THE CULTURAL MAGAZINE OF PRO HELVETIA, NO. 57, ISSUE 3/2011

PerformanceBody, Time and Space

Dan Bau Meets Schwyzerörgeli: A Swiss-Vietnamese Premiere in GiswilInstant Composition: Schaerer and Oester On Tour in Grahamstown

Genius or Craft: Can Creative Writing Be Taught?

passages

2CONTENT

Performance:Body, Time and Space

Playful, personal, pedagogical: our dossier offers insights into the contemporary performance art scene. Pictured here: Martin Schick and Laura Kalauz with their Common Sense Project.

6 What Is a Performance Anyway? Today almost everything can be called a performance.

How does a Cultural Studies professor define this form of artistic practice?

By Gabriele Klein 12 To Inform or to Provoke? Performance and Politics A performance cannot start a revolution. But this form of

artistic practice can wield provocative power in the political realm.

By Eva Behrendt

17 How to Move with Words A visit with Simone Aughterlony, choreographer and

dancer, during a rehearsal. By Julia Wehren

20 “Can you trust the people sitting next to you?” Contact with the audience is central to the work of the experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment. Dagmar Walser talks to artistic director Tim Etchells

24 Switzerland’s Performance Scene A new generation, new media and new platforms are

making things happen here. By Sibylle Omlin

28 LOCAL TIME New Delhi: Conversations With

Puppets By Elizabeth Kuruvilla

Cape Town: “The eeriest music I’ve ever heard”

By Chris Kabwato 32 REPORTAGE Swiss Rhythms and Asian

Melodies By Christian Hubschmid (text) and Niklaus Spoerri (photos)

36 PRO HELVETIA NEWSFLASH Award-winning Swiss Computer

Games / New Board of Trustees for Pro Helvetia / Swiss Art in Prime Location / Pro Helvetia Takes on the Biennials

38 PARTNER PROFILE Migros Culture Percentage By Christoph Lenz

39 CARTE BLANCHE Can Creative Writing Be Taught? By Michel Layaz

41 GALLERY A Showcase for Artists Catwalk By Sandrine Pelletier

42 READER SURVEY RESULTS

43 IMPRESSUM PASSAGES ONLINE NEXT ISSUE

4 – 27 DOSSIER

Cov

er: g

ate

c, V

icto

rine

Mül

ler,

200

3; P

hoto

: Dav

id A

ebi

Ph

oto

page

2: G

erha

rd F

. Lud

wig

Ph

oto

page

4: S

imon

Egl

i

3EdITORIAL

Art is dynamic – it is constantly renewing itself and offering new perspec-tives on its social context. Artists are often ahead of their time, which is why artistic phenomena are hard to evaluate using existing funding crite-ria. This is particularly true of performance art. Since it bursts the bound-aries of traditional genres and mixes elements of dance, theatre, visual art, music, literature and new media, performance can fall between the cracks of funding policy – because it is frequently unclear what category it be-longs to, and thus which funding budget should cover it. For this reason, Pro Helvetia deploys a flexible promotional practice and has performance projects evaluated jointly by those responsible for the various artistic gen-res. What counts is that good art receive the necessary support.

The pioneering role that this interdisciplinary art form has always played whetted our appetite for its current incarnations. Over the past few years and across the various artistic disciplines, a young and lively perfor-mance scene has grown up that experiments with new forms, venues and themes. Organizers from all genres have increasingly been including per-formance projects in their programmes or even devoting showcases to them. In Switzerland there are currently more than half a dozen festivals dedicated explicitly to per formance art. All of which is reason enough for Passages to take a look at the Swiss performance scene, as well as to inves-tigate the political potential of performance and the pivotal role played by its audience. After all, in an era in which everything, from sporting events to shareholders’ meetings, counts as performance, the performative, and its artistic potential, demand closer examination.

Andrew Holland

Acting Director andHead of Promotion Pro Helvetia

Crossing the Boundaries

4Performance

The play of appearance and reality, staging and authenticity, is the key to the

provocative power of performance. But what artistic potential can performance

provide today, when the term is used in all fields, from sporting events to town hall debates and shareholder meetings?

In this dossier we also look at performance’s political potential, at the role played by

the audience, and at contemporary currents in the Swiss performance scene.

Performance

5Performance

With her meditative shows, artist Victorine Müller stands out

in the Swiss performance scene. Enveloping herself in a second skin made of fantasy

forms, she creates living installa-tions of unusual beauty.

Pictured here: the performance return (Swiss Institute for Art

Research, 2008).http://victorinemueller.com

6Performance

erformances are fundamental to the habits, practices and rituals of cultures, and they are part of everyday cultural experience: for example, how we wear clothes, practice personal hygiene, have parties or organize demonstrations. This cultural-anthropological thesis

was formulated in the 1960s by the ethnologist Milton Singer, the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner and the performance theo-rist Richard Schechner; it was the starting point for vibrant re-search on the various social, cultural and aesthetic manifestations of performances. The primary object of this research was what Singer called “cultural performances”, those performances that shape everyday life. For Turner, performance is a practice in which a culture can recognize itself.

The omnipresence of performance

While an anthropological perspective sees performances as a fun-damental feature of human cultures and cultural practices, a sociological perspective emphasizes the meaning of performance in the recent history of (post-)modern society. Performances have become even more signifi-cant since the radical restruc-turing of society in the 1960s. A social world focused on events and theatricality has come to be characterized by information, virtual reality, and the media, which has fostered a new con-cept of society: Baz Kershaw’s “performance society”, or Zyg-mont Bauman’s “liquid moder-nity”, the basic idea goes, favors flexibility over rigidity, opposes fragmentation and cohesion, prioritizes plurality over unity, and establishes cultural diver-sity rather than a homogenous culture.

The increasing importance of the performative is mani-fested in all social spheres, in business, politics, culture, sci-ence and sports. Sports events, public trials, talk shows, political conventions or shareholder meetings: many public events are staged as performances. Not only do politicians, managers, lawyers or even defendants put on per-formances, their success and failure are measured according to how “good” their performance is. In this, they resemble media stars. In advertising, too, the concept is omnipresent and has many meanings, ranging from function and accomplishment to appear-ance, behaviour and presentation, as well as result, output and suc-cess. Utterly distinct products, including the computer mouse, loudspeakers, and a magazine for financial information, are called “Performance”, while an anti-aging skin lotion promises “3D Per-formance” and sporting-goods labels and marketing or advertis-

ing agencies are dubbed “active performance” or “performance advertising”. BMW calls its sports-car accessories “BMW Perfor-mance”. Porsche uses the advertising slogan “Porsche Intelligent Performance”, and a Mercedes Benz ad asks, “What is perfor-mance?”

Artistic performance as resistance

If performances can be anything these days, whether potentially profitable businesses, political speeches, scholarly lectures, pure entertainment, everyday rituals, or stagings of the body and the self, the political and aesthetic potential of performance as an art form needs to be distinguished from all that. For while perfor-mances have been increasingly present in social space since the 1960s, they were first and foremost established as a scenic art prac-tice. Here, performance stands for a format that destabilizes many boundaries, such as those between popular culture and art, crea-tive process and art work, author and object, or actors and audi-ence. Artistic performance addresses the social position of art itself

and calls the distinctions be-tween artistic genres into ques-tion. It may not be possible to come up with a good definition of performance, but the theater-studies scholar Hans-Thies Leh-mann describes its lowest com-mon denominator as follows: “Performance is what those who perform it call performance.”

Although the actions of the Dadaists in the 1920s might al-ready be called performances, performance in Western art only came to be an emblematic art form in the 1960s, as Performing Art, Action Art or Performance Theater. It was a decade in which industrial society began to be fundamentally transformed and the new paradigm of (post-)structuralist thought was estab-lished in the academy.

Performance as an art form began with revolutions in the

fine arts and the performing arts. As a way of resisting the art mar-ket, artists such as Allan Kaprow, Wolf Vostell, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and the Viennese Actionists developed perfor-mance-like forms in Happenings, Fluxus, or Body Art. They altered the canon of forms in the fine arts through the integration of time: duration and the moment; simultaneity, unrepeatability and bod-ily presence. The entrance of the performative into fine arts also changed where it was exhibited. It moved out of the studio to the audience, where it presented the process of the creation of imagery as a theatrical event. Feminist performance, above all, became an important instrument to stage political art with the body for such artists as Marina Abramovic, Valie Export or Yoko Ono.

What Is a Performance

Anyway?From the sporting event to the town hall

debate and the shareholder meeting: today almost anything can be called a

performance. Cultural Studies professor Gabriele Klein defines the term, and

discusses the aesthetic and political potential of performance as an art form.

By Gabriele Klein

P

7Performance

Analogous to the fine artists, theatre directors like Peter Stein and Peter Zadek also experimented with new concepts in the 1960s. With the growth of skepticism about mimetic representa-tion, the theatre became what Lehmann calls “postdramatic”. That is, a work understood as a repeatable product was replaced by an unrepeatable act of communication, a process, a “theater of situations”. Performance in postdramatic theater also tries to treat time and space differently. It is a practice that defines the-atrical space only through the actual presentation of the work it-self. Unsurprisingly, then, ever since its early days, the new genre of performance art has defined itself as an artistic practice beyond

the classical theatrical context that seeks out new spaces in the public sphere. This has made it possible to play with the customs of bourgeois theater and to call the relationships of actors and audience, text and interpretation, or self and role into question, thus turning the theatre of representation into a public spectacle of presence. This scenic art addresses and reflects everyday social practice as a theatrical form. Theatre is no longer just a site of bourgeois representation but rather an immediately intended ex-perience of the real, a staging of authenticity. Here, the theatri-cal performance takes place beyond a psychological unfolding of plot and character. Even the theatrical “text” is no longer based on a literary original interpreted by the director and then in turn by the audience; instead, it only emerges in the performance pro-cess. The members of the audience are increasingly and actively drawn into the performance as it progresses, so they lose their classical role as passive consumers and interpreters of the pro-duction and become what Jacques Rancière calls “emancipated spectators”.

Such “de-dramatization” brings theatre closer to dance while, since the 1970s, dance has been addressing the theatrical framing of choreography, for example in the dance theatre of Pina Bausch, Johann Kresnik, Susanne Linke and Reinhild Hoffmann. In the theatre as a site of what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls “the production of presence”, the contemporaneity and transience that were once the specific characteristics of dance as an art of the body have become features of the theatrical happening and, at the same time, symbols of the inconstancy of the social in the “liquid” mod-ern era.

Artistic performance since the 1970s

Performance changes according to its aesthetic, political and so-cial context. In the artistic performances of the 1960s and 1970s in the West, for example, the individual arts interpenetrated and

dissolved fixed boundaries between genres. In contrast, the per-formance art of the 1980s increasingly rediscovered the specific characteristics of the individual arts. The once-powerful assertion of boundary transgressions was followed by a revival: a trans-formed awareness of each art’s own medium, of objects in fine art and texts in the performing arts. The performance art of the 1980s primarily worked with a heteronomy of the subject opposed to the self-determination of the artist and the spectator. At the same time, performance was transformed from an action into a produc-tion focused on perfectionism, the role of technology, a new close-ness to the text, an increasingly dramaturgical structure, and a

growing distance from the audience. The 1980s avant-garde, such as the Wooster Group, Forced Entertainment, and Need-company, transformed text into a general intertextuality appropriate to authorless or multi-author discourses; it was only one element in the scenic presentation. At the same time, Poetry Slam marked the emer-gence of a new, literary performance art in which anything that could be done with the voice and the body could be called a

“reading”. In the fine arts, analogously, a new faith in painting could be found in works by such artists as the “Neue Wilde” (“New Wild Ones”). In the countries of the Eastern bloc, where it was mostly forbidden, performance art developed into a medium crit-ical of society.

In the 1990s, performance art experienced a renewed boom characterized by collective work (like that of the Gob Squad or the Rimini Protokoll), the use of set pieces from the artists’ biogra-phies, and scenic, autobiographical narration, as in the work of the group She She Pop. In his actions, Christoph Schlingensief, argu-ably the best-known performance artist in the German-speaking world, picked up on the trends of the 1970s and radically erased the boundaries between art and politics. An aesthetic critique of representation was the focus of European conceptual dance, as practised by choreographers like Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmatz and Thomas Lehmen. At the same time, performance art underwent rapid developments in the former Communist countries and became an important channel for the new democ-racies, while in countries like China and Cuba artistic performance was adopted as a medium for political messages.

The politics of performance

With the focus on collective work, the common creative process, and the interaction between actors and audience, performance art aims to be a democratic artistic practice that, as the examples above have shown, establishes itself as a political-critical author-ity in opposition to the art market and social relationships. It is re-garded as a reflective art form that contributes to the understand-ing of the social position of contemporary art by calling its basic conditions into question and making them the content of its rep-resentations. Because its production practice is radically connected to contemporaneity and unrepeatability, to embodiment and pres-ence, it problematizes the status of the museum and of the theatre

Contemporary performance art is obliged to find an aesthetic strategy that can explore the increasingly subtle social boundaries between play and seriousness, between seeming and being, and between the imaginary and the real, so as to be able to make itself the Other that un-settles and dis-solves those boundaries. ”

“

8Performance

The German performance collective She She Pop works with auto­

biographical elements. In Testament (2010) members appear on stage

with their own fathers to negotiate love, inheritance, and the question

of who owes what to whom. www.sheshepop.de

P22852_E_06_11_Dossier_Klein.indd 8 17.11.11 10:54

9Performance

P22852_E_06_11_Dossier_Klein.indd 9 17.11.11 10:54

10Performance

as sites of supposed reality and bourgeois representation. That is precisely why the performance theorists Baz Kershaw and Peggy Phelan see it as political art: it does not depict the idea of freedom but rather reveals how freedom is produced. According to Phelan, performance resists objectifications; useless in an economic sense, it is a “transient” art form that cannot be integrated into the cycle of copying, representation and reproduc-tion. But how can performance art be crit-ical when the transient, the contempo-rary, the ephemeral and the theatrical have themselves become central charac-teristics of contemporary societies?

The social context of aesthetic critique

The political aspect of performance can-not be identified in itself but only recog-nized in its relationship to something – and this relationship is its social and artistic context. In contrast to the 1960s, artistic performances at the beginning of the 21st century are confronted with the omnipresence of theatricality. The social situation itself is characterized by the dis-placement and dis-solution of social orders, cultural conventions and signs, as well as by political and aesthetic provocation, the search for utopias and heterotopian spaces, the depiction of the absent, and the tracing of what is repressed and forgotten. As a result of all this the theatricality of performance is no longer easy to generate aesthetically. Contem-porary performance art is obliged to find an aesthetic strategy that can explore the increasingly subtle social boundaries between play and seriousness, between seeming and being, and between the imaginary and the real, so as to be able to make itself the Other that un-settles and dis-solves those boundaries.

Jean-Luc Nancy sees the desire for presence as a sign of a longing for the production of “somewhat more meaning” – and this surplus of meaning is produced by the constant generation of meaningfully interpretable material in a society of media and staging. From the perspective of media theory, this leads to a con-clusion opposed to Phelan’s thesis: when body and presence, aura and authenticity, and incident and event become social impera-tives of self-fashioning and the global laws of neoliberalism de-mand the permanent production of new products, the very irre-producibility of performance ends up actually corresponding to the new laws of neoliberal politics and the global market. Or to put it even more strongly, as an avant-garde art, performance pos-itively explores such principles. Performance can thus be seen not only as a critique of a neoliberal economy but also as its aesthetic counterpart. After all, it is a practice which rehearses the new val-ues of the globalized world, like mobility, transience, placeless-ness and flexibility, as well as the permanent reinvention of the self. For performance – like dance – to realize its critical power as a transient and thus contemporary art form with new artistic vi-sions, it must develop aesthetic strategies that distinguish it from what Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle”. Here, re-fusal can involve standing still, or moving slowly, or even staging a representation of absence. In the end, how socially critical, op-positional or aesthetically innovative an artistic performance is

can only be determined with reference to its frame, that is, to its interpretive context and to the particular situation in which the performance takes place.

Gabriele Klein is a Cultural Studies professor and director of the Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Hamburg.www.performance.uni-hamburg.de

Translated from the German by Andrew Shields

Performance can thus be seen not only as a critique of a neoliberal economy but also as its aesthetic

counterpart. After all, it is a practice which rehearses the new values of the globalized world, like

mobility, transience, placelessness and flexibility, as well as the permanent reinvention of the self.”

“

Phot

o pa

ge 8

: Dor

othe

a Tu

ch ;

page

11:

Kat

rin

Scho

of

11Performance

Xavier Le Roy’s choreographic works are characterized by

an experimental attitude toward bodies and art. Still from Giszelle

(2001), created by Le Roy and danced by Eszter Salamon.

www.xavierleroy.com

12Performance

n a suburb of Düsseldorf on a sunny June morning in 2002, the director Christoph Schlingensief, wearing a full-length coat and sunglasses, unloaded a piano in front of the offices of a company called Web/Tec, covered it with detergent, spread a sack of feathers in the front yard of the building, put

a live chicken on the piano and set fire to a straw effigy with a pho-tocopied picture of Israel’s then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon taped on its face, as well as to a pile of books that included several copies of Martin Walser’s Death of a Critic. This performance, Action 18, attracted a small troop of spectators and journalists and was even filmed by local and fed-eral police, for Schlingensief’s voodoo-like “purification rit-ual” was aimed at Jürgen Möl-lemann, the owner of Web/Tec, as well as at his business partners in the Arab world. At the time, Möllemann was the head of Germany’s Free Dem-ocrats, a party that had just been making headlines by taking anti-Semitic positions in an election campaign.

The action lasted only ten minutes and was relatively quiet. The only people who were nervous were the police officers assigned to protect the building (and its yard). Perhaps Schlingensief’s cry of “Kill Möllemann” in a Duis-burg theater a few days earlier had made them especially vig-ilant. Of course, whoever was familiar with the artist and his work knew that even his shout of “Kill Helmut Kohl!” at doc-umenta X was not part of any real plan to commit murder. For Schlingensief, however, those ten minutes in Düssel-dorf had painful consequen-ces: he was sued and had to pay a sizeable fine, even though he de-fended himself by maintaining that his action was in an artistic context.

Performance as political statement

Action 18 can be seen as a classic example of political performance. Unlike in traditional theater, such a performance is not focused on a dramatic text for whose presentation actors take on roles and pretend to be someone else. Instead, as in a religious ritual, the fo-cus is more on the performer’s real actions. In the case of Schlin-gensief’s Action 18, a series of actions taken out of their usual contextonly acquired a meaning of their own through their com-position and the location of the performance. At least in part be-

cause the artist-protagonist wore a coat and sunglasses, Action 18 also recalled the work of Joseph Beuys.

But even Beuys’s 1974 coyote performance I like America, and America likes me was more than an esoteric artistic exercise. The live coyote that Beuys spent several days with in a New York gallery represented the America of its indigenous inhabitants, and the artist’s emphasis on having contact solely with this animal dur-ing his visit to the US was a clear political statement.

Schlingensief’s Action 18 referred to Germany’s own political reality both in its language and in the site of the action, while also

adopting procedures with anti-Semitic connotations, such as the burning of books. Appropri-ately, throughout the perfor-mance, a spectator was holding up a sign reading “Is Schlin-gensief crazy? No! Fascistic? Yes!” – though it was not clear whether he was part of the event or acting on his own.

All in all, the blending of reality and fiction, seriousness and silliness, “left” and “right,” art and non-art, seems to be essential to the irritating power of performance in the realm of the political. It may also lead to legal consequences for some performances – although it is unclear at times whether those in power want to silence disa-greeable critics or whether universal application of the laws is being invoked. From the artists’ side, the transgres-sion of the boundary between art and reality can also have ethically unsavory implications – such as when composer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen called the attack on the World Trade Center a work of art.

In Schlingensief’s action art, this irritation involved not criminal but political strategy. To name but a few examples, he founded a political party (Chance 2000) and ran for Chancellor himself (even managing to get 60,000 Germans to vote for him), had his audi-ence vote on the deportation of asylum seekers, and cast a Zurich production of Hamlet with neo-Nazis who supposedly wanted to leave the movement. The reactions of the media and the public confirmed that his strategies regularly succeeded.

Schlingensief’s startlingly up-to-date immediacy and his re-peated success at making headlines with his performances are un-equaled in the German-speaking theatre world these days. It is not that there is no longer any political theatre or performance art. But in general, positions have been quieter and ambitions more mod-

To Inform or to Provoke? Performance and Politics

Political performances cannot exactly launch revolutions. But this form of artistic

practice can wield provocative power in the political realm. While Christoph Schlingensief was once able to stir up public debate with his

controversial performances, the younger protagonists of this genre take their positions

more quietly. Performers like Rimini Protokoll, Milo Rau and Gob Squad see their works as a form of both research and education.

By Eva Behrendt

I

Phot

os: D

avid

Bal

tzer

(to

p); I

IPM

– I

nter

nati

onal

Ins

titu

te o

f Pol

itic

al M

urde

r (b

otto

m)

13Performance

For his play Die letzten Tage der Ceausescus (“The Last Days of the Ceausescus”) Swiss writer

Milo Rau conducted interviews with eyewitnesses and reconstructed the Romanian dictator couple’s show trial in scrupulous detail on stage.

http://international-institute.de

Christoph Schlingensief’s art actions always took political aim. With the show Ausländer raus!

(“Foreigners, Get Out!”) in Vienna (2000), he had television

viewers vote on which asylum seekers to deport, leading to

public controversy on the subject. www.schlingensief.com

14Performance

Phot

o: M

anue

l Rei

nart

z

est. Ideologically, too, times have changed. The avant-garde art of the 1960s and 70s, which Schlingensief drew on repeatedly, is no longer romanticized but often criticized by those working in theater today. For no matter how exciting and influential the new forms often proved to be, their ideological context often seems quite dubious now. The theatre generation born after 1970 (that is, the children of the rebels of 1968) might not be able to draw on that work as unselfconsciously as Schlingensief, who died in 2010.

The performance artist as educator

In any case, it is striking that many performance artists currently active in the theatre sector tend to behave like (apparently) objec-tive researchers or teachers rather than radical artistic subjects. They prefer to present posi-tions rather than publicly assert them, leaving it to the spectators to form opinions or take a political stance on the basis of what they see. Such artists aim to educate. They use the tools of journalists, historians and social psycholo-gists, such as conducting interviews, writing questionnaires and doing research on sources. Working with lay actors is part of this, although the lay participants are not asked to demonstrate their artistic skills. Instead, they pro-vide biographical information about their everyday lives, their pro-fession or their religion.

So when the director Hans-Werner Kroesinger, who was born in Bonn in 1962, plans a new performance, he might read up to 2,000 pages in preparation. Since the end of the 1990s, his spec-trum of themes has ranged from the crimes of colonialism to his-torical genocides like the murder of the Armenians by the Turks (with a special focus on the role of the Germans), as well as repre-sentative family histories like that of the industrialist family Flick, who rather unscrupulously supported whatever German political party had the say at any given time. Like a historian, Kroesinger finds his material in primary texts and sources, but then, more like a dramatist, he assembles it in a many-voiced collage. As the sources are not named in the production, and the actors do not perform clearly defined roles, Kroesinger’s theatrical works force the audience to think. They are quite the opposite of “histotain-ment”: the spectators have to pay extremely close attention if they want to understand from what perspective a particular event is be-ing talked about at any given moment. They are often rewarded with new insights into mainstream historical understanding, or even a complete displacement of it.

Reconstruction with a cathartic effect

The Swiss author and dramatist Milo Rau, who was born in 1977, takes a different approach. For his performance The Last Days of the Ceausescus, he conducted numerous interviews with partici-pants in the Romanian revolution of 1989, including General Stan-culescu, who betrayed the Ceausescus, and the soldier Dorin Ca-lan, who carried out their execution. On the basis of this material, historical films and the assistance of professional actors, Rau and his team staged a historically meticulous reconstruction of the show trial and execution of the Ceausescus in a military barracks.

The production drew on a hobby that artists and theatre people have borrowed in the last few years from history buffs: in “re- enactments,” lay people restage battles or strikes in the original locations. Such reconstructions can have a downright cathartic effect on their participants, especially when the historical events are not too far back in the past, as Jeremy Diller and Mike Figgis showed in their documentary film The Battle of Orgreave. In their reenactment of the 1984 battles between striking miners and the British police, the original participants traded roles and gained new insight into the events they had gone through.

The Last Days of the Ceausescus also had a special explosive-ness, at least at its performance in Bucharest (although it was in a

theatre and not in the original location): one of the Ceausescus’ sons filed and lost a suit against the use of his family’s name. Above all, though, the production gave the spectators and actors a chance to get a new perspective on their recent past, their images of his-tory, and their interpretations of them. In a country like Romania, which, like most of the former members of the Eastern bloc, does not have time to cultivate a culture of memory or to come to terms with its past, even this is an act of provocation.

Capitulating to the revolution

But neither Kroesinger’s productions nor Rau’s reenactment are political performances in the narrow sense; they rely too much on the protective realm of the theatre. The literary theatre of the first decade of the 21st century repeatedly took political positions, too, often leaving dramatic theatre far behind. Examples include Volker Lösch’s productions of classics with choruses of welfare recipients or prostitutes, Elfriede Jelinek’s biting social and political com-mentaries, and René Pollesch’s shrewd complaints about the ego-istic aspects of capitalism. But few have dared to forsake the pro-tection of the theatre, museum or exhibition for the risks of spontaneous, even aggressive outside influences.

The German-British performance group Gob Squad is aware of this dilemma and, in almost all of its works, tries to cross the boundary between the art world and the street. Its members don’t have any illusions, though, about the extent of their artistic im-pact. In Revolution now! (2010), one of their latest performances at the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, the per-formers left the theatre to interview passersby and encourage them to take revolutionary action – while all of this was being broadcast live back inside the theatre. Presumably, the end result of this self-ironic game was clear in advance. The participants themselves did not really believe that social change can be realized – and certainly not as the result of an artistic intervention. The “people” on the street agreed with them, with a healthy dose of humour and good

All in all, the blending of reality and fiction, serious- ness and silliness, “left” and “right,” art and non-art,

seems to be essential to the irritating power of performance in the realm of the political. It may also

lead to legal consequences for some performances. ”“

15Performance

They tried to encourage passersby to revolt: the British-

German collective Gob Squad with Revolution Now! (2010).

www.gobsquad.com

16Performance

sense. So the group briskly quoted their way through the iconog-raphy of revolution and capitulated before the great change.

Perhaps they made things too easy on themselves. But wouldn’t that also be rather symptomatic?

Effective change of perspective

In contrast, the collective Rimini Protokoll succeeded at least in generating some unease among the board members of the Daim-ler corporation. Chairman Manfred Bischoff welcomed sharehold-ers to the Daimler general meeting in Berlin in April 2009 with an unusual remark: “This is neither a theatre nor a play!” It was ap-parently necessary to make that clear after Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel of Rimini Protokoll – just in time for the financial crisis – came up with the idea of declaring the share-holder meeting a “readymade” entitled Hauptversammlung (“General Meeting”). With the help of the Hebbel am Ufer theatre in Berlin, they transferred voting rights to about 150 spectators and thus managed to get them into the meeting. This was a tiny minority, given that there were about 7,000 shareholders at the meeting. But the chairman of the board clearly recognized the risk that anyone looking at this event not as a participant but as what Clifford Geertz would have called “a participatant observer” might well come to different conclusions about it, and even see through its pseudodemocratic rituals.

That was the effect the Riminis had sought. After all, they always examine the issue of the relationship between appearance and reality in their work. Their artistic act consisted only in an ex-tremely effective displacement of perspective. They did not want to “denounce the self-presentation of a global player as a show”; instead, they sought to make it possible to experience it “as the rit-ual of a meeting of different interests”. They succeeded brilliantly by leaving the spectators to their own devices and only offering more information in “niche talks” with experts. For some of the spectators, a routine event with business magnates became a crash course in economics, marketing and manipulation: education in the best sense of the word. These days, one cannot expect more.

Eva Behrendt (b. 1973) is a theatre critic and freelance contributor to Theater heute. She lives in Berlin. Translated from the German by Andrew Shields

17Performance

ehearsing, organizing, answering questions, nursing her baby: the Zurich-based dancer and choreographer Simone Aughterlony has a lot to do this hot August day. She is at the Dampfzentrale in Bern, working on her new piece We Need to Talk. A few stories up, her

family is waiting in the artists’ residence, while on stage, the lights and music for the last scenes to be run through today are being tested. Aughterlony may be tired, but she is full of energy and in an excellent mood. A few minutes ago, she lay under a stifling, stiff plastic cover on the stage, her muffled voice barely audible: “In ten minutes, my air’s going to run out,” she said. “Forgot my oxygen tank.” Later, sitting on a music box, she will tell the story of the alien. The listener, spellbound at first, drifts away after a while and comes back right when the mood grows darker. The alien is no longer protected and cared for by the community but is beaten, and the performer is creating images of strange landscapes of bodies. Here, she breaks off and sits down with her dramaturge at the edge of the stage. Good. It was epic this time. Twenty minutes of storytell-ing, a little trip to the world of science fiction and back.

*

Much earlier in the piece, the plastic cover was a giant, blown-up globe. A distant planet. Mother Earth. It’s not yet clear, and may never be. Aughterlony does not want to give the audience any fixed images; she prefers to let them do their own thinking. She regards them as communication partners on the same level as herself. Even in her first work, Public Property (2004), she moved her chair right up next to the rows of the audience and tested the connec-tions between the audience and the performer. “How can the au-dience sit there and watch me if I don’t address them directly?” Aughterlony’s trademarks are: direct confrontation, a challenging gaze into the eyes of others, laughter and storytelling, and the rep-etition and variation of what is always the same. She connects scene after scene in long dramaturgical arcs, which can be quite trying for both the performer and the audience. Both sides must endure it for quite a long time, until small transformations occur, almost unnoticeably leading to a shift. For example, the mood at the birthday party in The Best and the Worst of Us (2008) turns into a requiem for lost happiness before finding the way back to it. Or, with more and more groaning, the airy dance steps in Per-formers on Trial (2005) turn out to be mere codes. Most of the time this happens with a great deal of energy, although it takes place over a long stretch of time. Aughterlony is a strong per-former. She seems wild and self-confident, and at the same time, something vulnerable and wounded shimmers through.

She is indeed wild and unsettling; both these qualities quickly made this dancer well-known right from the start. Born in New Zealand of English parents, she joined Meg Stuart’s company Dam-aged Goods in 2000 and then followed the group when it moved from Brussels to the Schauspielhaus in Zurich. There, she danced, trembled and sang as if her life depended on it, first in Highway 101 (2000–01), and then in Alibi (2001) and Visitors Only (2004). She quickly became the central protagonist in Stuart’s works and finally even learned a new version of Stuart’s congenial 1991 solo Disfigure Study. Stuart and her company worked with Christoph Mar-thaler’s Schauspielhaus team for four years. That was enough time for Aughterlony to make friends and establish contacts in Zurich. Alongside her engagements as a performer and choreographer in

theatre productions by Stephan Pucher and Falk Richter, she be-gan her own choreographic ex-plorations in 2003. She was given the necessary platform for them by the Theaterhaus Gessnerallee, where her first solo, Public Prop-erty, had its premiere. Further work with the Hebbel am Ufer theater in Berlin, the Schouw-burg in Rotterdam, and the Dampfzentrale in Bern followed; all these collaborations continue today. By now, she has created nine works in all, duets and group pieces, as well as joint works with other artists, such as Isabelle Schad and Jorge León, who also often collaborates with her as a dramaturge. In 2010 she worked on a large project with Léon: To Serve, a trilogy of film,

play and curated performance programme on the contemporary situation of domestic workers, which was both a success and a tour de force. With the birth of her second child, Aughterlony now wants to return to the small form, the solo, and thus to the begin-ning of her career.

*

She is now going through all her previous pieces, writing short texts, considering patterns that keep coming up in her work and themes that she wants to keep exploring. She sees this not as re-jecting what is familiar but as exploring it anew in different con-texts, or as she puts it, “making ghosts into guests”. Mostly, her own works have addressed issues of representation and disguise on stage, the boundary between fiction and reality, or the truth content of gestures and emotions. Now, in We Need to Talk, refer-ences to her biography are beginning to crop up in her work.

Aughterlony was born in New Zealand in 1977. She graduated from the New Zealand School of Dance in 1995. 1977 was also the year the United States sent the Voyager 1 and 2 probes into space.

How to Move with Words

Dance or performance? For the dancer and choreographer Simone

Aughterlony, the two genres cannot be separated aesthetically. Both deal

with time, space and the presence of an audience. And also, of course,

the presence of bodies. A portrait.

By Julia Wehren Photo by Fabian Unternährer

R

18Performance

Direct confrontation, eye contact with the spectators, laughter,

storytelling and variations on a theme: all part of Simone Aughter-lony’s signature performance style.

19Performance

Each of them carried a gift from the earth: the Golden Record, a disc with pictures and recordings as signs of human life. It might someday testify to the achievements of humanity, an interstellar code, as it were. Among other things, it includes 90 minutes of music, from Beethoven, Bach and Chuck Berry to folk music. Aughterlony has chosen it as the frame for her solo, as a matrix that is both limiting and inspiring. The idea of a future in the far reaches of space connects her with science fiction, whose construc-tions of time and space have long fascinated her. “Science fiction always carries the past into the future,” she says. “It doesn’t really create anything new.” For what is outside the present is ultimately inconceivable, regardless of what we may imagine.

*

Aughterlony always devotes a great deal of time to doing extensive research for her projects. She reads and goes to the theatre, al-though she regrets that she manages the latter less often of late. She at least tries to keep up with the most important dance pieces, such as Jérôme Bel’s latest solos, or the works of Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, whom she helped out by taking on a part in Bloody Mess in 2007. Her network is quite important to her. She keeps working with the same artists, with her partner Thomas Wodianka, with Nic Lloyd, Kate McIntosh and Phil Hayes. They are musicians, performers and actors. Aughterlony likes working with artists whose bodies have specifically dance-oriented training. This creates a special closeness to the audience, who can better identify with the way such bodies communicate, how they manage to do something or not. As a choreographer, she also likes to be inspired by the other artistic qualities of her collaborators. A kind of knowl-edge transfer takes place: “We compare notes, discuss things, learn from each other.” Still, the responsibility always remains with the choreographer. She suggests themes for improvisations and de-cides what will finally be seen on stage. She sees her activity as “ar-ranging and juxtaposing”, and she calls her profession “choreog-rapher and performance maker”.

She sees her own dancer’s body, trained in classical ballet and contemporary dance, how it has been formed and “educated”, as she calls it, as a welcome opportunity to explore movements. In her new solo, she will put it to more use again. “Inspired by the classical music, I have been remembering earlier experiences I had while dancing,” she says, and laughs: she is delighted that her body still works so well.

*

After this week of rehearsal, though, she will still have to plough through a huge amount of text and hours of video material: notes from the dramaturge and recordings of her improvisations, which will gradually take shape as fixed forms. Aughterlony will arrange almost all the parts in advance, the movements as well as the texts. “At every moment, I know exactly what I am going to do,” she says. Everything has to be clear enough that she can approach it with the necessary freedom on stage. Whether she is dancing, speaking or singing does not really make a difference to her. Sometimes, the words simply come more quickly than the movements. “Words, babbling to myself, help me find any movements at all,” she says.

Dance or performance? For Aughterlony, the two genres can no longer be aesthetically distinguished. The contemporary dance scene borrows performative strategies from everywhere, she says, from theatre or the fine arts. In the end, the artists’ own sense of themselves determines which scene they belong to, as does how they would like to be seen, or the market and the sponsorship and promotion context they want to be active in. At the same time, it is necessary for institutions to create particular categories and put artists into them. “In the end, though, it’s about the same thing in both dance and performance: time, space, and the presence of an audience,” she says. And of course the presence of bodies. “Perhaps the dancer’s body is more likely to generate meaning, perhaps it is more expressive,” she adds. But the body definitely makes each artist’s training clear. And that’s precisely what makes the mixing and crossing of different forms of expression so fascinating for Aughterlony, the trained dancer.

www.aughterlony.com Julia Wehren (b. 1975) trained as a dancer and studied dance theory. She worked as a culture journalist until 2007, when she became an assistant at the Institute for Dance Studies in Bern. She is currently working on a dissertation project with a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Fabian Unternährer (b. 1981) is a freelance photographer based in Bern. He studied at the University of the Arts in Zurich (ZHdK) and the Ecole Supérieure d’Arts Appliqués in Vevey. His works have been shown at a number of solo and group shows, mostly in Switzerland. www.fu-photo.ch Translated from the German by Andrew Shields

20Performance

If there were a tangible contract between the performers and the audience, what in your opinion is the most important thing this contract would include?For me the most important thing as an audience member is an openness to being there – to watching and experiencing what is actually happening. That sounds very simple, but I think for most of us, myself included, that’s hard, because you come with other things on your mind, with expectations and preoccupations and it’s very easy to get confused between what you’re looking at and what you wish you were seeing. I suppose that in some way every performance strives to create that quite fundamental contact, that contract, which is to say: We are here, you are there, and this is the moment we are engaged in together.

And as part of the stage, how do you create that engagement?There is also some kind of effort from the performer – an effort towards being there, being in that space, being with those people who are present that even-ing, negotiating what is ac-tually unfolding between you and them, and be-tween you and the other performers on stage. As a performer, the biggest trap that you can find yourself in is being bound up in routine or in some fantasy about what you’re doing, rather than recognizing what you’re actually doing. Especially as touring per-formers – moving from one kind of theatre space to another, which we’ve done a lot of – it’s easy to find yourself bound up in the technical issues or concerns of yes-terday’s performance rather than today’s. You really need to be there with the actual audience that is there. This focus on engage-ment – on presentness – is a struggle against the idea of the audi-ence as a passive consumer of spectacle, against performances in which those watching are not implicated, not truly present. I know, this is a cruel way to think about an audience: a hungry animal that needs something to happen, bloodthirsty, eager for quick pleasures.

When I think of the performances of Forced Entertainment, I remember that the audience was often addressed directly: they were flirted with, teased, rejected and the whole time wonder­

ing what the performers were doing up there on stage. You cer­tainly keep the audience busy…What I am interested in is engaging people in this more fully present and attentive way, so that we can draw them into another kind of watching which is seductive and troubling, pleasurable and confronting. I think we always have to start with the basics though, this very simple notion of presentness. And then these processes of fictionalizing, flirting, lying, pretending what you speak of can take us on journeys away from the here and now. It’s as if each performance might be a process of unpacking what now could be. For all my fascination with states of present -ness

and transparency, I’m also gripped by the way that per-formers can be distant, pri-vate, incomprehensible or unknowable. This presents another interesting part of the spectator’s relationship with the stage – because to encounter performers in these more distant guises can really have us guessing and wondering. It might also have us an -noyed or puzzled or bored! But what’s interesting is that these states of uncertainty or unclarity have the poten-tial to be transformed, to become clear in a new way, to open up to another pos-sibility on the other side.

Did your perspective on the audience change through­out these 25­plus years of work with Forced Enter­tainment?It changed a lot over the years. I think in the very be-ginning, in the 1980s, the work was really shy about

the audience, we didn’t really acknowledge the public, we were be-hind a wall in a way. We were very interested in cinema; we would have liked to make films. I think the idea that there was an audi-ence was a bit embarrassing somehow. We were in a bubble, until we started to open up a bit. And then over the next years it came to be that we just couldn’t stop with the audience. Everything was going to them. We were in a line at the front and the lights were on and we wanted to talk pretty directly. This relationship has gone through different moods – from First Night, which is playfully aggressive and has quite a bit of fun causing problems with the au-dience. It explores a conception of the audience as a tyrannical monster, terrifying and oppressive. Maybe a year or two later, we made the long story-telling piece, And on the Thousandth Night…,

“Can you trust the people

sitting next to you?”

For the internationally acclaimed British performance group Forced Entertain -

ment, contact with the audience is crucial. The group constantly negotiates the

boundary between stage and spectators, and occasionally subjects the relationship between

performers and audiences to a serious test. A conversation with artistic director and author

Tim Etchells.

Interview: Dagmar Walser

Foto

s: H

ugo

Gle

ndin

ning

21Performance

“It’s important to remember that there are more of you than

of us. So if it does come to a fight, you will undoubtedly win...” In

Showtime Richard Lowdon directly addresses the audience, thus calling

attention to the power relations between performers and the public.

Every theatre performance creates a sense of community, because

the spectators are brought together through a common experience.

In Speak Bitterness, however, the performers attempt to disturb this

sense of unity and split the audience.

22Performance

which in contrast is pretty warm and generous with the audience. So our treatment and portrayal of the audience has definitely shifted, and continues to shift. I feel like probably the long-term mission is about to explore all of the different ways in which one can inhabit that relation, and to keep changing the times that one inhabits that relation, keep changing the temperature or texture of it.

In your performances you’ve often worked with the exhaustion of the performers, especially in the Durational Performances. But there’s also Thrill of it All, for example, which starts with a 20­minute dance, by the end of which the performers are ex­hausted, which is interesting because it also seems to have an effect on the audience. How do what’s happening on stage and what’s happening to or in the audience relate? Each piece is always constructed as a deployment of energy, and when you push the performers through something physically ex-hausting or exhilarating or use language that is exhausting or ex-hilarating, their defences crumble – to a certain extent. An alert and rested performer is usually controlling what they do, manag-ing and controlling how they appear, but if they get tired, whether physically or intellectually, they become more ragged, less able to control, and as a spectator you start to see things that the perform-ers might otherwise have edited out. The tiredness opens them up. As this happens to the performers, what’s interesting is that your own defences as the audience get a little worn down too. It’s as if you were a bit punch drunk, defences down, and that creates a pos-sibility that wasn’t there when you first sat down. In this way the audience “mirrors” the state of the stage.

In Showtime you focus on this line between audience and stage very directly. Richard Lowdon tells the audience: “There is a word for people like you: audience. An audience comes to a theatre perhaps to see something which, if they saw it in real life, they might find offensive… Perhaps you’ve come here this evening because you want to see something you’ve only done in the privacy of your own homes or something that you dreamed about doing in the privacy of your own homes. An au­dience likes to sit in the dark and watch other people do it. Well, if you’ve paid your money – good luck to you. However, from this end of the telescope things look somewhat different. Yyou all look very small, and very far away, and there’s a lot of you. It’s important to remember that there are more of you than of us. So, if it does come to a fight, you will undoubtedly win.” Sounds very much like a power game…As I said before, the audience is a tyrannous monster! It has de-mands! And the unfolding of the evening is always, on some level, about how those demands are negotiated, managed, met or re-fused. Of course the work that we’ve made is hugely based on ex-ploring a whole set of power dynamics about the audience: the power of the stage over the audience, the power of the audience over the stage. The important thing is to acknowledge that set of

power relations, to put it under scrutiny, and to try to problema-tize it in all sorts of different ways - which you can do if you know what the rules of the situation are. There is this sentence, again in Showtime, where Richard says to the audience: “We’re gonna do what we’re gonna do, and you’re gonna do what you’re gonna do.” There are the rules, the expectations, but the night is always fragile. Anyything can happen.

What do you want to happen? Are you looking for a confronta­tion with the audience?No, it would be very easy to provoke a fight, but I am much more interested in the process of tension and seduction, making prop-ositions and making problems of those propositions. It is an ar-chitectural or musical process much more than a chance to cre-ate a fight! There is a collective thing happening. The conventional theatre desire is to bring everybody together. What we’ve been working on for such a long time is to question this entity at the same time as forming a group of the separate individuals who ar-rive. In theatre performance, you’re always dealing with the con-stitution of the community; you’re always building up that social space of the auditorium, creating an experience which binds and links it. But it’s also very interesting to divide the audience. Many of our pieces create a problem around this idea of the collective spectatorial WE. Who are we as we sit here? What are we here for? In Speak Bitterness the performers make all kinds of confessions – and put the audience in a situation where they have to decide whether to belong to the WE that is spoken of or not. When the performers say “We never washed up properly, we never took the dogs out for a walk,” the audience generally accepts this. It’s not such a terrible set of things to admit. However, when the perform-ers say “We pushed dog shit through foreigners’ doors,” the audi-ence will probably try to alienate itself from the situation – the so-cial ‘we’ becomes a problem. The assumption in theatre is often that the audience is good and decent but can you trust the people

sitting next to you in the auditorium? Can you be sure they are not racist vigilantes on the nights they’re not watching plays? Of course not.

Can you say what you might wish a spectator to say or think when they leave the show?Not concretely in that way, because I think what interests me is to open a contradictory and ambiguous space. I like it best when the whole ground seems uneven, unpredictable – when the perfor-mance can’t quite be resolved. It’s not that I want people to feel this or that. It’s more that I want them to feel the tension between possibilities, I want them to stay in a kind of unresolved space. I

The audience is a tyrannous monster! It has demands! And the unfolding of the evening is always, on some

level, about how those demands are negotiated, managed, met or refused. ”

“

23Performance

like this idea that you make a work that, when it’s over and the au-dience leave the performance, is still unfinished business. It’s like the fishhook’s got into your skin.

There is a tendency in the performing arts today to leave the theatrical space, and break theatrical conventions. For exam­ple: site­specific work, or involving people in the performance who didn’t decide themselves to participate. Most of your per­formances take place in art spaces, theatres or galleries. Why?I’ve done projects that break these frames. But I’m mostly inter-ested in structures, encounters, in cultural forms, where the rules are known for both sides. For me, having accepted the conven-

tional frame that there is an audience constituted in an auditorium and that there is a stage and that what we are watching is on the stage, I can start to open space and possibilities. For me, working within this initial set of accepted formal constraints sets useful lim-its and parameters inside which I can work on the audience.

Is there a moral reason you want to have clear rules for every­body? Maybe yes. It’s connected to this idea that we all should know the ground we are standing on. I don’t like cheap, deceitful, apparent undermining of rules – or what seems to be the undermining of rules, but really isn’t. The thing I struggle with most is where the-atre pretends not to be theatre, pretends not to have these kinds of rules or frames, but in fact still does. You see it a lot: in immersive theatre or promenade or one-on-one performance, where there’s a pantomime of ‘rule breaking’ or ‘newness’ but there the reality is just as conventional, just as power-based as a regular play. Funda-mentally it is, as we said, about power. But when we know what the rules are, power can be addressed, questioned and pushed at.

Would you say this perspective on the audience is a political attitude? Of course to me that’s hugely political. I’ve seen a lot of work that declares itself political but the way that it treats its audience it is actually just very reactionary, or deceitful. What interests me more is that the politics are deeply integrated in the form: the nature of relationship to the audience, the integrity and transparency of the things we spoke of before. It’s in the nature of how performance opens up space in the audience, of how it deals with the collabora-tive authorship of the audience. Perhaps also this idea of clear rules and a very straightforward, simple presence in front of the audi-ence is something that makes the work transparent internation-

ally. At the heart of what we do on stage there’s a no-bullshit way of being there. We didn’t develop a highly artificial, symbolic per-formance language in Sheffield, where you have to know a whole lot about the history of contemporary performance to grasp it. Mostly what you’ll see is a bunch of fairly ordinary-looking people walking onto the stage and starting to talk to you, you know what I mean? It’s not rarefied – and I think the audience appreciates that.

Tim Etchells is an author, visual artist, director and performer. He is best known for his work as author and artistic director of the British performance group Forced Entertainment. For more than 25 years, in books, essays, exhibitions and performances, Etchells has been reflecting on the art of performance. His latest novel, The Broken World, was published by Heinemann in 2008. www.forcedentertainment.com; www.timetchells.com Dagmar Walser is a radio journalist and theatre critic for the Swiss public broadcaster SRF.

The work that we’ve made is hugely based on exploring a whole set of power dynamics about the audience: the power of the stage over the audience, the power of the audience over the stage. The important thing is to acknowledge that set of power relations, to put it under scrutiny, and to try to problematize it in all sorts of different ways. ”

“

Illu

stra

tion

: Eli

zabe

th T

rayn

or

24Performance

nyone attempting an overview of performance art in Switzerland will be astounded by the variety of forms it takes here. Several important centres for perfor-mance developed in the 1980s, including Geneva’s Festival La Bâtie, Zurich’s Theater Spektakel, Fri-

bourg’s Belluard Festival, the BONE Festival in Bern organized by Norbert Klassen, and Ruedi Schill and Monika Günther’s work in Lucerne. Since then, the scene has grown in both size and variety. And over the last ten years, new festivals and project spaces like the Kaskadenkondensator in Basel, Stromereien in Zurich, Interna-tional Performance Art in Giswil and Les Urbaines in Lausanne have given the medium an enormous boost.

The move into the landscape and the use of new media

The conditions and tendencies that provided the impetus for this movement are many and varied. The trend for blowing open traditional artistic media and presentation spaces has been clearly discernable since 2000. For a long time now, art-ists who use performance have not simply worked within the format of the body-centred re-cital: they have worked with internal and external spaces, and with different temporal specifications. Performance art now scales the highest peaks of the Alps and sounds out the deepest shafts of sewer systems. One example of this is the work of artist Katja Schenker. Her performances are a skilful combination of her own bodily strength andh the physical properties of materials. She devises situations in which she can create a paper landscape that fills a room, dig trenches in the earth, or lift large pieces of asphalt by hand. Unsurprisingly, new media and interactivity have also begun to be included in performances. The artist Gaspard Buma from Lausanne, for instance, uses meas-uring and data-transfer devices from the realms of medical tech-nology and communications in such a way that during the actions he performs, his body becomes an electronically alienated musical instrument.

As an art form that employs physical creativity and acting, per-formance has admittedly always been closely linked to the picto-rial qualities of visual art and the staged performances of the thea-tre, but it is also just as close to music, dance, spoken word, and process-oriented art.1 New performance-specific art forms, such as interactions in public places, performative installations in pro-ject spaces, and long-duration performances, to name just a few, also increasingly call for new event formats.

Today, the practice of performance art has become widespread, as it can take place anywhere, and does not necessarily require a stage or white cube. With the economic pressure on urban spaces, and public spaces increasingly being opened up for event culture, per-formance art’s diverse projects would seem to be an ideal way to utilize every possible gap, theme and space.

A new generation: the use of dramaturgy and elaborate technology

Ten years ago, the Swiss art schools started offering courses in per-formance practice, and subsequently developed the ACT network, a performance platform for students that was founded in 2003.

This caters tor an active young generation, and ensures a sus-tained interest in the medium. Today it’s often not just the art-ists themselves who develop performance initiatives, but also curators and directors. Younger protagonists have taken over from the old pioneer generation. Amongst these are the highly promising artists Anne Rochat, Simon Kindle, Sophie Hofer, Do-menico Billari, Mio Chareteau, Mélodie Mousset, Michael Kim-ber, and many others. They form the new generation of Swiss performance artists, for whom the use of dramaturgy and elab-orate material, in situations which are often technologically complex, is a matter of course. Even a helicopter can be put to good use, as the work of the Ba-sel performer Domenico Billari shows. For his work o.T. (2007), a helicopter carrying a large con-

tainer of water emptied its load directly above the performer. This piece, however, also clearly demonstrates that in spite of new me-dia and new locations, the live use of a physical body remains the pivotal point of the performance work.

Research projects, and the ability to commercialize, increase your chances of survival

There are many different formats within which today’s artistic performances can be seen: from festivals, which take place regu-larly, to temporary platforms like Kunstexpander in Aarau, all the way to longstanding performance laboratories like the Kaskaden-kondensator in Basel or the Progr in Bern. Looking at this devel-opment – the abundance of performances, protagonists and scenes – it’s not hard to recognize a real “boom,” as the performance art-ist Muda Mathis has put it.

Many of the initiatives started by performance artists have dis-appeared again over the last decade (such as Der längste Tag [The

Switzerland’s Performance

Scene The performance art scene in Switzerland

has been picking up the pace over the past ten years. Some have even claimed

that it is booming. A move out into the landscape, elaborate technical settings,

installations, and the use of new media are just a few features of the new generation.

By Sibylle Omlin

A

Phot

os: M

arti

n St

olle

nwer

k (t

op);

Rao

ul G

ilib

ert

(bot

tom

)

25Performance

For Partition for 8 Muscles and 1 Sampler (2004) Gaspard Buma

uses a computer, electrodes, adapters and cables, an amplifier and

a loudspeaker. With the help of modern technology, the Lausanne-

based performance artist trans -forms his body into an electronically-

wired musical instrument. www.gaspardbuma.org

Culture shock, identity and intercultural misunderstandings: these phenomena inspired Yan Duyvendak and Omar Ghayatt

to create Made in Paradise. In their piece, the artists address Islamic culture and European perceptions

of Muslims as the Other. www.duyvendak.com

26Performance

Longest Day] in Zurich’s Kunsthof). However, this is not out of keeping with the character of the medium, which has always been ephemeral. It has become apparent that those festivals or institu-tions that survive are primarily the ones that have achieved a clear focus for their content, along with a stable source of finances and a sufficiently high public profile. The ‘sustainable’ festivals are linked to community structures, public funds or publicly financed institutions (La Bâtie in Geneva; Theater Spektakel in Zurich; Bel-luard Festival in Fribourg).

In recent years the medium has undergone a degree of sta-bilization and institutionalization, and there are a number of re-search projects being undertaken by performers and academics: for example, the Perform Space project led by the School of Art and Design in Basel, or Andrea Saemann and Katrin Grögel’s Perfor-mance Saga project. Performance art has now also gained entry to galleries, art exhibitions and museum collections, and thereby ac-cess to the market. The Zurich performer San Keller, for instance, produces a sticker, an object or a flyer for all his projects, which can then be sold. The pioneer generation turned performance into lasting pictures suitable for galleries and museums through photography and video. Today, performance art is seeking out new forms of marketing and communication.

In connection with this I would like to speak about two of the current trends in Swiss performance art which I find interesting.

Performative installations and performance in social spaces

Angelika Nollert and Silvia Eiblmayr produced a groundbreaking exhibition of performative installations in Germany and Austria in 2003, and in recent years Swiss institutions like the Migros Museum or the CentrePasquArt have also begun to explore per-formance art. As a result, seeing performance art outside of the moment of live experience has become more commonplace: the performance focuses on the space and in the created object. The Zurich-based artist Victorine Müller is known for her perfor-mances, lasting up to an hour, inside transparent inflatable objects, and she then exhibits these poetic pieces in museums.

Today, even architectural art projects integrate performance art. This can be seen at the Kantonsspital Zug, where Susann Wintsch has created a permanent installation of eight exhibits by Swiss-German artists produced using performance.

Performance art is a field for situational and site-specific ac-tivities, which play out in all areas of life. As such, participation is also an important aspect of performance, and this is reflected in the theory surrounding it; the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of “art relationnel” is used in a positively inflationary way. These artists aim to create social integration with their perfor-mances, within groups, neighbourhoods, social environments and societies. The Zurich performer Anne Lorenz worked with the 140 inhabitants of a village in Upper Austria for her 2005 project Auf dem Hinweg (“On the way there”), to turn small everyday gestures into a physical performance on the streets. The performative act is a social act. This fact has also been used as an argument for fund-ing bodies. The live element of the performance brings together art education and the integration of various groups of visitors. One of this medium’s greatest challenges is to ensure that the context

– the location, the space and the audience – immediately helps to create the performance. “Immediate” in this context means more quickly, more reactively, and more unrelentingly than in other art forms like painting, music or theatre. This also brings to light the fact that the broad field of performance makes a degree of differ-entiation necessary. Historical and contextual aspects, and the me-dia used, are becoming ever more important ways to create a clear position amongst the mass of projects. “Whether something is a spontaneous initiative by artists in temporary spaces, or a perfor-mance by established institutions like theatres or theatre festivals, influences how it is perceived, which in turn feeds back into the work,” explains the performance artist Dorothea Rust, who also organizes these events. Performance art has always been an artis-tic strategy with which the performer creates surprises, intense moments, wonder and confusion, even incomprehension. In situ-ations and surroundings that are often positioned outside of con-ventional institutions, performance moves and challenges its au-dience. It will be interesting to watch this agile and flexible medium playfully breaking new ground in terms of marketing and communicating with audiences.

The most important addresses for performance art in Switzerland:

Festival La Bâtie, Genf: www.batie.chThéâtre de l’Usine, Genf: www.usine.chThéâtre Arsenic, Lausanne: www.theatre-arsenic.chFestival Les Urbaines, Lausanne: www.urbaines.chFestival des Arts Vivants, Far°, Nyon: www.festival-far.chFestival Belluard Bollwerk International Fribourg: www.belluard.chFestival International Performance Art, Giswil: www.performanceart.chFestival Migma, Luzern: www.migma.chFestival Stromereien, Zürich: www.stromereien.chTheater Spektakel, Zürich www.theaterspektakel.chFestival Perform Now!, Winterthur: perform-now.chFestival Bone, Bern: www.bone-performance.comProgr/Stadtgalerie, Bern: www.stadtgalerie.ch; www.progr.chKaskadenkondensator Basel: www.kasko.chKaserne Basel: www.kaserne-basel.ch

1 Performative! Performance Arts in Switzerland, ed. Sibylle Omlin, Pro Helvetia, Zurich 2004.

Sibylle Omlin is an art historian, curator and author. Since 2009 she has headed the Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais.

Translated from the German by Ruth Martin Phot

o: V

ikto

r K

olib

àl

27Performance

Artist rising: in his performance Walking On The Moon But

On Earth at Basel’s market hall, Domenico Billari takes flight thanks to a bunch of helium

balloons. Live physical performance as well as the experience of the

“lightness of being” are central and recurring elements in Billari’s work.

www.domenicobillari.com

28LocaL T ime

Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, maintains a global network of branch offices, which serve cultural exchange with Switzerland and support worldwide cultural contact.

LoCA L Time

san francisco new york paris rome warsaw cairo cape Town new deLhi shanghai

the hole). Then, the mother and the father died (blowing out the candle) and the girl was all alone. She would walk out of the house weeping (tiny pieces of clay fall like tears). one day, a storm came and tore down her house (picks off the house and throws it aside). only her bed was left. Soon, a goose came and chased her away from the place where her house used to stand. The girl started walking (up her arm) and walking, turning to look back, but never to return…” There’s silence around the rectangular table as Gysin folds up the clay on her arm. The group of about 15 indian educators and puppeteers at-tending Gysin’s puppetry workshop, organ-ized by Pro Helvetia in its office in New Delhi in the last week of July, are clearly moved by the story and her performance. But the unspoken question hangs in the air: where is the happy ending?

The therapeutic aspect is importantAs the sweltering afternoon progresses and Gysin, 62, a trained mime, puppeteer and kindergarten teacher, shows the gathering how to breathe life into clay, twigs, a sheet of paper, or anything within reach, one be-gins to understand the reasons for the darkness in her tale. it has a lot to do with her fascination with fairytales, which ap-peal to children’s souls. “it gives them the force to confront uncomfortable truths in their lives, which a real story can never do. once, during a performance about a child who lived alone with her mother, a little girl piped up that her father, too, visited them only once a year. Her teachers had no clue that the father didn’t live with the child,” she says. Puppetry for therapeutic purposes is still a key motivation for Gysin,

who started her work around 40 years ago after studying at Jacques Lecoq’s School of Theatre in Paris.

Gysin’s workshop on puppetry for the young – and the three-city tour of india with her glove-puppet show, Mimi and Brumm are Having a Party, about a mouse and a bear who live in a book –comes appropriately at a time when many

Bangalore, Kolkata and New Delhi were the stops

on margrit Gysin’s indian tour. in the Swiss puppeteer’s

workshops, she showed local colleagues how she breathes life

into everyday objects.

Conversations with Puppets

n e w d e L h i

Phot

os: m

ridu

l Bat

ra

By Elizabeth Kuruvilla, New Delhi – There’s a story in every ball of clay, says Swiss puppeteer margrit Gysin. She gath-ers some in her hand, presses it down un-evenly on the top of her right arm and starts, “once upon a time (sprinkling torn bits of pink bougainvillea petals), it was winter and snowing heavily. in this place, there was a lonely tree (placing a twig in one corner) and a house (raising a section of the clay) where a girl lived with her fam-ily. The house had a window (pinching a hole in the middle) through which one could see a fire burning (she lights a tiny candle so we see a light flickering through Local puppeteers and teachers showed great interest in Margrit Gysin’s workshops. In India, puppets are increasingly used as teaching tools.

29LocaL T ime

indian schools and parents are exploring alternative methods of education that al-low students creative and emotional free-dom to discover their world. New-age schools are breaking free of textbook- oriented, rote methods of learning, and are discovering the ease with which broad concepts can be explained to kindergarten students with the help of puppets. At the workshop, thus, there is an enthusiastic turnout of teachers from the experimental Heritage School and the Delhi Public School, as well members of Dadi Pudum-jee’s ishara Puppet Theatre Trust and Anu-rupa Roy’s Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust, two well known names in the circuit of contemporary puppeteers in india who conduct puppetry workshops in schools as well. “margrit has a wealth of experi-ence. Young puppeteers have a lot to learn from her. Besides her innovative story-tell-ing methods, she also shared her adroit-ness to deal with audience responses and with child psychology,” says Chandrika Grover Ralleigh, Director, Pro Helvetia in-

dren. Their reactions are amazing. They share things with the muppet. They behave as though the muppet is listening to them, feeling with them,” says Khanna.

india has a formidable history in pup-pet theatre, but the process that Gysin worked with in Switzerland is obviously only making its inroads here now. “Gysin’s performances are for smaller groups, an in-timate theatre. in india, playing for such small groups is a luxury. The concept of just puppet theatre for children or for adults has come from the West, and our modern puppeteers have imbibed it,” says Pudumjee. indeed, traditional indian pup-pet theatre, with its deep religious ethos, was largely performed for audiences, men, women and children included, at religious fairs and festivals. An important compo-nent of the oral form of storytelling in in-dia, it drew its major themes from epics like the mahabharata and Ramayana and religious texts like the Puranas. “margrit is aware of the rich cultural heritage of folk puppet theatre. But during this visit she had the opportunity to interact with con-temporary puppeteers and learnt how they are evolving contemporary puppetry in the current art landscape,” says Ralleigh.

Current generations of puppeteer fam-ilies may be unwilling to continue with this economically unviable profession, but puppetry as performance art has grown in stature, with contemporary puppeteers working with themes ranging from gender to Bollywood. “india is culturally more extrovert than Switzerland, so the influ-ences are stark and loud,” says Narain. The themes of the Swiss puppet theatre he wit-

dia, about her reasons for in-viting teachers to learn from Gysin at the workshop.

From the Mahabharata to Bollywood For the teachers from The Heritage School, this was a continuation of the process started by indian puppeteer Varun Narain – incidentally also the first beneficiary of Pro Helvetia’s artist-in-resi-dence programme in Swit-zerland – who has been tu-toring them in using puppets as an educational tool for the past several months. Trupti Khanna, a Grade 3 teacher at the school, was more interested in Gysin’s experiences using puppets to connect with children emotionally. “We use puppets to teach chil-dren, but we also have something called circle time in school, where a muppet is used to facilitate interaction with the chil-

“Fairy tales help children deal with difficulties in real life,” says Margrit Gysin.

Local puppeteers and teachers showed great interest in Margrit Gysin’s workshops. In India, puppets are increasingly used as teaching tools.

30LocaL T ime

nessed during his visit were more per-sonal, such as the relationship between a father and child, the paranoia of perfec-tion or even colour prejudices.

Take mimi and Brumm, for in-stance. Two bedraggled friends, a mouse and a bear, live in a book. Brumm, the bear, is obviously the older of the two and is sometimes protective of young mimi. Promising to stay by her side throughout the night as she sleeps, Brumm reassures her that “there’s a star for every child who keeps an eye on her”. But sometimes he is neglectful: “When he’s having his coffee, he doesn’t pay attention to me,” whines poor mimi. The show is fun, has the audience in giggles, and every child enthusiastically raising a hand for the privilege of being the next person to help Gysin on stage. But without saying it out loud, there are also undertones of home-lessness, loneliness, parental neglect in the conversations that take place be-tween the puppet friends, and with the audience.

earlier in the day, Gysin had held up a child’s scribble, saying, “Children don’t want to make a nice picture. They want to be inside of an emotion.” She knows that her puppets will be having quiet conversations with each child listening to them.

www.prohelvetia.inwww.figurentheater-margrit-gysin.ch

elizabeth Kuruvilla is books and arts editor at Open, a weekly indian magazine (www.openthemagazine.com). She lives in New Delhi.

By Chris Kabwato, Grahamstown – i live in a strange little place that looks more like a Victorian village than an African town. Grahamstown is located between east London and Port elizabeth in the eastern Cape of South Africa. As the name denotes, it is a creation of a colonial past. Now it prides itself on a number of things: it has one of Africa’s best universities (Rhodes University), an amazing literary culture and, for the last 37 years, it has hosted the National Arts Festival.

The festival is a dizzying 10-day array of the best in South African and world theatre, dance, poetry, visual arts and, of course, music. At the heart of the music programme is the Standard Bank Jazz Festival, which caters for a variety of jazz

styles. As the organizers state, “it brings to-gether 250 of the top young jazz musicians in the country, 35 jazz educators and 80 jazz performers from South Africa and around the world.”

For 25 years the Standard Bank Jazz Festival has been a ground-breaking space that accentuates the very collaborative nature of jazz. it is into this space of vari-ous acts – live performances, jam sessions, workshops and intense socialization – that Swiss vocal acrobat Andreas Schaerer and his compatriot, double-bassist Bänz oester, stepped on a cold week in July. Gra-hamstown was their first port of call on a tour that would take them to Johannes-burg, Cape Town and maputo (mozam-bique).

“The eeriest music i have ever heard”

“Fantastic and definitely avant-garde” was the audience’s verdict when the Swiss jazz musicians Andreas Schaerer and

Bänz oester played at the South African National Arts Festival. The event in Grahamstown led to inspiring collaborations.

c a p e T o w n

Phot

os: C

hris

Kab

wat

oPh

otos

: Chr

is K

abw

ato

Improvisation and spontaneity are the basis for their music: Andreas Schaerer (left) and Bänz Oester (right).

31LocaL T ime

Accompanying the Swiss duo was Cape-tonian mark Fransman, an accomplished tenor saxophonist and pianist. The oppor-tunity for Schaerer and Fransman to col-laborate had been hatched by Pro Helvetia Cape Town, the liaison office of the Swiss Arts Council. Schaerer and Fransman had spoken over the phone and corresponded via e-mail. each had taken a listen to the other’s music and they felt the chemistry was just right. Their first appearance on stage in Grahamstown was preceded by just one rehearsal session in the spirit of improvisation, which was the hallmark of the music project.

Schaerer is a successful, active jazz musician and improviser, and he calls his way of working “composition on the in-stant”. The key elements of jazz – improvi-sation and spontaneity – provide him with the flexibility to produce music that ranges from the highly-structured to improvised, energetic collaborations. oester is one of the most famous double-bass players in Switzerland, and has worked with South African musicians before. Joining Schaerer, oester and Fransman in the debut Gra-hamstown concert was Deborah Tanguy, a Parisian vocalist.

on a stage bathed in a strange purple light, the quartet kick off their opening piece: a good 22 minutes of the eeriest mu-sic i have ever heard. it starts with Schaerer sounding like a creaking door, before he and Tanguy move into grunts, chants and humming, transitioning after a good eight minutes to standard jazz with Fransman doing a solo riff. i later understand from Schaerer that he got into his kind of vocal act by deliberately wanting to irritate: “When you irritate people, they pay atten-tion. As they react you change the nature of performance – the audience becomes the performer.” over the next few days i will witness him doing just that.

if in the first performance Tanguy’s vocals seem to overshadow Andreas’ beat-boxing, he has regained his space and en-ergy the following day in a performance alongside British jazz saxophonist and singer Soweto Kinch. Schaerer’s voice starts off indistinguishable from Kinch’s saxophone, but as Kinch moves into a free-style rap, Schaerer provides the beatbox background music with his voice. Then it’s Schaerer’s turn to do his own piece called Knock Code 3, an energetic and rhythmic

song that mocks sound testing (1-2-3-4) and brings the house down. on stage Schaerer is like a tiger in a cage. There is energy pumping in his veins and he wants to let it out. He prowls on stage listening

to the instruments, gathering his vocal strength, drinking in the rhythm (and a lot of water too) and then unleashes his energy.

After the show Schaerer said he felt an incredible energy from the audience and from the supporting musicians, and all he could do was step outside and watch the stars. “Collaborations like this bring new ideas and add new energy to a musician’s mind. We both are truly inspired by the experiences we had,” says Schaerer. “it was very interesting to see how musicians approach music and improvisation differ-ently. We got the impression that the jazz scene in South Africa is very supportive and musicians encourage each other a lot.”

Composition without sheet musicBeing the teachers they are, Schaerer and oester also did two training workshops, one vocal and the other on instrumental composition. The first workshop was with a diverse group of youth. in typical Schaerer style it is an unconventional kind of training. Twenty or so youngsters spread out in horseshoe arrangement and he di-vides them into groups by pitches of voice: tenor, bass and soprano. Without a single coherent word uttered, the young people get into a fun-filled and energetic 30-minute session of human sounds and mouth per-cussion. The rest of the time is dedicated to a question-and-answer session in which the curious youths probe Schaerer with questions ranging from his stamina, how he rests his voice, practice, why he chose

to do his unique vocal act, whether beat-boxing could ever become part of a music curriculum to whether his body move-ments on stage are done consciously.

The second training workshop was, in the words of a University of Witwatersrand music teacher, “how music should be taught”. Without formally addressing the 20 or so youths armed with a variety of in-struments – clarinet, trumpet, saxophone, drumsticks – Schaerer and oester start a beat on stage and then Schaerer just walks up to a musician, imitates a sound with his mouth and the musician plays along. He then gently guides the musician to the stage. 45 minutes later an ensemble has composed a piece without any sheet music.

Schaerer and oester left Grahams-town with many fans. “Fantastic, different and definitely avant garde” was the re-sponse from music teacher Cameron An-drews and student Thembinkosi mavimb-ela, who participated in the workshops. Praise for Schaerer also came from local South African musician Bokani Dyer, win-ner of the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award, who in a radio interview admitted, “People i would like to collabo-rate with include Andreas Schaerer – an amazing talent.” Fransman later told me he felt the collaboration with Schaerer and oester would go beyond the tour into a joint recording. For his part, Schaerer was equally complimentary of the South African musicians: “i can very well imag-ine building a band that is half Swiss and half South African and such an ensemble composing and touring europe. i am sure both sides would benefit immensely in terms of music and exploring new spaces.”

www.schaerer-oester.com www.prohelvetia.org.za Chris Kabwato is a journalist and photographer. He is the founder of Zimbabwe in Pictures Trust and writes a weekly column for NewsDay, a Zimbabwean daily. He also coordinates Africa’s premier journalism conference, Highway Africa. www.highwayafrica.com

Young South Africans experiment with vocal percussion during a workshop.

32

A hush spreads to the very back row when Thu Thuy (seated, front left) plays the first notes of “Eliah,” a lyrical composition by Dani Wallimann (on clarinet, at right).

Swiss Rhythms and Asian Melodies

For the Swiss roots revival group Siidhang, folk music is as much a part of everyday life as the pitchfork or the Subaru parked outside their farmhouse. At the Folk Culture

Festival in Obwalden, their “Future Ländler” songs merged onstage with traditional music from Vietnam. A Eurasian premiere in a forest clearing near Giswil.

By Christian Hubschmid (text) and Niklaus Spoerri (photos)

P22852_E_32_35_Reportage.indd 32 17.11.11 14:50

33

Thu Thuy hangs on for dear life. The Stäfeli-Usser Äbnet cable car is descending into the valley. To the left and right, water-falls hurl themselves over cliffs and boul-ders; through the window there is a view up into the glaciers. The car dangles over the abyss. Just don’t look down. A soft cry escapes Thu Thuy’s lips. Half afraid, half delighted, she calls out: “Switzerland, I am ready!” This evening the first rehearsal will take place in Giswil, in the canton of Ob-walden: three Vietnamese musicians are meeting the local Ländler group, Siidhang. The Vietnamese women have travelled to Central Switzerland for the Obwald Folk Culture Festival. It’s a festival that brings together folk music from various regions of the world, and from different Swiss can-tons. Its goal is to track down authentic, living folk music, outside of folklore and patriotic sentimentality. And to discover the essence of folk culture, which is shared right across the globe.

A picture-postcard idyllAlp Usser Äbnet, 1673 metres above sea level. Thu Thuy and her friends are spend-ing the afternoon under a picture-postcard blue sky, eating cheese, bacon and ham. They wolf down the cheese, rind and all, ex-cited by this dairy product which is so un-usual in Vietnam. They take photos of eve-rything: the alpine flowers; the panoramic views; the Pinzgau cattle outside the cha-lets. Under the yellow Eichhof beer umbrel-las, Thu Thuy and the other Vietnamese women start up a gentle song. The hikers at the other tables listen entranced to the deft harmonies of the centuries-old music of Vietnam. The picture-postcard idyll sud-denly takes on foreign features – and is em-phasized all the more clearly because of them. In the sixth year of its existence, the Obwald Folk Culture Festival is featuring a true cultural mix for the first time. Nor-mally the individual groups, who live many thousands of kilometres away from each other, play one after the other. First an or-chestra from that year’s featured country – in 2011, Vietnam. Then a choir or an en-semble from a featured region of Switzer-land, which this year is Toggenburg. But

REPORTAGE

34

now the names on the programme sound special: Siidhang with Thu Thuy, Thuy Anh & Le Giang. The Ländler group Siid-hang can only rehearse in the evening. Dani Wallimann, the clarinettist, works in construction. The accordion players Michi Wallimann and Hugo Barmettler are farm-ers. For them, folk music is as much a part of everyday life as the pitchfork and the Subaru outside their farmhouse.

At six o’clock, Michi still has to feed the pigs. Amidst the deafening squeals of the happy swine, he loves nothing better than to yodel. And as he does so, melodies come to him; their origins in everyday life can be heard clearly. It is music that has not been artificially structured; more oblique and refined than the traditional Ländler folk tunes. The Festival Director, Martin Hess, describes it as “Future Län-dler music”.

The ingredients for Pho soupThe 63-year-old from Engelberg has been to Hanoi several times over the last few months. He brought the Vietnamese musi-cians sheet music and DVDs of Si-idhang. Swiss folk music is vastly different from the Vietnamese form. It’s jaunty and made for dancing, while Vietnamese folk music is gentle and always has a narrative undertone. The mu-sicians from Hanoi have never heard Swiss folk music before, but this isn’t a problem for them. They play polkas and waltzes from the sheet music and set them in their own arrangements. Martin Hess was already excited having visited the rehearsals in Hanoi. Now he has just got back from the butch-er’s in Giswil.

The founder of the Obwald Folk Culture Festival has been

discussing the menu plans for the 11- strong Vietnamese troop. He has had to or-der pigs’ tongues and hearts. Nobody eats these in Switzerland any more, and they are available at a knock-down price. They are, however, essential for a proper Viet-namese Pho soup. The Vietnamese women who are spending a week in Giswil, at what the Swiss press has termed the “strangest festival in Switzerland”, cook for them-selves in the hotel kitchen.

Thu Thuy and her fellow musicians come from a country whose millennia-old culture has been sharpened under French and other imperial influences. Although Vietnam is ruled by a Communist govern-ment, it is oriented towards a market-based economy in the same way as China. The gross national product is growing at a rate of knots. In the capital, Hanoi, people travel on sleek scooters, mobile phones to

their ears. Traditional folk music is in a dif-ficult position. Thu Thuy and her friends hardly get to perform, since people prefer modern Vietnamese pop music and hit songs. Folk music in Vietnam is a strongly academic affair.

Thu Thuy teaches at the academy of music in Hanoi and is often sent abroad by the Vietnamese government to represent traditional music. She has eight years of study behind her, has mastered several in-struments, and is a real virtuoso. In Swit-zerland it’s the other way around: folk mu-sic is not well-supported academically, and is therefore a living art form which can be seen in Switzerland’s many yodelling fes-tivals, and the local music events known as Stubeten. In Giswil the Vietnamese mu-sicians will play alongside men who can barely read music. Professionals meet am-ateurs; the cultivated Vietnamese artists and the Swiss “diamonds in the rough”.

Tradition and cultural exchangeThe first rehearsal on this Monday evening is also the last. The Siidhang members ar-rive a little late at the clearing where the festival is taking place. The greetings be-tween the rugged Swiss and the Vietnam-ese ladiesare brief. Both parties speak only rudimentary English. Michi Wallimann says: “I thought everything of theirs would

RepoRtage

The sensitive playing of the Vietnamese lends the rough Ländler music a depth and emotionality it didn’t have before. The key now is not to practise too much. So the group moves on to the pub in Giswil.

Swiss folk tunes are jaunty and rhythmic, Vietnamese melodies gentle and lyrical.

35

be made of wood, but this instrument has electronics!” The Dan Bau is the most typ-ical Vietnamese in strument. It is a single-stringed zither, with a sound-box made of bamboo or wood. For the concert it has to be amplified. The Vietnamese kneel on the floor. The Swiss sit on chairs, legs apart.

Thuy Anh simply starts to play. Her two-stringed violin has a human tone, like a woman’s voice. It’s breathtakingly beau-tiful, but together with the accordion, Dan Bau and double-bass, the piece by Dani Wallimann which they are playing from sheet music sounds too unwieldy, with too much going on at once. The women begin to giggle. Dani Wallimann holds onto his clarinet and says: “We’ll hold back a bit to start with.”

In Switzerland there is an open quar-rel over folk culture. One side claims there is no longer a real tradition: it’s just folk-lore. A nostalgic longing for an ideal world; sentimental kitsch, without any meaning or relation to modern reality. Martin Hess thinks otherwise. In the foreword to the festival programme he writes: “For Obwald Folk Culture Festival, tradition is a living thing we want to pass on to future gener-ations. Here, in the exchange with other parts of the country and with foreign cul-tures, our tradition will be deepened, sharpened and further developed.”

In Giswil it soon becomes clear who is wearing the trousers. It’s the Vietnamese women. Gently but firmly, Thu Thuy be-gins to arrange the piece. The Vietnamese dulcimer will begin, then the violin and accordion, the double-bass and Dan Bau should take turns joining in. The plan works. Suddenly the energy level rises. The sedate Ländler tune starts to swing, and the diverse instruments wind them-selves around the curves of the natural melody. Hardly a word is spoken. The in-struments flirt with each other.

An hour later, the mountain in the background is tinged with pink. The clear-ing is plunged into darkness. On the stage, the motley group is playing as naturally and smoothly as if it had never done any-thing else. The sensitive playing of the Vi-etnamese lends the rough Ländler music a depth and emotionality that it didn’t have before. The key now is not to practise too much, otherwise the magical spontaneity will be lost. So the group moves on to the pub in Giswil. Sitting around the locals’ ta-ble, it quickly gets late. The men make their farewells to the Vietnamese ladies with a yodel into the night.

Once the festival begins, nothing can go wrong. The Vietnamese ambassador is there, and has brought his Indonesian and Thai colleagues with him. The canton of

Obwalden, which subsidises the festival, has sent a delegate. Josef Gnos, the pre sident of the canton’s culture commission, outs himself as a fan of the fes-tival. In Autumn 2011 it will be decided whether the three-year grant for the Folk Culture Festi-val, which is also supported by Pro Helvetia, will be extended. He is confident that it will go through.

Siidhang with Thu Thuy, Thuy Anh & Le Giang is a tri-umph. The tables are mainly occupied by local people, but there are also some visitors from the city. They stamp their feet on the floorboards, calling for an encore. The group doesn’t have one, as they have only practised three pieces. And so Thu Thuy begins the dreamy in-tro to Dani Wallimann’s piece “Eliah” for the second time. She

is wearing a long yellow dress, her head-dress atop her head like a halo. There is si-lence all the way to the back row.

www.obwald.ch Christian Hubschmid is a culture journalist for the Swiss-German Sunday paper SonntagsZeitung. He writes about all forms of popular music, from Lady Gaga to yodelling, as well as about theatre, cabaret and show business. He lives in Zurich with his wife and two children. Niklaus Spoerri is a Zurich-based photographer. He trained in photography at Zurich’s School of Applied Arts (today the ZHdK). Since then he has worked professionally in documentary photography, portraits and reportage. In September, his book of portraits of professional doubles, who is who? was published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg. www.niklausspoerri.ch Translated from the German by Ruth Martin

RepoRtage

Before the concert: a visit to the picturesque Alp Usser Äbnet.

36

Pro Helv eti a Newsfl asH

in 2012 Pro Helvetia will be restructured to separate strategy and operations. this far-ranging change has its roots in the new Culture Promotion act passed by parliament in 2009. in its smaller form, the Board of trustees is exclusively trustees is exclusively tresponsible for the Council’s strategic direction. it comprises nine figures from the cultural scene, with all linguistic re-gions represented. Board President Mario annoni will remain in office for another two years.

the federal Council has appointed the following members of the Board for a term of four years: Marco franciolli, director of the Museo Cantonale d’arte lugano; Guillaume Juppin de fondaum-ière, co-Ceo of Quantic Dream; Claudia Knapp, curator, freelance jour-Claudia Knapp, curator, freelance jour-Claudia Knapp, curator, freelance journalist; Johannes schmid-Kunz, cultural manager, managing director of the schweizerische trachtenvereinigung; trachtenvereinigung; tNicole seiler, dancer and choreographer; Peter siegenthaler, financial expert, president of the verband verband v schweizer-chweizer-chweizerischer Kantonalbanken; anne-Catherine sutermeister (incumbent), Haute école de théâtre la Manufacture; felix Uhlmann (incumbent), professor for state and adminsitrative law, University of Zurich.

on the operational level, a 13-mem-ber expert commission will assist man-agement with the assessment of applica-tions for funding and the Council’s own projects. the interdisciplinary body will make recommendations on all projects with funding over CHf 50,000. f 50,000. f addidi-tional independent experts are available for consultation.

www.prohelvetia.ch

New Board of trustees for trustees for tPro Helvetia

the GameCulture programme, which has been in effect since 2010, is to run for two years with the aim of support-ing sophisticated design.

the winners:• Daina: The Herbarium

by Dario Hardmeier and raffaele de lauretis • Feist

by florian faller and adrian stutz• Jump N Roll

by Games2Be (Gerhard oester)• Krautscape

by Mario von rickenbach, Michael Burgdorfer

• Macrocosmby Klaas Kaat

• MokMokby twobeats (twobeats (t samim winiger, Marc lauper)

• POPby Bitforge (reto senn, andreas Hüppi)

www.gameculture.ch

Midway through its run, Pro Helvetia’s GameCulture programme is doing very well. in september the international jury awarded up to 50,000 francs to each of seven swiss computer-game developers to enable them to produce prototypes. the games have potential, says Guillaume de fondaumière, president of the jury and co-Ceo of french game studio Quan-tic Dream: “sooner or later they will all make it onto the market.” Games for the computer, for the iPhone, iPod and iPad have been created that experi-ment with the medium, whether by means of 3D-like, handpainted landscapes or a multiplayer racing game in which the course develops during play.

it’s good news that the first “call for projects” enjoyed such a promising response. the arts Council is already planning the next call for 2012, when it will make a decision regarding its future policy for supporting work in the field.

award-award-a wward-wward- inning swiss swiss sComputer Games

Krautscape: an action-packed multiplayer racing game for Mac and PC

Pro Helvetia NewsflasH

37

Zurich and teaches at etH Zurich, will represent a position of importance to contemporary swiss architecture in the floating City. with its choice, the jury aims to spur a discussion of contemporary architectural theory.

a seven-member jury composed of representa-tives of both disciplines is responsible for the nomi-nation of artists and ar-chitects for the three bi-ennials. Project managers at Pro Helvetia are art his-torian sandi Paucic and culture manager rachele Giudici legittimo.www.prohelvetia.ch

the last bit of adhesive tape has now been removed from the swiss Pavilion in venice. with his expansive installa-tion, thomas Hirschhorn represented switzerland at this year’s venice Bien-nale. as of 2012 Pro Helvetia will select the swiss representative. the new Cul-ture Promotion act assigns responsibili-ty for representation at the art and ar-chitecture Biennales in venice as well as the art Biennial in Cairo to the swiss arts Council; the federal office of Cul-ture (foC) had previously made the decisions. this means a strengthening of one of the traditional core duties of Pro Helvetia – the distri bution of swiss culture abroad – by a key mandate.

in 2012 the venice show will be devoted to its second focus, architecture: the 13th architecture Biennale will take place from august to December. to do justice to its international renown, the jury of experts has nominated an in fluential architect and theorist: Miroslav Šik, who runs his own firm in

Installation view of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Crystal of Resistance at the Swiss Pavilion.

Pro Helvetia takes on the Biennials

although this is schnyder’s very first ex-hibition in the Us, the Basel native who has lived in Zug since 1966 has been wrongly overlooked by the international scene, says siNY Director Gianni Jetzer. the New York show, to run until 19 feb-ruary, features Landschaft I-XXXV (1991): 35 landscapes offering a unique glimpse of switzerland, at once homey and uncanny. the artist’s most recent video, Schnapsparade, will also be on view: a dozen little schnaps bottles parad-ing by on wooden wagons carved by hand by schnyder. the scene is accompa-nied by marching music that tips the entire piece into the realm of the absurd.

www.swissinstitute.net the siNY’s new address: 18 wooster street, New York, NY 10013

Poto

(bo

ttom

): D

avid

e le

gitt

imo

swiss art in Prime location

At the Swiss Institute New York (SINY): Frédéric Schnyder’s Schnapsparade

the swiss institute has found a prime location in soHo in the middle of the Big apple, with ex-cellent walk-in custom. to help it hold its own amid the cultural variety of New York, swiss art has been granted generously proportioned viewing rooms on the ground floor, where the siNY can show a sophisticated New York public what switzer-land has to offer in the way of contemporary art: for example the self-taught artist Jean-frédé-ric schnyder (born 1945).

Pro Helvetia NewsflasH

38PARTNER: MigRos CULTURE PERCENTAgE

By Christoph Lenz – No, there’s no por-trait of him in her office. But then, who would want to hang a founding father on the wall, when he is still such a shining figure in the present day? I’ve already switched off the dictaphone when Hedy Graber, who heads the Directorate of Cul-tural and Social Affairs at the Federation of Migros Cooperatives, confesses that the conversation around her boardroom table returns to him again and again. Usually in connection with the question of what he’d think of one project or another.

He is, of course, Gottlieb Duttweiler, founder of Migros; politician; citoyen. And this idea goes back to Dutti too: in 1950 the patron issued a watchword for his com-pany, that “with increasing material power, [it] should constantly foster even greater social and cultural achievements”. In 1957 the Migros Culture Percentage was en-shrined in the statutes of the Migros Coop-eratives. Since then, the institution has established itself as a mainstay for Swiss cultural production.

Equal rights for commerce and cultureContinuity is a rare commodity in cultural funding. It’s even more remarkable that a private company, moreover one facing stiff competition, should provide exactly that. For 54 years the orange giant has been in-vesting a percentage of its sales revenue in projects with cultural and social value. And this is no mere marketing ploy. The Migros Culture Percentage, according to the cooperative’s statutes, is a company objective on an equal footing with the re-tail business.

The Percentage currently has a budget of around 115 million Swiss Francs. But only around a third will be used for cultural projects in the narrower sense: Migros takes a wider view of its social engagement, and also supports access to education and leisure activities. This task falls to the ten regional cooperatives within the Percent-age, like Migros Aare or Migros Eastern Switzerland. These are autonomous sup-porters of regional initiatives. Club School facilities, integration projects, and the management of local recreation areas, the so-called “Green Meadow” parks, fall under their remit.

Braver, defter, more consistentThe Zurich-based Federation of Migros Co-operatives is responsible for numerous ac-tivities at a national level. It manages the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, which aims to fuel a broad, academically-grounded di-alogue on social and economic issues. The Directorate of Cultural and Social Affairs also has its home in Migros’ Zurich head-quarters. The core of its business goes be-yond the support of culture. Applications

for financial aid come not only from the fields of visual arts, comics, children’s and youth theatre, and film, to name just a few, but also from the organizers and promot-ers of health projects. As varied as these ar-eas are, for Hedy Graber three aspects are key to dealing with applications: they must be “relevant, current and innovative”.

Evaluating applications is just one part of the Percentage’s activities. When neces-sary, the orange giant also takes a directly creative role in the Swiss cultural land-scape. The biennial Steps festival, which of-fers a nationwide stage for contemporary dance every other spring, has its origins in one such initiative. The same goes for the three-day event m4music, which has very quickly established itself as a forum and laboratory for Swiss pop music.

These examples illustrate where the strengths of the Migros Culture Percent-age lie: it is more independent than pub-lic institutions, and thus braver, defter, and more consistent. Migros entered un-charted territory when it began supporting pop music recordings in the nineties. Now there is hardly a single municipality that doesn’t offer grants for producing CDs.

The Migros Culture Percentage has now turned its attention to alleviating bands’ little emergencies: anyone who needs a camera to film a video clip, a copier to print a flyer, or a lavish bus to travel to a concert can get assistance from the four Culture Bureaus Migros helps to finance in Basel, Bern, Geneva and Zurich.

And what would he think of this? He’d probably say that many great stories began with a simple van.

www.migros-kulturprozent.ch Christoph Lenz writes about culture and media for the Bern daily newspaper Der Bund. Translated from the German by Ruth Martin

PA RT N ER

Illu

stra

tion

: Raf

fine

rie

Migros Culture

PercentageThe Migros Culture Percentage

supports education, leisure activities, dialogues and

contemporary culture: in some cases with substantial

grants, in others simply by lending out a set of wheels.

39CARTE bLANChE

By Michel Layaz – What kind of writing? Literature, of course. After all, school is supposed to teach us to write in our native language. But writing literature from our language (as Karl Kraus said: I do not write in German but from German) makes the business a bit more complicated. Why? It makes it necessary to define what can be considered literature today. And in an era when everyone thinks that what he thinks is justifiable simply because he thinks it, such a debate would be quite long, contra-dictory, and noisy.

Who can learn to write literature? Peo-ple who are possessed by writing, people ready to become involved in what they are passionate about. And ready for others to follow them down their path.

With this clear, let us try to answer the question. The arguments are familiar; both sides repeat themselves, defend an ideol-ogy, indeed a philosophy. On my right, the “French school”, dominated by the idea of the inspired genius, the writer as a me-dium who, as soon as he is asked a question about his art, always paradoxically finds himself obliged to outline the entire his-tory of literature, from its origins to today. The idea that writing could be taught even just a little bit would reduce the writer’s glory, brilliance and genius. On my left, the “American school”, uninhibited, open to the most varied experiments, but not afraid to talk about effective, efficient and con-ventional frameworks for structuring a story. A belief in apprenticeship, in pro-gress. Why should writers differ from plas-tic surgeons, musicians or actors, who have long been perfecting their arts in schools?

If there are days when I feel very Amer-ican about this, there are others when I al-most feel French. But I am sure that there are young and wonderful people with mag-nificent potential who have chosen to make writing the center of their lives. When a lit-

erary institute reaches out to them, that is surely a great opportunity. In such a place (beyond just the writing workshops with their stimulating constraints), they will be able to make the work closest to their heart a priority, while also learning from the re-marks and questions of the school’s other students, and above all from the comments of writers, that is, people whose legitimacy derives from their own practice of writing. The latter will remind them, for example, how important it is to be uncompromising with themselves about the quality of a text they have written. They will have to put their egos aside and develop a healthy re-flexivity. Confronted with sustained, con-structive criticism that highlights pitfalls and dysfunctions while also emphasizing what is particularly successful, the stu-dents develop better eyes for the malleabil-ity, instability and perfectibility of their texts. Clearly, this is not at all about sub-mitting to authority; rather, the students learn from privileged encounters where everything can be said and where they are accountable only to literature itself.

The writer who respectfully follows the work students give him can incite them to discover all kinds of incoherencies that prevent the text from taking shape; he can make them aware of the quicksand that

must be quickly avoided or they will sink, and he can also remind them to never for-get that, as Erri de Luca put it, “writing is an island, not the infinite ocean.”

All that is worth a great deal, but even so, the teacher’s primary role will always be to serve as a stimulus. Everything that in-vites you to be yourself is a stimulus.

Michel Layaz is a writer whose books are published by Zoé and Points-Seuil. He teaches at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel. Deux sœurs, his most recent work, came out in February 2011. Translated from the French by Andrew Shields Illustration: Rahel Nicole Eisenring

Can Creative Writing

Be Taught?

CA RTE BL A NCHE

40PerformanceScHaUfenSTer

Sandrine Pelletier

Catwalk, 2005In-site installation comprising 60 cat figures (nylon, cloth, glass, acrylic, plasticine, carpet material), various sizes

Sandrine Pelletier works with a variety of me-dia, including sculpture, textiles, drawings, installations, performance and music. In ad-dition, she uses techniques borrowed from folk art and diverse handicrafts. Optical illu-sions are fundamental elements of her work, and her installations incarnate themes such as metamorphosis, ritual and legend.

Catwalk is one of Pelletier’s first large-scale installations and was commissioned by Tsumori Chisato. The artist combined cloth from the Japanese designer’s collection with other materials to create a swarm of cats hov-ering surrealistically over the room.

Sandrine Pelletier (b. 1976) lives and works in Geneva. She is a graduate of the University of Art and Design Lausanne (ECAL) and has been teaching at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) since 2010.

Each issue, Gallery presents a work by a Swiss artist.

G A LLEry

42

Receive information about art and cul-ture in Switzerland, keep up to date on Pro Helvetia’s current projects, and read reports of Swiss cultural exchange with countries around the world.

Passages is published three times a year in German, French and English and is read in more than 60 countries.

Send an e-mail with your postal address to passages@prohelvetia.ch or sign up for a subscription on our website at www.prohelvetia.ch › Publications

Order a free subscription to Passages!

Browsing, Blogging, Tweeting, TaggingCultural Journalism in Flux

World Traveller with Sketchpad: Cosey in India | Swiss Game Design in San Francisco | CoNCa: Fresh Breeze on the Catalan Cultural Scene

THE CULTURAL MAGAZINE OF PRO HELVETIA, NO. 56, ISSUE 2/2011

passages

In June of this year the Passages editorialboard conducted a reader survey. Threeyears after the launch of the new concept,we wanted to know how our readersfeel about the magazine. The responseswere pleasingly positive, with a majorityof those surveyed happy with the maga-zine’s journalistic content: 80% like thechoice of topics and 74% find that thearticles often or almost always give themfood for thought. 80% of readers oftenor almost always find the graphic designattractive, and over 80% think thatPassages explains Pro Helvetia’s dutiesand services. More than 80% of readerswould be sorry to see the magazinecease publication. Average reading timecease publication. Average reading timecease publication. Ais 40 minutes.

A total of 594 people took part in thesurvey, of whom the largest group wassurvey, of whom the largest group wassurveyartists (30%) and the second largest artenthusiasts (26%). The rest were eventorganizers, institutions, journalists, poli-ticians and others. The proportions ofmen and women were practically equaland – perhaps the most surprising result– the readership is relatively evenly dis-tributed over the 25-year-old to 64-yeartributed over the 25-year-old to 64-yeartributed over the 25-year --old to 64-year--old to 64-yearold age groups. The survey is an incentiveto the editorial board to continue on thecurrent path.

The lucky winner of the photo print byTom Huber is Tom Huber is T Passages reader PeterNiklaus of Olten. We congratulate himNiklaus of Olten. We congratulate himNiklaus of Olten. Won the prize!

From the survey:

When you receive Passages culturemagazine, you read:

• almost all the articles• rather more than half• rather less than half• only individual articles• none of it

Good Marks fos fos f r Passages

25.3%31.3%

22.9%

19.3%

1.2%

43

Egypt in Transition

How did the Egyptian revolution affect the country’s arts and culture sector? What influence do artists have on Egyp-tian politics? Can art help to bring about social change? In the next issue of Passages we pay a visit to Egypt. We ask Egyptian artists how they see their role in the current process of social transformation, and find out what changes the revolution has brought to the art world. We report on the country’s cultural politics and funding policies, and take a look at the work of interna-tional funding institutions in Egypt. The next issue of Passages will appear in May 2012.

PassagesRecent Issues:

Browsing, Blogging, Tweeting, Tagging No. 56

Creativity and Culture Shock No. 55

Computer Games:The Art of the Future No. 54

Browsing, Blogging, Tweeting, TaggingCultural Journalism in Flux

World Traveller with Sketchpad: Cosey in India | Swiss Game Design in San Francisco | CoNCa: Fresh Breeze on the Catalan Cultural Scene

THE CULTURAL MAGAZINE OF PRO HELVETIA, NO. 56, ISSUE 2/2011

passages

passages

Gäuerle and Chlefele: Swiss Folk Culture in Argentina p. 6Exoticism with a Twist: Chopin as Modern Opera p. 36

On the Heels of a Poet: Writer-in-Residence in Buenos Aires p. 41

Computer Games: The Art of the Future

THE CULTURAL MAGAZINE OF PRO HELVETIA, NO. 54, ISSUE 3/2010

passages

THE CULTURAL MAGAZINE OF PRO HELVETIA, NO. 55, ISSUE 1/2011

Creativity and Culture Shock Cultural Exchange around the Globe

By the Suez: Artist in Quest of Evidence | Design: Objects That Testify to Human Creativity | Experiment: Musicologists Meet Sonic Tinkerers

Publisher Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council www.prohelvetia.ch Editorial Staff Managing Editor and Editor, German edition: Janine Messerli Assistance: Martha Monstein, Sandra Suter and Juliette Wyler

Editor, French edition: Marielle Larré Editor, English edition: Rafaël Newman, Marcy Goldberg Editorial Address Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council Passages Hirschengraben 22 CH-8024 Zurich T +41 44 267 71 71 F +41 44 267 71 06 passages@prohelvetia.ch Graphic Design Raffinerie AG für Gestaltung, Zurich Printing Druckerei Odermatt AG, Dallenwil Print Run 18,000 © Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council. All rights reserved. Reproduction only by permission of the editors. Bylined articles do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher. Photographs © the photographers; reproduction by permission only. Pro Helvetia supports and promotes Swiss culture in Switzerland and throughout the world. It supports diversity in creative culture, stimulates reflection on cultural needs, and contributes to an open and culturally pluralist Switzerland.

Passages The Cultural Magazine of Pro Helvetia online: www.prohelvetia.ch/passages/en

Pro Helvetia News Current projects, programmes and competitions: www.prohelvetia.ch

Pro Helvetia Branch Offices Paris/France www.ccsparis.com

Rome, Milan, Venice/Italy www.istitutosvizzero.it

Warsaw/Poland www.prohelvetia.pl

Cairo/Egypt www.prohelvetia.org.eg

Cape Town/South Africa www.prohelvetia.org.za

New Delhi/India www.prohelvetia.in

New York/USA www.swissinstitute.net

San Francisco/USA www.swissnexsanfrancisco.org

Shanghai/China www.prohelvetia.cn

Newsletter Would you like to stay informed about Swiss arts and culture, and keep up to date on Pro Helvetia’s activities? Subscribe to our e-mail newsletter: www.prohelvetia.ch

A subscription to Passages is free of charge, as are downloads of the electronic version from www.prohelvetia.ch/passages/en Back copies of the printed magazine may be ordered for CHF 15 (incl. postage and handling) per issue.

I MPR ESSU M PA SSAGES ON LIN E N ExT ISSU E

impressum / passages online / next issue

Pro Helvetia supports and promotes Swiss culture in Switzerland and throughout the world.

It is striking that many performance artists currently active in the theatre sector tend to behave like (apparently) objective researchers or teachers rather than radical artistic subjects.

Contemporary performance art is obliged to find an aesthetic strategy that can explore the increasingly subtle social boundaries between play and seriousness, between seeming and being, and between the imaginary and the real, so as to be able to make itself the Other that un-settles and dis-solves those boundaries.

The audience is a tyrannous monster! It has demands! And the unfolding of the evening is always, on some level, about how those demands are negotiated, managed, met or refused. www.prohelvetia.ch/passages/en

To Inform or to Provoke? Performance and PoliticsEva Behrendt, p. 12

“Can you trust the people sitting next to you?” Tim Etchells, interviewed by Dagmar Walser, p. 20

What Is a Performance Anyway? Gabriele Klein, p. 6