multilingual | Etcetera

Der Meister des Unheimliche

Ein Porträt des deutschen Theaterstürmers Ersan Mondtag

Im deutschen Theater ist niemand mehr zu finden, der nocht nichts von diesem Enfant terrible gesehen oder jedenfalls von ihm gehört hat. Das Werk des Regisseurs und Gestalters Ersan Mondtag hält die Mitte zwischen Theater, Bildende Künste und Performance. Aus einer tiefgegründeten Faszination für Horror, bespielt er mit seinem extrem visuellen Stil meisterhaft die Ängste des Zuschauers. Montag präsentiert sich in dieser Spielzeit zum ersten Mal mit zwei Produktionen dem belgischen Publikum.

Shirin Sojitrawalla

essay 26.02.2019

Cally Spooner: between language and body

Black box and white cube

From February 3 till March 18, the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva held a survey exhibition of the work of the British writer, performance-maker and visual artist Cally Spooner (b.1983). She presented her work in Belgium as well, as a part of the Playground festival at STUK and, more recently, during a talk she gave at KASK. Spooner’s work provides an interesting case study on performance and choreography in a museum setting – a much-debated subject – merging as it does creation processes and viewing regimes associated with the black box as well as the white cube. In her oeuvre, text, video, audio, sculpture and choreography are related thematically, dramaturgically and in time.

Kristof van Baarle

essay 14.01.2019

What is Queer About Queer Performance Now?

Between identity and identitylessness

In this article, Elke Huybrechts regards what happened on theater stages in 2017 through a queer theoretical lens, motivated by her fondness for queering as a strategy, but also by the realization that there’s an antagonism as well as a certain elusiveness at the heart of the artistic practices she associates with it.

Elke Huybrechts

essay 08.01.2019

Nieuwsbrief

The spirit of Judson in a new millenium

The legendary collective still oscillates between canonization and transience

Until the beginning of February, the New York MoMA is mounting an exhibition on Judson Dance Theater. In the sixties, this legendary collective, which used the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village as its home base, paved the way for a postmodern dance and performance which steered clear of the formalism of modern dance. The influence of Judson Dance Theater on the development of contemporary dance in the last decades of the twentieth century is undeniable. But what can the movement mean to millennials who are trying to find their place in the world of dance today?

Eylül Fidan Akıncı

essay 07.01.2019

Decor as protagonist

Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati on theatre and the new climate regime

What do we humans have in common with wales, mushrooms, bacteria or the internet? We are all networked entities. Philosopher Bruno Latour pleads for a radically different perspective on the persistent binaries of human-thing, human-environment or local-global. Latour crosses the boundaries of the academic world and brings his insights to the stage, together with researcher-director Frédérique Aït-Touati. ‘Using horror techniques to arouse strong feelings doesn’t make a work political.’

Sébastien Hendrickx, Kristof van Baarle

conversation 07.01.2019

Cybernetics vs. Decartes

The Mind of non-Cartesian Theater

To contextualize my work HUMAN SIMULATION, I organized a Cybernetic Conversation at the Beursschouwburg in March 2017 with Professor Francis Heylighen, head of the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition research group at the Free University of Brussels and the Global Brain Institute1. Two months later, in June 2017, we arranged the first Cybernetic, Algorithmic, Systemic Theater Symposium2 at Frascati Theater, Amsterdam. Both these events brought together artists, theater makers and scientists in the fields of systems biology, cognitive science and cybernetics to build a common language around complex systems through theater experiments, lectures and conversations.

Orion Maxted

essay 18.12.2018

Thinking out loud

Essayistic figures on stage

The influence of the essay as a means of expression has long reached beyond the confines of literature. Just think of the visual essay and the rich history of the essay film. In his groundbreaking study Postdramatisches Theater (1999), theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann devoted a very short chapter to the ‘scenic essay’. Lehmann saw it as one of the possible paths that theatre could pursue as soon as it decentralized or let go of the dramatic plot. Today, a lot of the work that dominates our stages possesses an essayistic slant. Why is that? And how do artists translate this form to the stage?

Jasper Delbecke, Sébastien Hendrickx

essay 28.11.2018