Under the title “The presence of the elsewhere in the now (Die Gegenwart des Anderswo im Jetzt)”, the festival Theaterformen, which took place in Braunschweig in June 2010, devoted a full weekend to debating issues of colonialism and racism. Within the context of this colloquium, which opened up diverse, partly conflicting perspectives on the topic’s complexity in talks, debates, performances and video installations, a dramaturgy of heterogeneity allowed visitors to carve their own itinerary amongst people and things. The following considerations should be understood as an initial ex post mapping of an individual path through events. In the process, lines are of necessity drawn to reading and theatre experiences that were and are relevant at other times and in other contexts.
As I have argued in my recent book The Transformative Power of Performance, performances epitomize the state of in-betweenness. These states give rise to performances, because they take place through the bodily co-presence of those who perform and those who look on. Whatever the performers do affects the participating spectators; and whatever the spectators do affects the performers and other spectators. Thus, a performance comes into being only during its course. It arises from the interaction of performers and spectators.
Upon leaving in July 2010 Professor Daryl Chin is giving us an interview about his time and experiences at the Centre for Interweaving Performance Cultures from 2009-2010. Therein Daryl shares his perspectives on the development and specificity of art under the conditions of the Modern.
Daryl maintains a cultural blog, Documents on Art & Cinema.
Festival Theaterformen in Braunschweig – Thematic weekend: The Presence of Elsewhere – Here and Now
Still from Christmas Beach Walk – Jörg Laue, 2008.
The success of the German entry to the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo was matched by stunning sales and chart positions in many countries throughout Europe. Having more Google hits than any of the contestants before the contest itself was a sure sign that the appeal of a German contest song was to a much broader European youth culture than a national boundary could contain. The song was produced by Stefan Raab, himself a former contest entrant as a writer, and now the producer of the German national contest. In a wrap-up event two days after Lena triumphed in Oslo, she guested on Raab’s night-time talk show which was frequently interrupted by the host (Raab) and guest (Lena) breaking into a football chant of ’Deutsch-e-land’ to celebrate only the second win for Germany in the 55 year history of the contest, a Cold War-era televisual phenomenon purporting to be apolitical and aiming for the promotion of a collective European identity. Also, in a succession of post-contest interviews it was strongly suggested by Raab that Lena should defend (verteidigen) her title, and thereby undeniably linking a song contest to a sporting contest, and in particular to the imminent World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa. In terms of the impact of popular culture, the World cup soccer tournament and the Eurovision Song Contest are the two biggest televions shows in the world, both televisual spectacle fo competitive and competing nationalisms.
When I was growing up, there were certain books which really galvanized me, making me think that critical writing was as richly evocative as any other kind of writing. One such book was Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation; it was so inspiring that I rushed out to get her second collection of essays, Styles of Radical Will, the minute it was published. (I still have the hardcover, though the jacket has long since disintegrated.) But then I read her novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit, and I was stumped. I couldn’t understand how someone with such a keen, critical mind could turn out such… crap. Soon after, I remember reading Gore Vidal’s review of her novels in The New York Review of Books, in which he explained how the analytic sense and the intellectual enthusiasm, which made Sontag such a formidable essayist, were not the same as the imaginative and emotional qualities needed for a novelist. He noted that Sontag was one of the few American writers well-acquainted with the most recent developments in European literature, but ticking off the influences (a little Sarraute here, a dollop of Robbe-Grillet there, Tomasso Landolfi coming in during the final stretch) wasn’t the same as being transported into the imaginative realm of the aesthetic.
This short film features parts of the presentation and workshop Phillip Zarrilli held in Tanzfabrik Berlin in March 2010.
“… follow the breath with the inner eye … residual awareness of the point … forwarding down, inhalation back, and up, exhalation forward, and down … sustain the stretch … don’t second-guess your impulse … oops, everyone is not together … once it’s in play you have to deal with it … slide left, sense right, slide right, sense left, slide the left back, sense the left, slide the right back, sense the right …”
