Faster, Higher, Stronger
with a hammer soon afterwards. In the final part of the show, the audience took part in a basic survival course. Three groups were formed on stage, where audience members could acquire new skills and coalesce into communities with experts and individual course participants.8 Although weak connections characterize these communities, these links are paradoxically the more valuable ones, especially when it comes to promoting and spreading innovation.9 The survival lessons ended without a definitive culmination, thus intermingling fictional play and reality. The Rush hour performance by Ceren Oran was very moving and almost shocking, but this time not because of audience participation. Oran’s complex yet simply organized choreographic reflection on the concept of time is based on interactions among three actors and three treadmills. Together with the trio of performers and one musician, the audience could reflect on the way time is understood in contemporary art and also experience time’s effects at firsthand. What do time pressure and the breakneck pace of contemporary life mean for the individual human being? As the author Ceren Oran said: “Looking at the situation Europe’s currently in, especially with regards to the growing nationalism, the three performers become symbols of a destructive force originating in an exclusive concentration on the self.”10 The performance pressure that permeates contemporary society was presented on stage as a paradoxical phenomenon. The dramaturgy of this extremely body-oriented performance was closely linked to the human body and the psyche. At first, the three performers familiarized themselves with the treadmill in their own way; the whole process seemed alternately amusing, witty, aloof and disconcerting. Through one of the performer’s slogans and the pressure of competition, but also through the almost animalistic instincts and the need to fight, the initially playful atmosphere gradually morphed into tragic and deadly performance pressure. Although these performances provided exciting starting points for further discussions and research, they could not be intensively discussed and analyzed at the conference. The problems presented by Rush hour and FIGHT! Palast #membersonly directly concern the IETM’s members in their professional and private lives. We too are all victims of today’s ubiquitous time pressure. The events at the conference were surely not meant as “aesthetic relaxation”: these performances undoubtedly had wholly different intentions. The fact that the performances could not be discussed in detail is a regrettable but logical consequence of the lack of time. It should not be forgotten that the international meeting in Munich was organized to facilitate sharing, to strengthen and support one other and to enable freelance artists to live and work in a more secure situation over the
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