a dominant wave of culture-making that is deeply problematic. But the transformation of cities is a form of scenography. So artists versed in theatrical techne, a dramaturgical way of doing things, have a very appropriate role in the urban field.

What I like about working with Ant is that it’s made clear to everyone that moving out of the theatre into the streets doesn’t put you in some blank field. Ant and Edit always emphasize the specifics: Who are you working with? Where does it take place? What’s the audience out there? So to me there is an on-going dialectic of shows and non-shows. I’m not rejecting theatre in favour of other forms, but I think of it as an affirmation of theatre, an expansion of what theatre can be.’

‘There is a great sense of urgency in working in and with the city’

In the piece Publicum Fugit Bojan Djordjev explores the possibilities of intervening into the public space by emptying it.

The artist uses the mathematical half of the population of Belgrade as performers in this piece, and plans with them a spectacular choreography of collective flight from the public spaces: streets, traffic nodes, parks. One ordinary working day at noon, half of the population of a city runs away from the other half without any explanation.

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Interview

21

A present-tense description by Leila A ­ nderson of what happens when two competing soccer teams sabotage their own game and hijack the expectations of their fans by repeatedly dropping to the ground in the last minutes of play. They do this as a statement against the epidemic of gender violence in the country: 'The game cannot go on while this goes on'.

An intervention that arises from the heart of dominant masculinity, competitive sport, to provoke change in its millions of male fans.

Participants Pages The following pages comprise reflections on the block’s theme, insights into the experiences of the past ten weeks, documentary material from assignments, transcripts of the scenes that occurred.

Each DasArt student who participated in the block contributed in a personal way, filtering the programme through their own artistic sensitivity.

In this project of Agustina Muñoz displays of fruits and vegetables will be curated by gallery owners, and greengrocers will sell contemporary art. 'Gallery owners will do what they do best: sell. The greengrocers will do what they do best: sell. Art will be in the streets, and fruits and vegetables will be pieces of art.'

p.22 Mladen Alexiev p.23 Leila Anderson p.24 Sara Behrad p.25 Bojan Djordjev p.26 Margo van de Linde Humanize the Screens is a presentation by Mladen Alexiev of a project by a fictional non-governmental organisation. They use the digital screens that exist in the public spaces in order to temporarily exhibit durational video shots of faces of people from marginal social groups.

p.27 Orion Maxted p.28 Agustina Muñoz p.29 Ana Wild

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Participants pages

Mladen Alexiev (BG)

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Participants pages

Leila Anderson (ZA)

Letter to Unknown Person, intervention draft

The reflexivity of the block has come in a surprising way for me. Our process has been intensely active and immersive.

The pace of making has been rapid. It is a rhythm and form that is new. I am both naively unprepared and intentionally off-balance. This out-of-balance state is, conversely, an attempt to find a new state of balance: one more conscious than that in which I have previously worked.

One task after the other has challenged me in radically different ways. Each has demanded an appraisal of what matters: a personal and ethical consideration of what urgently needs to be changed followed by immediate action. These actions (e.g. shouting in public, creating an imaginary intervention, making a performance to be viewed by more than 500 people) have, in each case, raised questions of efficacy, clarity, responsibility and the limitations/ possibilities of the chosen form.

Previous projects have begun to re-circulate in my mind – shifted, as they are, out of their regular thought-orbit. The motivations for choices that I had made in those projects became clearer, and, concurrently, the retrospective holes in their fabric became apparent. Exotic Alien is a performance and photographic series from 2012. The work conflates a female body and a peacock in a fetishized union of desire and destruction.

In order to make the work, I bought a live peacock, had it euthanized by a veterinarian and then prepared to my specifications by a taxidermist. The desire to make the work, an acute and definite need, had been provoked by the bizarre experience of finding a dead peacock on a beach in Cape Town.

In investigating this anomalous event, I discovered that the birds are non-indigenous ‘exotics’ that have controversial status as feral scavengers who roam around several affluent neighbourhoods in the idyllic fringes of the city.

My choice to sacrifice a peacock for the work was, at the time, a means toward an end.

But the experience of researching, planning and executing the action was, in retrospect, the place in which complex ethical questions lie. What responsibility do humans have towards the maintenance of the ‘man-made’ ecosystem? What are the ways in which beauty disguises destructiveness? In what

ways do we justify our use of animals: as food, as pets, as objects? What does it mean to be ‘wild’ or ‘tame’ in such an altered natural world? What does our relationship to other living organisms expose about our relationship to ourselves and other humans?

The images that resulted from the work have aesthetic strength, but they omit the detail and complexity of the experience.

They operate on a symbolic level when the work could have, and should have, included what live part of reality was sacrificed for a live fiction.

Why had I chosen to keep these problematic and fascinating ethical parts out of the final work? I am beginning to answer this question, and its variants through a new path of self-reflexivity. More questions arise relating to my own work process… What is the moment in which an initial impulse, a sudden flash of fascination and repulsion, is transformed through the need to create an aesthetic product? What can I do to keep an idea moving constantly between the insightful stage of intellectus (as the Greeks defined this intuitive process) and the reflexive exercise of ratio (the thorough work of discursive reasoning)?

It is the beginning of a new process: developing ways of working, whether condensed into a day-long spontaneous performance task or spread over months of development, that can be both sharper and more open – consciously exploring these ethical concerns and aesthetic choices.

‘What are the ways in which beauty disguises destructiveness?’

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Participants pages

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Sara Behrad (IR)

Participants pages

Bojan Djordjev (RS) Role Exchange – Bojan and Manuela (post-hoc note and transcript)

‘Every Nerve’ created an open space that not only led me to break out of my own framework and conditioning so that I could examine them, but it also helped me to become more sensitive about staying in touch with my roots, in order to find a way of sharing this in new experiences with others – the great possibility of uncovering hidden qualities.

Funeral before Living Changing somebody’s life, not as a task but as a way of reaching a deeper understanding of life, opened up many questions for me. Life can change because of experience.

It seems this is a way of many. Sometimes fear is simply resistance to change. I was thinking of my fellow participant Margo.

I asked her, ‘What is your greatest fear in life?’ She answered, ‘Death.’ Therefore, to change her life, I concentrated on her death.

I think it’s better to be really aware of transition. If we put death out of our lives we start doing nonsense, because we don’t understand how little time we have on this planet.

When we know we are going to die, everything suddenly gets a different meaning.

We concentrate on the things that we care about, that are going to happen...

It was 7 am. We met in Park Frankendael.

We started walking down the path. Suddenly she said, ‘Here!’ That was the spot where I staged a funeral for Margo.

I shouted in the market.

How we can be open and secure simultaneously?

I imagine myself doing the same thing in Tehran...

Oh, my God!

I danced in front of the police officers in the street and they smiled at me.

Can you imagine that?

Stoned An Iranian woman in Amsterdam who has not been stoned!

Six people in the Oosterpark have this little bandage on their wrist.

I urged you to create awareness about stoning to death, which is still happening in Iran.

There is strong anger about this issue that makes me a voice wanting to be heard.

This intense experience still moves me.

When I was trying to get people involved in this issue, my conversation with Dutch youths who were smoking in the park illuminated the difference between being stoned from dope and being stoned to death.

Unifying Sheep Eid has its roots in pre-history, when early man sacrificed animals and humans to obtain the mercy of God. In daily life in Iran, the issues are what intervene in our lives, and if we make an action for the issues we care about, it is considered political opposition to the state. Would you like to have the freedom to intervene, or have something intervene in your life? In Unifying Sheep, I targeted sheep genocide, which happens in the big festival called Eid Ghorban, in order to bring up the matter of who takes a step.

Here, the narrator, an old sheep, tells human children the story of ‘sheep solidarity’ to let them know how children’s innocence played an important role in this. In the first revolution started by children, they cut off the ropes of the sheep and set them free.

In this imaginary intervention, I tried to pose a question which is being asked in many societies nowadays: Do you want to be a leader or do you want to be a sheep?

Looking for theatre at the market, which was the assignment in Tellas’ workshop ‘Found Theatre and the Urban Readymade’, I found it in the dismantling of the ‘stage’.

I approached a fruit seller named Manuela and asked her if she would exchange places with me. I offered to fold the crates and pack up the fruit stall when the working hours were over, while she took my place and started up conversations with the ‘audience’ about a world without money.

By trading my labour at the stall for her labour in my performance, I was unable to hear her – therefore I have transcribed conversation from the performance captured on a video recording. There was a sense of relief in letting go of control in the meditative repetition of folding crates. The rest was up to Manuela: What do you think the world would look like without money?

Different.

How different?

Nice. That’s what I thought, really nice.

Sorry, what was the question?

The question is, What do you think how the world’s gonna be without money?

So there’s no money at all.

How do you think people are gonna be?

How do you think they’re gonna be towards each other?

Where you gonna work?

Where would you like to live? [incomprehensible] no beds no houses?

No, everything is there, but just no money, so maybe you can barter. [incomprehensible] and you can pay with work.

That’s what I thought, you can trade things.

One’s gonna make trousers, and the other’s gonna have apples.

So you can exchange things. Because people ask me how is the world gonna be without money, and I thought: there’s gonna be a lot more respect for each other. Cause money

changes people. Drugs alcohol, you can’t sell them. If you don’t have that, if you can’t buy, there’s lot more respect, I think. People [incomprehensible] there’s no greed. That’s what I thought.

But people are gonna start trading drugs for apples.

Yes, well, that’s the next question.

What about the birds, they don’t have money, but they seem to be quite greedy and happy.

Greedy?

Yes, these birds are. But I think they’re greedy because they are hungry. And people are greedy because they want more.

That’s a difference, yes.

And I think people are gonna be much nicer, that’s what I think, because you are not gonna earn money to have a bigger home, or you want to have two cars, or you want to go on holidays four times a year, you have enough.

Maybe things are going to have more value, the value of something, you have to figure out what the real value is, without the money.

That’s a good one.

Yes, money is just a way to put value on things. One euro, two euros. [incomprehensible] you can buy the same thing for a different price. So the price now seems to tell you the value something has.

But that’s not really true.

It’s symbolic.

What does it mean?

Yes what does it mean?

The man who asked me this question [incomprehensible] I think I would never live here. I’d live somewhere where the sun is shining. Where people are slow, where you don’t have to rush, you’re not in a hurry, you can do things in your own peace, in your own time. And this is what you haven’t got in Holland.

But I’ve expected more questions from you.

I’m talking. I’m gonna grab him.

I’m gonna grab him.

So do you think it’s possible? [incomprehensible] If you gonna make a movie of me, what am I gonna give you in exchange? A smile, friendliness, happiness. That’s all that matters, I think... It’s overwhelming, this… everyone is looking at me.

I have a question. So do you think that it is possible, the world without money?

It used to be, so many years ago, people used to trade things [incomprehensible] I can’t believe in this. I think the people would be scared. I’m the one who doesn’t want to live with money. But maybe this thing is not gonna work out. And then I’m the stupid one and I’m gonna starve in the end. So if I can get some guarantee, like, it’s gonna be ok, for my kid, there’s enough to eat and everything, then… and enough for him to be happy, then it would… but I think that this one [incomprehensible]

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Participants pages

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Margo van de Linde (NL)

Participants pages

Orion Maxted (GB) Intervention as Knowledge

‘What could I perform for you in order to change your life forever?’

Excuse me, do you mind if I sit here?

No. Do you mind if I ask you a question?

No, go ahead.

What could I perform for you in order to change your life forever?

Who sent you here? Oh man, I’m always the butt of the joke… (takes drag of cigarette) No, it’s not like that. I’m an artist. I’m studying at the theatre school just over there. We’re working on a project. And this is not the performance right now, don’t worry. I’m just doing research. I want to ask you seriously what performance I could make for you that would change your life forever.

Well…hmmm…in that case I’m happy you’re approaching me. It’s nice that someone’s coming to speak to me. That makes me feel good.

I think the thing that could change my life is if someone were really nice to me. Truly. And that I really believed it.

How can you be so sure that that’s enough to be a life-changing experience?

Because most people always want something else when they’re nice to me.

Theo handed me a concrete challenge for my first intervention. One that I felt I want to, and should, pursue. I couldn’t help but think I’d ‘struck gold’. He moved me AND presented just the right level of challenge.

Now, how to make a work for him and be true to his request yet keep my artistic and personal parameters in mind? Would it be possible to be selfless within the scope of making an art work? Oddly, the act of being kind to Theo began the moment I decided to remove myself from him and head back to DasArts – the anecdotes he ended up sharing became too overwhelming, as did the cigarette smoke.

But with some distance, I might be able to plan something that would become a better anecdote for him than the ones now at the forefront of his mind.

I decided I could try to temporarily lift Theo and myself out of reality by turning us into characters recounting our conversation on the bench, in song. On the one hand, it would be a revisiting of a real moment; on the other hand, turning it into a melody and etching it into a CD for him to have, forever, would give it a kind of magical charm that might override some of the burdens in his life. This was of course completely presumptuous of me, but then again I’m not sure you can stage an intervention without some presumption.

As far as the singing was concerned, I had no idea if he had ever even considered doing such a thing. But I was convinced I could get him to this point because of the end product, the CD. It wasn’t going to be an easy task to find him again and make any of this happen, but the search, followed by shared time and effort, was precisely what would contribute to the worth of my kind gesture. I thought. But I never managed to find him again.

From the comfort of one’s computer chair, overwhelmed by information, it can be impossible to know what is happening in the world. Never fear: online petition organisations are here, telling us not only what to care about but what to do about it too, with one easy click. Warning: Sitting Kills. What I want to say is, maybe confidence, values and real change do not come from sitting.

Getting up leads to knowing.

The topic is ‘intervention in public space’, so it might appear strange to begin by thinking about the individual. However, the definition of intervention as ‘engagement with a particular system’1 raises (self-)awareness that the intervener is a system too.

This diagram2 shows the system of an individual organism (the circle), in contact with its niche (the curved arrow). The organism and its niche form an indivisible unity; that which the organism is not connected to through its senses and extended senses does not exist.

We think we know ‘things’ about the world, and that we know what we know, but we’re often mistaken on both counts. To know what is going on, one must ‘join with’ the subject of enquiry – to measure something one must change it, get it to react to you.

Intervention can be a method of research.

To identify a boundary is to identify oneself as being in contact with another system and therefore either becoming or on the verge of becoming a single system. Identifying a boundary is to identify a system in the production of itself - the production, therefore, of a single shared system that is both the intervener and the intervened-in. This is mirrored in Tanja Bruguera’s remark on useful art: ‘I’m tired of making art that points at the

thing – I want to make art that is the thing.’

Intervention in this sense becomes (forced) collaborative self-production. It’s interesting that this joining of systems seems to problematise the distinction between private and public space. In the broadest sense, everything is an intervention at some point.

Intervention is interpenetration. Quickly checking our own realities, we find boundaries pervading every level of the private and ‘social’ and ‘public’. Indeed, our moments of greatest pleasure, anxiety, fear, anger, love, etc. all seem to relate to having our boundaries transgressed or to transgressing someone else’s.

If we think of intervention as a general and pervasive theory of the self-integration of systems, what would a general topology of intervention be? In other words, how might one start to visually describe the various ways that two or more systems can join together? For possible examples, see the diagrams ‘alter flow’, ‘hitch a ride’, ‘intervention c connects flow a to flow b’.

From the trickster’s perspective, an alternative to a topology could be a strategy of identifying boundaries to locate the most affective point of intervention in a given system. Both alternatives might be thought of as studies of the relationship between object and flow.

Knowledge and power to change the world are related (as advertising / propaganda testify). Intervention provides a useful baseline for understanding and acting, since knowledge both requires intervention for its creation and is an intervention into one’s own body. Being an artist is already an intervention into oneself and one’s role in society. This raises the question: What kind of intervention does one need to make into oneself?

To intervene, to seek to change the world, might appear arrogant but in fact it is the opposite: naivety. It is to admit that one does not know until one tries. It is also the means and the openness to try.

1. Definition provided by Gavin Kroeber 2. Diagram of ‘Autopoesis’, coined by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varella.

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Participants pages

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Agustina Muñoz (AR)

Participants pages

Ana Wild (IL) Middle-East Time Machine An Imaginary Intervention

When I was asked to work in public space, I first thought about putting a confessional room, a place where you could tell your secrets and talk to someone, in the middle of one of the noisiest squares in Buenos Aires.

Ant Hampton asked me: ‘Why walls?’ In the midst of the chaos, I was creating an indoor space just like a theatre. Then I thought about a car trip where one can get in a car, be driven around the city and listen to the driver chatting – again an indoor, encapsulated space, with the spectators being aware of their condition as audience to ‘a piece of art’.

I also thought about having an individual spectator follow someone to an apartment packed with people who are in a meeting.

Once there, it is not possible for the spectator to see who is acting and who is not. This meeting can last for hours, different things can happen. They talk about politics, they ask the spectator about his life, someone offers him a beer and he suddenly becomes an actor, telling some facts about himself but also a lot of lies. This is again the fictional context.

I think of my desire to create a private space in the midst of city life, a silent space, an escape, a zooming-in. In what way is this an intervention? My spectators are always volunteering to enter a space. I cannot escape

this. Is this due to inertia or a bad habit?

Now, I think I really believe in that element I was asked to dispose of during these months: the ceremony that separates the mundane from the sacred, the fictional space, the ritual of representation.

I need to tell of that moment in which time and space become porous. Like a cut, like a wound in reality. Like the door in a theatre that closes behind us.

I remember that what surprised Peter Brook the most while in India was that there was no distinction between the market and the temple. Goods were sold in the same place where the gods were worshiped: the smell of food, money and incense, all in the same place.

Find a way to create intimacy in the streets.

Find a way to make your art cohabitate with the avenues. Find a way to create silence with busses passing by. Find a way of achieving concentration in public space.

Find a way of making the outside a fictional place. Find a way of cutting through reality, of merging with it.

What are those walls that I need? What is the frame of art? The pages of a book, the camera in films, the awareness that someone has created something, that someone is behind it, sharing a vision of the world.

The formal time used in Israel, my home country, is called IST - Israel Standard Time.

The time zone is called UTC+2, meaning the offset from the Coordinated Universal Time is 2 hours ahead. In summer, around March, the clocks are changed to daylight saving time. The time used then is IDT - Israel Daylight Time, the time zone is called UTC+3.

In the Palestinian Territories, the standard time is called EET – Eastern European Time.

The offset is UTC+2. In summer, the clocks are changed to align with the EET, offset UTC+3. As you see, even though the times are measured according to different systems, practically, they are the same.

Recently, a minor time warp occurred: While the Palestinian clock changed to its standard winter time, (EET, UTC+3) on September 26, the Israeli clock remained on daylight saving time for another whole month and only changed on October 27. During this month, the borders between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Territories served as timezone borders, regardless of the proximity between them.

Something quite unusual occurred in this month: there is quite a large population of Israelis – IDF soldiers and settlers – within the territory of the West Bank. During this month, this population lived according to Israeli time, while the Palestinian population lived according to Palestinian time. In fact, within the borders of the West Bank, two populations living on the same grounds, in the same zone, were living in two different time zones. During this month, these two populations were separated by TIME BORDERS ONLY. Undeniable and Unavoidable Differences If we ask an Israeli and a Palestinian to tell the history of the Holy land – for example, the events of 1948 – we will hear two very different stories. That difference is unavoidable. In Israel, the Zionist narrative is a prism through which history is told. In Palestine, the narrative is different, and so is history.

Let me rephrase that: looking back on the same time, in the same place, two different histories exist side by side – or rather, one on top of each other. Undeniably, the future also looks quite different from those two different perspectives. Now, the unavoidable question is: If Israelis and Palestinians live without a common past or a common future, why should they share THE PRESENT?

Practical Middle-East Time Machine Next year, a radical change in time legislation is about to be applied in the Holy Land.

Seeing as the actual borders between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Territories leave both sides unsatisfied, and seeing as coexistence between the two nations has proved to be problematic, the two nations will now be separated by a TIME BORDER while sharing the same territory. A Palestinian state will live an hour earlier than the Israeli state; and so, in fact, Israel will constantly exist in the Palestinian future, while Palestine will exist in Israel’s past.

This Middle-East time machine still requires the practice of co-existence: the two nations will in fact not be sharing a present, but they will have to constantly exist in each other’s past or future. Existence in the past or future of a state requires the practice of tactics that allow the future and the past to come into existence in the present. These practises are barely feasible – they require constant practice of heart and mind – but in time they will become a part of the national identity, just as a common future and past are intrinsic to a nation. In a year’s time, Israel will maintain Palestine in the past by feeling nostalgia towards the Palestinian state, while the Palestinians will constantly be expecting Israel to declare itself in the harmless future.

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Debate

Text: Florian Malzacher

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Debate

‘Put the Urinal Back Into the Restroom!’

Florian Malzacher is Artistic Director of Impulse Theater Biennale in Cologne, Düsseldorf and Mülheim/Germany. Till 2012 he was co-programmer of the interdisciplinary arts festival steirischer herbst in in Graz/Austria where he also co-curated the 170-hour marathon-camp Truth is Concrete inviting more than 200 artists, activists and theorists to investigate artistic strategies in politics. Malzacher is member of the advisory board of DasArts and has been a regular contributor to the current block Every Nerve.

Toward a Useful but Disobedient Art

Florian Malzacher

Is This Still Art? Not surprisingly, such claims immediately bring back the same old question that has accompanied all avant-gardes and that defined the aesthetic discourse of the 20th century: Is this still art? But repeating this question is even more redundant, since most answers already have been given.

Socially engaged, participatory and useful art practices are often based on the artistic strategies of the 60s and 70s: installation art, performance art and conceptual art, all of which focussed on creating situations (creating ‘reality’) rather than representing them. They emphasised process and social relations, and they questioned the notions of authorship and individualism (and in doing so critiqued the capitalist system). Site-specific practices not only taught us how to use non-art spaces, but also to understand the theatre stage as a specific site. The idea of participation and intervention radicalised the understanding of audiences – and re-defined the very gradual (and often misconceived) differences between voluntary and involuntary participation.

‘Art is not a mirror to hold up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.’

Bertolt Brecht

Of course, it’s a provocation: after hundreds of years of fighting for the autonomy of art, after decades of learning that the main quality of art is its ambiguity, after years of repeating that art is about asking questions and not about giving answers, suddenly there is a persistent call for art that is useful, for direct engagement, for artistic activism, for interventions into the political realities of our societies and economies.

This call is not new. It has its predecessors: the productivists, for example. In clear opposition to Naum Gabo’s dictum that constructivism (the most en vogue art trend in postrevolutionary Russia) should stay exclusively within the realm of abstraction, artists like Aleksei Gan, Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova demanded that art should play a practical, a useful role in society. Fifty years later, Joseph Beuys opened his Free International University (FIU) and declared, ‘Being a teacher is my greatest work of art.’

From then on, but with renewed intensity since the early nineties, the concept of socially engaged art has continually developed further. However, it is only since the manifold political and economic crises all over the world in the last couple of years that the idea of activist art has become a main topic within the contemporary art world. Whether it be on the squares of Tahrir, Zuccotti, Syntagma, or Taksim, in front of the Kremlin, in Japan after Fukushima, or in the midst of Brasilia’s iconic architecture – artists are always among the first to get involved. But one question re-occurs: How can art play a role in this?

Homeopathic Political Philosophy It looks like we are witnessing another paradigm shift in the relationship between art and politics. A generation of philosophers that derived their theoretical concepts from their own, very concrete political experiences and engagement (for example, the leftist groups in France and Italy of the 1970s) was followed by generations of philosophers (and artists, curators etc.) that continued these thoughts – but too often without connecting them to their own con-

temporary realities. So we became used to calling concepts, cultural theories and art works ‘political’, even if they were only very distantly based on theories that themselves were already abstracted from the concrete political impulses that had sparked them. A very homeopathic, second-hand idea of political philosophy and art has become the main guideline of contemporary cultural discourse.

The classic leftist idea of the 1970s that ‘the private is the political’ was meant to politicise the private. But it seems that it privatised the political instead. The idea of ‘the aesthetical is the political’ was meant to politicise the aesthetical. But it seems that over the years it aestheticised the political. The constant awareness of the complexity of the notions of truth, reality or even politics seem to have manoeuvred us into a dead-end street: either we are too simple or too complex, too populist or too stuck in hermetic eremitism.

Either we include too much or we exclude too many.

We have reached a point where the necessary awareness that everything is contingent and relative often has become an excuse for intellectual relativism.

Activist art has become a main topic within the contemporary art world The growing demand for socially engaged, participatory art, for interventionism and art-activism, for an art that gets involved very directly and hands-on, is a clear reaction to this relativism. As the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, one of the main advocates of this movement, declares in her Introduction to Useful Art, ‘It has been too long since we have made the gesture of the French Revolution the epitome of the democratization of art. We do not have to enter the Louvre or the castles, we have to enter people’s houses, people’s lives. This is where useful art is.’

Participation and intervention radicalised the understanding of audiences

Obviously, the call for ‘usefulness’ is problematic – it seems to agree with the social democratic instrumentalisation of art as a mere tool for social work and as an appeasement strategy. But this fear underestimates the subversive qualities of art. The most powerful examples of socially engaged art are far from fulfilling social-democratic demands for symbolic gestures. Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International established a political party and a union-like organisation for illegal migrants in Queens, New York. Jonas Staal’s New World Summit creates alternative political spheres for organisations banned from democratic discourse (meaning they are considered ‘terrorist’ by Western democracies). The Austrian Wochenklausur finds ever-new ways of shifting money and attention from the art market to social causes. Santiago Sierra or Artur Zmijewski point in extremely uncanny ways at wounds we try so hard to ignore, while Pawel Ałthamer or the late Christoph Schlingensief try to be part of the complex process of healing. These works offer no easy answers; they do not give easy comfort. They are useful not only through their direct engagement but also by subtly or polemically critiquing the capitalist status quo. Their practice is symbolic and actual at the same time. And they shift the emphasis from the ambiguity of the artwork to the ambiguity of our own lives.

In very different ways, they all underscore Tania Bruguera’s call: We need to put Duchamp’s urinal back in the restroom – where it can be of use again.

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Reportage

Text: Daniël Bertina

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Reportage

‘You Can Never be an Impartial Observer’ For the block ‘Every Nerve’, the participants did interventions in public space, seeking confrontations with whore-hoppers, businessmen, anti-riot squads, football hooligans, economics students, shoppers and tourists. The results serve as sketches for new work.

enthusiastic. ‘Because of the riot, we were sucked into a flood of activity, aggression and violence. It was almost palpable. This intervention made it overly clear that you can never just be an impartial observer.

It was awesome to experience that in the flesh.’

A little group of uniformed ‘security guards’ wearing black HEMA rain gear with badges and armed with hand mirrors, stand in the full spotlights of the rumbling arrest wagons of the anti-riot squad. To the left, on the Damstraat, a drunken horde of Celtic and Ajax football scatterbrains is approaching, herded by a battalion of anti-riot police who have just cleared the Dam square. To the right, a group of policemen hold back German shepherds foaming at the mouth, ready for battle. Disoriented tourists flee. Not the ideal moment for doing performance art in public space. Or is it?

90% Could Be Illegal Less violence entered into Bojan Djordev’s intervention. During a previous visit to the harbour of Amsterdam, Djordev had discovered that the Netherlands is the world’s number one cocoa importer. Outside the office buildings on the Zuidas and near the University of Amsterdam’s faculty of economics, he interviewed a number of businessmen and students about the cycle of the cocoa bean, from harvest to chocolate bar.

On the basis of a sketchy description of the production process on an A4 sheet of paper, he asked them: Where is the most profit made? And by whom? The lively discussions that ensued were recorded.

Turmoil of Battle In the end, just before the police and the hooligans came to blows, the DasArts security guards stepped out of the turmoil of battle. Which proved to be a wise decision, for in the resulting scuffle 15 plainclothes policemen were beaten badly enough to be sent to the hospital. This performance by Orion Maxted and Greg McLaren was repeated a few times in a safer part of the city, in addition to other interventions by their fellow students Mladen Alexiev, Leila Anderson, Bojan Djordev, Margo van de Linde, Augustina Muñoz and Ana Wild.

‘This was the start of a performance about the violence of the state,’ says Maxted the next day. ‘In this city, everyone watches everyone, while the police watch over us.

But who watches the watchers? We did that in this intervention. The idea was to follow the police as an anonymous group of security guards and observe them, in the hope that this would lead to interaction and confrontation. We used the hand mirrors to reflect the policemen, so that they could see their own faces on our bodies and the builtup tension could ebb away again.’ Maxted is

The police stopped the performance after receiving complaints from women of easy ‘Only 10% of all cargo in the harbour is checked,’ says Djordev. ‘So 90% of what is in those containers could be illegal. Probably that’s true for all those office buildings on the Zuidas, too. My intervention was a tryout in order to learn more about the subject.

I managed to get some interesting conversations going and to also discuss the controversial aspects of cocoa production – the human suffering and exploitation. I would

have liked to continue talking with everyone a little longer. Now I’ll have to look for the performative qualities of this work. I don’t as yet have any idea about how I’m going to turn this into a performance.’

Aggressive or Amazed For a full 40 minutes, Margo van de Linde sat disguised as a prostitute behind a window in the red light district, across the street from the Casa Rosso sex palace – until the police put a stop to it after receiving complaints from the women of easy virtue next door to her. Van de Linde posed as a lady of the night, but each time she made eye contact with a potential client or bystanders, she reacted in a totally unexpected manner. Says Van de Linde: ‘Sometimes I would be very grotesque or react neutrally, other times I would burst into tears. It brought me very many insights. When the police showed up, a fascinating discussion broke out about the boundary between public and private space. I had rented the room from some young web entrepreneurs and was using it for my personal art project, but thanks to that window, it also gained a public dimension. If you imply that you are running a brothel, you fall under the laws governing prostitution. Even if you are from DasArts.’

Mladen Alexiev and Leila Anderson did their interventions in the midst of the crowds of shoppers on the Kalverstraat (Anderson) and on the Damrak (Alexiev). There they sometimes faced aggressive or amazed reactions from the shopping public. In the grey rain, Alexiev held up a protest sign saying, ‘The Rain Will Not Erase It’. Says Alexiev: ‘First I wanted to go to the Dam, but the police stopped me because of the football commotion. On the Damrak, where it was quieter, the piece worked better. I was trying to momentarily interrupt the monotone streetscape with my intervention, and that was successful. Moreover, as a result of my role as a lonely demonstrator with a cryptic slogan, I was very aware of my own appearance and presence. I am curious to see how this work can grow further.’

Leila Anderson spoutes a tirade at the faceless mannequins

In the business district Bojan Djordev (r) asks questions about cacao import

Mladen Alexiev walks with his protest sign on the streets of Amsterdam

Daniël Bertina is a journalist, critic and dramaturge. He writes for the newspaper Het Parool, the Holland Festival, JHM Magazine and Cultuurpers.

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Reportage

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Bystanders look at Margo van de Linde, disguised as a prostitute behind a window in the red light district

Reportage

Anderson stood before a number of shop windows in the Kalverstraat and spouted an alienating tirade at the faceless mannequins as idealized images of femininity. Her instigation to ‘Liberate yourself, do it now, break through the glass’ was dismissed by a redfaced woman with a broad Jordaan accent: ‘Oh, she’s mental, you can tell by the look on her face.’ Nonetheless, a little group of people (and not only the DasArts-initiated) followed Anderson with increasing amazement. She herself is not so pleased with her intervention: ‘It didn’t get across what I had in mind. I should have worked out the text better; and because of the repetition, questions arose about the character that remained unanswered: Who is she? Why is she doing this? Now it was unclear whether it was a performance or a real, spontaneous outburst. Without a microphone and amplifier it might have been clearer, also for the spectators.’

Liberating Everyday Objects Agustina Muñoz and Ana Wild did their intervention in secret. With their tongues painted blue like the clandestine superhero duo Circulo Azul, the two of them stole various objects from Amsterdam stores and unobtrusively placed them at other locations in the city. At the scene of each crime and finding place, they left a note with their manifesto, detailed directions for the person who might find it, and a blue circle. The duo hid liquorice in the Portuguese Synagogue, placed a kitschy glass pyramid from a hippie shop between jars of pickles in the Albert Heijn supermarket and stuck a tube of saffron paste in a book by Jorge Luis Borges in the municipal library. All with the poetic goal of celebrating anarchy and liberating everyday objects.

The duo did not carry off all of the actions they had planned, but they are elated about their performance. ‘We succeeded in experiencing total anarchy in an invisible but very direct manner,’ says Wild. ‘As a shoplifter you see and feel the city in a completely different way.’ Adds Muñoz, ‘Perhaps we could have made it even more specific, for instance by putting an object in a very exact place in a book, by a specific, meaningful passage in the story. But we see this intervention more as a system test. Now the challenge is to integrate these practices in our lives as well.

That’s true for all of us at DasArts.’

‘Oh, she’s mental, you can tell by the look on her face.’

The group of uniformed ‘security guards’ is armed with hand mirrors

In the spotlights of the rumbling arrest wagons of the anti-riot squad

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Reflection

Text: Lisa Skwirblies

It Won’t End in Tears, Yo

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Reflection

Lisa Skwirblies is a researcher and dramaturge who is currently working on her PhD in Performance Studies. She participated in a workshop with the Yes Men in Amsterdam in 2011.

Bridget Kievits and Orion Maxted

A Plea for a Society of Tricksters

‘Being an artist today feels like an intervention in itself.’

Orion Maxted

In order to get people engaged, one needs to tell a good story. For example, the story of the trickster - a figure that enters the public stage and questions, manipulates and reshapes the social order. A trickster is a shape-shifter and boundary-crosser that dislikes hierarchy, mocks authority and disobeys rules. She fosters enthusiasm, is highly creative and contagiously funny.

The trickster is a figure appearing in many activist practices today. Assuming that art can indeed learn from activism, I claim that the potential lies in these trickster-features.

They bear potential for young performance artists to make work with a social and political impact.

Resistance Seems Futile In an era in which, as is clear by now, all areas of our experience have been monopolised by capitalism, resistance to it seems futile. In an era in which terms like ‘participation’ have been hijacked by neoliberal policies and used to cover up the state’s withdrawal from its last responsibilities, we are in need of tricksters who speak truth to power. Thus DasArts opened its doors for an intensive workshop on ‘tricksterism’, led by professional activists of the Yes Lab and Avaaz.

One of the first things you learn in tricksterism is that a crisis is not just a moment of disaster but the perfect moment for change. Moreover, a crisis is the calling into question of accepted truths, in the best trickster manner. In activist language, this Janus-faced term is called crisitunity.

The word is a clever combination of crisis and opportunity, and it describes the moment in which the trickster sets the stage. I surely had my very own crisitunity during the block at Dasarts, when I was confronted with the heap of burning social issues that were dragged into the sheltered space of the theatre school when the activists entered. Transformation into a trickster figure apparently needs to begin with addressing one’s personal accepted truths: What is the actual urgency in my art practice? What kind of privileges am I really willing to give up in order for something to change?

Crisis is not a moment of disaster but the perfect moment for change The Gap The crisitunities of Avaaz and the Yes Lab evolve around the idea that there is a gap between ‘the world the way it is and the way most people want it to be’. By mobilising almost 30 million members worldwide, Avaaz aims to close that gap between the way it is and the way it could be. Being able to draw from a big pool of participants online, they are very successfully intervening into old and new policies worldwide. The activism of the Yes Lab, on the other hand, has developed tools for highlighting this same gap. As the aforementioned definition of ‘crisis’ has shown, most of the time we are not even aware of how big the gap actually is.

Making the gap visible and tangible corresponds deeply with the notion of politics as French philosopher Jacques Rancière has put it, and brings us closer to the political impact that the practices of the trickster entails.

Policed Spaces Rancière distinguishes between two kinds of politics.

One is called dissensus, the other one the police. Police in this context should not be confused with an actual person in a uniform but understood as a practice determining what gets to be visible and audible in society. It is the force that determines normative behaviour and sets cultural boundaries. Rancière’s police would, in our example, be busy with covering-up the fact that a gap exists between the world how it is and how we want it to be. Politics as dissensus, on the other hand, makes heard and seen what the police practice silenced. It confronts the police practice with the

Fossil Free AHK Text: Orion Maxted Typhoon Haiyan was the biggest storm ever recorded devastating the Philippines and killing 10,000 people.

It demonstrates the urgency to cut global CO2 emissions and thereby limit the catastrophic effects of climate change.

Fossil Free AHK (FFAHK) is a campaign for Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten/AHK (DasArts makes part of the AHK) to divest its finances away from all associations with fossil fuels. First the AHK must stop, by June 2014, banking with Deutsche Bank (DB): It must deliver the message that investing in fossil fuels immoral.

Q: How can we use creative interventions convey this message to the AHK? A: Create a storm.

With the organizers expecting a concert of Philippino bamboo flute music - FFAHK took over the weekly show at the theatre faculty of the AHK. Armed with petrol-powered leaf-blowers emblazoned with DB logos, alarms, loud bass, white noise, the sound of panicked crowds we created a literal storm. We took the microphones to read out our demands. We asked Bridget Kievits, Vice-President of the Executive Board of the AHK, to make a statement accepting our letter and promising to explore ideas at the Executive Board meeting.

We have received a written response from the AHK Board.

They ‘consider switching banks [and] will take the environmental argument into account [but] a change of banks brings an enormous amount of work for our financial depart-

ment […] so a change is something that will not occur in the near future’. It’s clear that the AHK has not understood the urgency and demonstrates the apathy, impotency and bureaucracy tragically endemic in mankind’s struggle.

Fossil Free AHK will keep up the pressure. We invite you to go to www.tinyurl.com/fossilfreeAHK to sign the petition and get involved in future interventions!

The FFAHK campaign was launched by Ana Wild, Edit Kaldor, Agustina Muñoz, Bojan Djordjev and Orion Maxted in the context of Every Nerve at DasArts. The Storm intervention was also joined by Ant Hampton, Leila Anderson, Mladen Alexiev, Sara Behrad and Margo van de Linde.

Thanks to Sean Devlin for inspiration and support.

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Reflection

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Recommended Literature

Colophon

Armed with leaf-blowers

Hope you enjoyed the articles in this magazine. Want to know more about the subject? Mentors Ant Hampton and Edit Kaldor have some suggestions:

logic of equality and is, in our case, the act of pointing to the gap, giving visibility to the void and lack and, moreover, to the cover-up of the police. Politics as dissensus has the potential to transform highly policed spaces into spaces where a subject can make its appearance. So does the trickster, as a Rancièrian descendent and dissentient.

Hack Reality A perfect example for a trickster-strategy that challenges the police principle is jobjacking - the act of pretending to be someone in a position of authority. By hijacking the positions of spokespersons, policymakers and CEOs, the old-school Yes Men tricksters are able to make promises, excuses and announce compensations that people in those positions would never voice, but that in their opinion should be voiced from exactly those positions of power.

Announcing compensation for the victims of the Bhopal disaster as a Dow chemical spokesperson, for example, made the atrocities the corporation had cause visible and the grief of the victims audible. It is, even more, a perfect example for Rancière’s understanding of politics as the

A gap between the world the way it is and the way people want it to be

power of those who have no specific qualification for ruling.

One does not have to be a Yes Man (especially not as a woman) to embarrass evildoers and affect public debate.

Tricksterism’s open-source dramaturgy sets up the foundation for everyone else to hack reality as well. The performing arts, already trained in shape-shifting and boundary-crossing, seem predestined to engage in the trickster’s anarchic practices. They can be appropriated as a gestus, allowing a certain bluntness and ambiguity that some of today’s socially engaged art projects have had to give up in order to make an impact in the communities they are engaged in.

We need more trickster artists dedicated to questioning our accepted truths. Trickster artists who dare to use their capacities to impact our imagination by showing us the wide range of our own possibilities. Trickster artists who activate new forms of participation that do not foster self-sufficiency and entrepreneurialism. Trickster artists who engage in practices of dissent. The stages are out there. We just need to seize them.

Ant Hampton The Brussels-based Swiss artist Christophe Meierhans’ current project, Some Use for the Broken Clay Pots, exposes the major flaws in what we call the democratic process today. Together with constitutional lawyers, philosophers and anthropologists, he’s written a new constitution from scratch and created a discursive performance where, as an audience, we get to imagine what the implied social reality would be like in practice.

Christophe’s great talent lies in his humble, no-big-deal approach, drawing us into complex matters by using common sense, to the point where our own sense of gaining an understanding and (gasp) knowledge of the matter not only becomes rewarding but inspiring in the best sense, a kind of optimism. ‘Some Use…’ premieres at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2014 before touring widely. The new constitution is available for purchase after each show. Essential reading! http://ow.ly/qIsdc My friend Christine Cynn – co-director of the film Act of Killing – joined us for a fascinating Q&A during Every Nerve at Dasarts. The AoK is a mind-blowing film about ‘killers who won’, still showing in cinemas worldwide. The filmmakers invited the perpetrators of the atrocities and mass murders in Indonesia during the mid-60s (lauded today as heroes) to tap into the gangster films that originally inspired them and create re-enactments for the camera. http://theactofkilling.com Satu Herala’s brand-new blog on art and activism. I’d especially point to Jacob Wren’s contribution, in which he perfectly expresses the tension between hope and realism.

‘Once I wrote, “Historically, artists have not necessarily been the most astute political commentators; perhaps the mental agility required for making art and the mental agility required for useful political analysis are fundamentally at odds.” This may or not be true, but if true it is also a rule with many exceptions.’ http://ow.ly/qK7Ew Edit Kaldor Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells – Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship is an overview of the history of social practice, sketching the spectrum of the most interesting practices in this respect, including the Futurists, the Dadaists, the Situationist International, happenings in Argentina, Eastern Europe and France, the Community Arts Movement, and current long-term educational projects by various artists It’s fun to read and it addresses the main theoretical questions that arise in participatory art.

Avaaz is a platform that intervenes in decision-making processes across the world through its close to 30 million members. Avaaz’s action framework ranges from online petitioning to funding media campaigns and organising ‘offline’ protests.

The Yes Lab is a series of training and brainstorming sessions that show activist groups how to become engaged by using the tactics and strategies of the Yes Men. The Yes Lab has worked on campaigns for Greenpeace, different grass roots organisations and universities throughout the world.

Creative Time’s Living as Form Social Practice Database from 2011: http://creativetime.org/projects/social-practicedatabase, an exciting overview of 350 socially engaged projects of the last 20 years from around the world; as well as the book Living as Form, edited by curator Nato ­Thompson, describing a selection of these projects and including articles by experts in the field.

Concept development & coordination Karin van de Wiel - StudioKvdW Editorial team Barbara Van Lindt, Karin van de Wiel Copy editing & translation Jane Bemont (English translation & copy editing), Petra Boers (Dutch copy editing) Design Thonik Photography All pictures in this publication are made

by Thomas Lenden. Except: page 9 and page 12 by Ant Hampton. Page 23 & 24: courtesy of the artists.

Page 25: film stills.

Publisher DasArts, Amsterdam, © 2013 Printer Drukkerij Damen Thanks to all contributors of the block and publication Juul Beeren, Margherita Bencini, Andrea Božic, Marieke Brommersma, Matthijs de Bruijne, Arie Bults, Sean Devlin, Jeroen Fabius, Alexander Gershberg, Vicente Granger, Ant Hampton, Rein Hartog, Joris Holtermans, David Helbich, Edit Kaldor, Gavin Kroeber, Wouter van Loon, Florian Malzacher, Christophe Meierhans, John Meijerink, Vivi Tellas, Mark Timmer, Pascal Vollenweider, Sjoerd Wagenaar, Nadja van der Weide This magazine is published by DasArts, Master of Theatre. DasArts is an international laboratory in the contemporary performing arts. The institute is part of ‘de Theaterschool’, the theatre faculty of the Amsterdam School of the Arts in the Netherlands. During the autumn semester a ‘block’ is organized where guest mentors are invited to frame a semester with a topical theme. Each year a widely disseminated publication aims at sharing the experiences and insights that were part of it.

DasArts, Mauritskade 56, 1092 AD Amsterdam, www.dasarts.nl Cover photo Mladen Alexiev (photography by Thomas Lenden)

Save the date Open Weekend

Master Proof Project

Friday 17 & Saturday 18 January 2014

Monday 10 & Tuesday 11 February 2014

We look forward to welcoming prospective students to our open weekend. To cater for a wide range of interests each day is organised differently.

RULE ™ by Emke Idema (NL)

To find out more about the work being produced by the international theatre-makers currently studying at DasArts, join us on Friday 17 January 2104 for an evening of performances.

Friday 17 January 2014 | 20:00.

If you are thinking of applying to DasArts, either now or in the future, and want to find out how the course operates, the students and the projects we are developing, join us on Saturday 18 January 2014.

We have devised a number of innovative ways to present what we do: experience the works in progress, meet the staff and students, visit the ‘curriculum room’ or join us in the kitchen for a meal.

Saturday 18 January 2014 | 14:00-20:00.

Deadline for Applications Thursday 23 January 2014 For more information about the application procedure please visit our website: www.dasarts.nl Early Bird Applications: Our online application form is active throughout the year. But why not be an early bird and take advantage of our personalised advice service?

Contact us between 1 March and 15 December for tips, advice on completing your application and for all the answers to your questions and concerns.

Email us with a draft of your application for a swift response – a final version can be sent at a later date.

We’d like to help you prepare!

Are you curious about the artistic outcome of a question-based study programme such as the one at DasArts? DasArts student Emke Idema is researching the ways in which art can function as a social and political laboratory. She presents RULE ™, her Master Proof Project, on Monday 10 February and Tuesday 11 February 2014 at DasArts.

Entry is free but places are limited. Please make advance reservations: dasarts@ahk.nl.

Master Proof Projects June 2014 Tchelet Weisstub (IL) and Riina Maidre (EE) wil present their Master Proof Project. More information on the projects will follow soon on our website www.dasarts.nl.