56 pg., published by toxic dreams, 2010
No ISBN, you can send us an email and we will send you a book.

Intellectual Property

or
Mr. Lincoln Goes to Prater

A Sci-Fi musical/opera built around the Department of Artificial Live Entertainment (ALE). A disorienting laboratory of past and future, fictional and historical, technology and philosophy, reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation. Intellectual Property asks the question what makes an original. In addition it deals with the questions of copyrights, intellectual property, historical inheritance. If Shakespeare would have lived today, what would have happened with all the source material he used for writing his plays? Would he have to pay royalties? Does the word “original” has any value anymore?

Singers/Performers: Siegmar Aigner, Dietmar Bruckmayr, Jeannie Mayr, Mirjam Wällstedt, Irene Coticchio
Composed by Josef Linschinger and Michael Strohmann
Video: Mathias Gmachl
Directed and designed by Yosi Wanunu
Produced by Kornelia Kilga

Production dates: March 31 – Apr 3, 2003, ORF Studio 3 Vienna

Realism or Vanya

(For the purposes of this discussion we would like to use a narrow definition of the term realism as: 1) A practical understanding and acceptance of the actual nature of the world, rather than an idealized or romantic view of it. 2) In artistic and literary works, lifelike representation of people and the world without any idealization.)

The center of this long-term project is the question of realism as style and its long and lasting influence on the theatre of our time. Using the play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov as the basic material for this discussion, we would like to explore the topic of realistic representation on stage and how it controlled and blocked the many other possibilities that the stage had to offer. It is a mistake to assume that realism as a style is over and that many other styles and techniques took its place. A quick look at our theatre stages will prove that realism is alive and kicking and its influence is very much still visible. That influence is not limited to the text but it can be seen in the style of acting, the directing and the sets. In Realism or Vanya we will use therefore not only the text by Chekhov but in addition text by: Stanislavski, Ibsen, Strasberg, Peter Brook, Brecht, Grotowski, Gertrude Stein, Artaud, Duchamp, Meyerhold and more. The idea, in essence, is to juxtapose the theory with the practice, to put the play in the context of theatre and performance in the late 20th and early 21st century.

Chekhov wrote: “All I wanted was to say honestly to people: ‘Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!’ The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life. And so long as this different life does not exist, I shall go on saying to people again and again: ‘Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!’” Chekhov’s reputation rests on his realism. Except for the climactic ending of each act in Ivanov, (especially the last one), the plays gain their tension and drama from the subtexts of people dispossessed of home, ideals, vigor and love. His realism derives from his portraits of his characters’ lives in their entire daily minutia.

Shortly after Chekhov’s death, in 1904, Tolstoy voiced a common feeling that plays like Uncle Vanya and The Three Sisters weren’t quite dramas. “To evoke a mood,” he said in an interview, “you want a lyrical poem. Dramatic forms serve, and ought to serve, quite different aims. In a dramatic work the author ought to deal with some problem that has yet to be solved and every character in the play ought to solve it according to the idiosyncrasies of his own character…. But you won’t find anything of the kind in Chekhov.” In this criticism Tolstoy hit on exactly those features that have made Chekhov’s plays the fundamental works of modern drama. Like lyric poems, they favor mood over plot; there is no overriding “problem”, and when problems do appear, the playwright never seems to endorse any solutions. Chekhov’s dramatic form allowed him to present things on the stage “just as complicated and just as simple as … in real life,” as he famously wrote. “People are sitting at a table having dinner, that’s all, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being torn apart.”

People are sitting at the table talking, doesn’t it sound familiar? (Again, look at the theatre around us). Like in real life… is this the purpose of art/theatre to portray life in real and to avoid any ornamentation; and if yes, how? Here we are arriving at the practice. How to make the real real. The relationship between Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theatre, co-founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Chekhov’s old friend Vladimar Nemirovich-Danchenko was to prove hugely significant for both parties. For the author, it regenerated his interest in theatre and his role in it. For the theater, not only did the success of their revival of The Seagull save them from ruin but also Stanislavsky believed that Chekhov’s work symbolized his ambitions towards naturalism in the theatre. As the famous Russian actor-director Meyerhold points out, this was not Chekhov’s sole purpose.

“Chekhov had come to visit a rehearsal of The Seagull (September 11, 1989) in the Moscow Art Theatre. One of the actors told him that during the play frogs croaked backstage, dragonflies hummed and dogs howled. ‘What for?’ asked Anton. [Chekhov] sounding dissatisfied. ‘It’s realistic,’ said the actor. ‘Realistic,’ A.P. [Chekhov] repeated with a laugh. And then after a brief pause, he remarked, ‘the stage is art. In one of Kramskoy’s genre paintings he has some magnificently drawn faces. What if we cut out the painted noses from one of these faces and substituted a live one? The new nose would be real but the painting would be ruined.’”

So what is realism? Is it a minimal style clean of any effect, is it about people talking and we the audience listen to their story, is it about mirroring the reality outside the performance space? Because if it is, then the reality is far denser, it is so complex and intricate that it is difficult to assimilate and understand. It is the question of density that is in opposition to Chekhov remarks about people understanding their life. Dogs howl in real life, but in theatre it is too dense or in other words unrealistic, or is it?

The Russian Formalists considered “density” (faktura) as one of the most important qualities in their world of deliberately fabricated objects. The appropriately (i.e. creatively) deformed work of art was supposed to reawaken the perceptual power of the audience and remind them of the “density” present in the world around them. To help the audience, Victor Shklovskij, one of the leading figures in this literary movement, proposed the strategy of “making strange”: the poetic image was always to be put into a new and unexpected context where it might be seen as if for the first time. “Making strange” is quite the opposite of “like in real life” but it is also a shift in importance from people talking to people being/behaving. Density requires, first of all, the leveling of all theatre elements. Each given sequence is the construction of a kind of art-object in which all the elements – performers, machines, words, space, time, noise, things – serve as variables, and stress is placed on the formal relationship of these variables. As a result, theatre experience no longer depends upon the intellectual super-structures that we normally rely upon to form our ideas and experience of the world and to match our experience with our perceptions of reality. Our perception of “the reality” is what this long-term project is about.

Process structure

First installment – Realism

All the elements of the play (characters, sets, props, moods, text) will be viewed form the point of view of realism. They will be put in front of the audience and examined in accordance to their similarity to real life. The presentation style will move from an installation, where the different costumes and props will be presented and played with, to documentary style movies where the life like reality will be shown. The acting style will follow the realistic tradition – character acting with attention to details and a full psychological motivation. The history of the play and the different landmark productions of it will be discussed as well, in an effort to show how the notion of realism changed over time.

Second installment – Making strange

All the elements of the play will be put into a “new and unexpected context” and as far as possible from realism. The acting area should be open to all the ambiguities, to all the multiple impulses present in a given situation. The realistic theater is not designed to engage directly in the basic self-contradictory nature of the human psyche. It can suggest it through a character’s behavior, but cannot play with it as a concrete motif in and of itself. In this installment the contradictory will be center stage. Via the text the question of language and why it never adequately expresses the true and complex quality of an internal impulse will be asked. The staging will allow for a multitude of things to happen onstage which will recast the language of the text, displace and expand it, and give it new meanings.

Third installment – Making strange realism

The finding of parts one and two will come together in this installment to be presented as the final piece.

Ich Sterbe/I’m Dying/Я умираю

For the last installment of the ‘Realism or Uncle Vanya’ project (Vanya 3) we take a detour; instead of another deconstruction of the play, we tell a different story, the story of Chekhov’s death. The famous writer died in 1904; since then the facts, concerning his death, are told, and retold, in a way that will make him turn in his grave. How did Chekhov die? Why can’t we get a realistic description of what really happened in his death bed, in a hotel room in Germany? How come, a writer that so insisted on describing life the way it is, cannot get a proper description of his death the way it was?
The story of Chekhov’s death is a Rashomon worthy of Kurosawa. The story of his death and the way it was viewed, the subjectivity of the observer, serves as ironic contra point to the so called objectivity of Chekhov’s writing. What is real in the realism of Chekhov’s death, and how speech can describe it is the center of the performance.

Filmcast: Cezary Tomaszewski (Anton P. Chekhov) Irene Coticchio (Olga Knipper) Anna Mendelssohn (Autorin), Otmar Wagner (Doktor Schwoerer), Radek Hewelt (Leo Rabeneck), Justin Poole (Porter)
Voiceovers: Evgeniya Lianskaya, Lena Kvadrat, Wolfgang Weitlaner, Oleg Soulimenko, Justin Poole, Samuel Machto, Olivier Brasselet, Radek Hewelt
Live Cast: Cezary Tomaszewski (Anton P. hCekhov), Anna Mendelssohn (Author)
Live Filming: Yosi Wanunu, Otmar Wagner, Claribel Koss und Michael Strohmann
Composition, Film- and Live Editing: Michael Strohmann
House: Otmar Wagner
Assistant director: Claribel Koss
Film Assistant: Isabella Sedlak
Written and directed by: Yosi Wanunu
Produced by: Kornelia Kilga

Production dates: Nov 25 – 29 2009, brut Künstlerhaus, Vienna

Mein Camp

A Lecture Demonstration

“I want to be one of the boys. A regular guy”
(Bing Crosby in the Road to Singapore)

The fear of homosexuality drives many cultural representations of masculinity; positive masculine identification is so hysterically tied up with an obsession with not being homosexual that – rather like the ultimate conundrum offered by the ‘The Sexual Aberrations’ (Freud 1905) being that perversity is the ultimate normality- homosexuality, through needing to be systematically repressed, becomes the sine qua non of masculinity. In so many narratives the man’s fear is the fear of an externalized ‘other’ that is actually, as it turns out, the embodiment of his own perceived internal inadequacies, most significantly homosexuality. (in the History of Sexuality Michel Foucault referred to fetishism as ‘the model perversion’, but as far as masculinity is concerned, this is homosexuality.)
Is there any necessary relation between the aesthetic, the sexual, the psychological, and the political? Is subjectivity purely ideological? How does heterocentrism inhere in the very model through which desire is conceptualized? Does psychoanalysis valorize an illusion of interiority and urge us to privatize or individualize phenomena that are more radically social and political? To what extent do theories of subjectivity produce the viewing experiences they claim to demystify? Can psychoanalysis be a critical apparatus for interpreting films when it is already a self-conscious narrative gimmick for making them? Is the erotic-as opposed to say, the socioeconomic, the ethnic, the racial-always the constitutive or primary site of spectatorial pleasure and subject formation?
Mein Camp traces the history of sexual representation through various films and narratives. From camp to porn, from Hollywood hits to underground classics. After all, cinema, especially Hollywood cinema, despite its history of censorship and its pretense to heterocentrism, is one of the queerest things ever invented. To trace the logic of its interpellations of queerness is an exercise in being inside and out at the same time.

Conceived and performed by Yosi Wanunu, Anna Mendelssohn, Cezary Tomaszewski
Produced by Kornelia Kilga
Co-production with KiG Kultur in Graz
Performance dates: Oct 16 + 17, 2009 Theater am Lend Graz and May 27 + 28, brut Konzerthaus, Vienna

Rehearsal blog taken by Noemi Baumblatt (director assistant):

Week #3

20.8.10
First costume try-out/try-on, finally: some combinations seem to work quite well
Sorting out the equipment store, a toxic mould paradise…
Irene, Sabile, Yosi and Anna start rehearsing the „formation dance“, which is supposed to come after Saddam (I try to follow the structure of Yosi’s concept, but still don’t quite get it…)
Michael arrives late after having problems with putting Helene into the Kindergarten
He brought his Ho Chi Minh/Full Metal Jacket-Music-Composition-Mix for the… -for which dance?
>>>Eskimo pussy blablabla… I don’t agree and ist NOT a question of political correctness.

Lunch break with celebration because I got ~the best flat ever~

Dance rehearsing continues without Irene
Discussing Michaels music: Yosi wants something more „Musical“, but doesn’t really know how or what
They try it with much faster music, it works!
Interruption through Monty Pythons „Ministry for silly walks“(link…)
Anna and Yosi work on the text

19.8.10
working on the entrance sequences Lesson 1: Get the Data, and the question of the setting up of the audience
tuning the text for the first parts
structuring the connections
Conny comes, watches the first part and opens a discussion about understanding the English language: according to her its all much too fast and too difficult to follow
So, what to do? Make it shorter?

Anna and Irene rehearse Lesson 3: Maximize efficiency, which even Conny likes
Its sexy, because they have guns and it doesn’t matter at all, what they’re doing with those guns
>>>why zum Teufel are guns sexy? Is that so and is it about power?

Lunch break: discussion about the language question >what does it mean to produce performances in English for an German speaking Austrian audience? Is language connected to the culture or is it more and more separating, as Yosi says? What do the formula local/global mean in this context???

We calculate the stick measures for the audience formation

Anna shows us a snowflake dance on youtube >it fits perfectly to the Terrain thing (according to Sun zu himself there are nine territories of war…), in which Sidy will be freezing in the snow, and it inspires some great ideas…
I already know, that the snowflake scene will be the most beautiful of the whole „art of war“-piece!

18.8.10
Irene and Yosi rehearse Lesson 2 : Empathize with your enemy
Adapting the text

>>>I left for the flat and have no idea, what happened meanwhile in the Marktgasse< <<

Im back: discussion about Lesson 6: Rationality will not save you
Is it clear enough? Anna says no! Me too.

Lunch break

Sabile and Michael work on the stick dance/music

>>>try out: Formation dance with music
Anna and Yosi rehearse the Al Pacino motivation speech
I will nominate her for the oscar.

17.8.10
warming up>>>rehearsing for the last dance (after the suicide bombing)
>Sabile brought some music by M.I.A., but we need something else…
formation dance: too long?
Michael will bring the music as soon as possible!
We are counting the sticks
I cut the sticks fort he stick dance rehearsal
Sabile and Irene leave

16.8.10
Irene brought the „Lord of the flies“ film by Peter Brook,
Anna transcribed the Al Pacino – Motivation Scene from a film I still don’t know the name of

Yosi summarizes the idea of the beginning

We look for a name for „our movement“???
Anna proposes „Neo-Survivalists“
What about adding a „Post“?
Do we need a corporate identity?

Yosi summarizes the status quo of the structure/material:
He keeps bombarding us with ideas for over an hour, shooting in all directions, its too fast and too much for me to put it all here, sorry!
He’s debating with himself, he says in the end. That describes it quite well.

Next week all the texts should be finished more or less ~>thats the plan!

Rehearsal of the press conference in Lesson 5: Bringing the media into play…
It should be a bit more neutral in the beginning and be presented with continuous concentration of all the actresses, so that they’re all participating also in each others answers and that it is constantly flowing somehow

Sabile has the great idea of inserting a line in Schwitzerdütsch/ Swiss German, but then obviously she needs glasses to be credible >but why/how does Sabile know how to speak Swiss German?

In the end its all theatre… said Saddam in the end.

Dance rehearsal with a music compilation by Yosi

Break

Yosi and Anna continue working on the second part of Lesson 1, meanwhile Sabile is developing the stick dance

Yosi and Anna go through the Al Pacino speech >does it need music?

Week #2

13.8.10
Sabile comes later, Irene and Anna working on the gun text lesson 3: Maximize efficiency
>>>sheep dogs!
Simplifying the last part of Lesson 3, discussing some sentences, then rehearsing standing, with guns, timing it…

Sabile arrives, they start working on the formation dance: Sabile leads some kind of an improvisation exercise, which is about releasing the group energy and means in concrete for example collective jumping in pairs

Meanwhile Justin Poole arrived, a guy from the United States, who is writing his Doctoral thesis about the international theater scene in Vienna and who already participated in the toxic dreams piece „I’m Dying“. He watches the improvisations going on and keeps asking me for the specific name of this technique, for why they are doing this and what it is exactly and so on…

They are still searching for movements, thats all.
Some dancing to the „Full Metal Jacket“ sound follows

Lunch break, Irene leaves

Should the audience be seen as the enemy?

Yosi dreams of a Drop box for the rehearsal space: One with a heart on it for positive feedback, on with a skull for critics on his dictatorship

The improvisation for the formation dance goes on
Yosi complains and is afraid, the dance could get to difficult for him to be able to participate
They recapitulate and assess the found movements, putting them together somehow…

Yosi and Anna get lost in Seinfeld and very excited about it

12.8.10
Yosi recommends „Children of men“
He explains his structural idea for the first part, Lesson 1: like the opening credits or the entrance sequence in a movie
Rehearsal of Lesson 1> Standing, sitting, changing the text

Johannes from the WuK comes to watch the rehearsal: dancing the musical dance, still with M.I.A. music, Yosi wants to have it rougher

Discussion about the audience stick formation with Johannes, and about the theatre police

Break!

working on lesson 5: the use of media
Splitting up the text in the three languages (Italian, English, German)

Irene leaves, we watch Leni Riefenstahls „Triumph des Willens“ to get inspired for the formation dance

Somehow Sabile, Anna and Yosi start discussing about what a lecture demonstration means, if it should be clean or broken by theatrical elements, and then, how to break it???

Anna brings the „Meet the composer“ (link!)-Choreography in, the Keaton-Style, the repetitive element…
They are searching for the mechanism in the movement…

Everybody leaves, Yosi looks at the status quo of my rehearsal blog (this here) notes: he says: if you write „Yosi seems to be obsessed by Zizek“, thats understandable, for example. But the rest should be more detailed – well… that means, I have to listen more in detail…

11.8.10
Yosi and Irene work on Lesson#2
We talk about the night vision visuals >Michaels helmet starts glowing in the dark!

All the time this name: Tony Judd, Tony Judd, Tony Judd… he just died.

Yosi shows a wikileaks video about a scandalous military action by the US-Army in Iraq: we learn that engage means to shoot… war seems to be a game

Everybody working on Lesson 1: Get the Data

Yosi presents us his pens as guns picture-ideas for the program booklet

Break.

Continuing on Lesson 1>>>extracting the key words for the screen projection with Michael

10.8.10
Yosi and Conny are in Niederösterreich to by the turntable thing
So we start a bit later
While waiting, Irene and me are sitting in the sun in front of the rehearsal cellar, observing a strange Saddam alike looking guy sitting in his old grey Mercedes for over an hour, talking to his mobile phone, observing us… in the end leaving without any bomb activity

Yosi arrives, Sabile teaches everybody the „Musical dance“
>the movements were written down in words by Yosi and then interpreted and retranslated into movements by Sabile
>they rehearse the dance with a song by M.I.A., with Stahlhelmets

discussion about the appropriated future vehicle continues> Michael shows us some documentation about the Dutch/Danish/Tamil bicycle armies…

>stick dance rehearsal with Yosi criticizing
it comes to a collection of weird, strange new dance styles: voging and wacking, jump style, tectonic, crumping, men-uman and so on…

Yosi holding veryyyy looong monologues…………………….

working on Lesson#4: reading together, as a press conference
Anna~>English
Irene~>Italian
Sabile~>German

Somehow the Porno topic comes up, Yosi seems to be in love with his favorite Porn Actress from Switzerland…

>conversation about the differences between a Märtyrerabschiedsvideo and the shooting of a porn video?!? the exhibitionistic element…

9.8.10
Yosi brings a text structure, divided in lessons, explaining his staging ideas, laying out the structure
Irene proposes a scene from „Lord of the flies“: the children in fear of the „beast“…
the „it“ outside…
We are reading the text
What does Sabile need for choreographing the dances?
>>>Stick dance, gift/bomb dance, Musical (Gold Diggers…) Dance, Formation thing
Lunch break> debate on principles: „The art of working together“…
>Irene has to go
>Michael? As usual with and behind his Computer
>Anna and Yosi working on the text of lesson #2
>and Im writing this.

Week #1

6.8.10
Yosi brings version two of the entrance text
Text reading
Michael isn’t conform with the use of the word dream: what does „dream“ mean?
>reading of the entrance text by Anna, Irene, Sabile and Yosi, version #2, takes 8 minutes
trying out some formation stuff…
we watch the motivation speech in „Saving private Ryan“
Anna shows us Al Pacino motivation speech in ??? (she’ll transcribe it)
We watch a part of „Paradise now“ on youtube, and some Videos about female martyrs
Why are martyrs mostly young man?
We need a body-bomb and a gift!

Suicide bombing needs publicity, like theatre… without it doesn’t work

5.8.10
meeting at the army shop in the Lerchenfelder Strasse:
buying stuff for costumes
working with the text draft
how to break the audience formation? Sidy role?
Anna proposes the Bande a part-choreography
We need some kind of Saddam Hussein costume/look for Sidy!
developing further the stick dance choreography
discussion about the Runaway Scene: Why Yosi’s motorbike isn’t appropriate for our Doomsday Scenario… bicycle instead? Roller blades? Skateboard? Jet-ski? No, Michael has a great idea: an electronic horse…
or blue camouflaged kayaks?

How to make Sidy a second Saddam Hussein? That will be difficult, even with the perfect mustache

A scene about the theatricality of the suicide bombing „performance“: the video production before, the letter, the whole context… (see „Paradise now!“)
The bomb as a gift… as Gift!

Suicide bombing > a tool to use
> „Know your enemy!“

Scene about using guns: sheepdogs… in color-coded game
Guerilla war ~>media bombing ~>old-fashioned war is over… corporate war >how to materialize it?

…warwarwar…

4.8.10
We watch a part of Godard’s multi voice combination „Weekend“: Yosi thinks of a similar combi-nation of Hippie and military style for the costumes
~collective multi voice text reading
break!
Anna proposes a text of Arundhati Roy
we need colored circles for the audience members to stand on!
First thoughts about a stick dance, inspired by some traditional Japanese music video on youtube, Sabile trying out, Michael presenting his music…

3.8.10
Yosi brings the first version of the starting text
>>>text reading

should be spoken in a nice way, no soldier screaming cliché, its about convincing
convincing as a task like in a debate club
discussing about the current developments in cannibalism,
then survival techniques >>>book for boys/book for girls
what is that – collecting war?
Do we need an uniform for the audience?
Airport situation for the entrance area? Body screen?

What is necessary to manufacture a group?
What is a „chorus of individuals“?
What about the power of the director?
And the fear of the future?

Rehearsal democracy = multi voicing ~~~>incorporating the ideas dealt with into the rehearsal process reality

2.8.10
everybody there, including Conny, just Sidy missing ~>he will arrive in September
organizational set up
Yosi presents his ideas (multi voice talking in the beginning…), he tells us about the Vorarlberg Project they did some years ago, and the 11 points of McNamara…
Yosi seems to be obsessed with Zizek… or even possessed.
You have to know, what you fight for, said Sun zu

The system of the text as a concert/choir… associative

Sidy will represent all the victims and the bad guys

Discussion about New Balance – Shoes: why/are they „Nazi-shoes“?

Suicide bombing as an anti-capitalist strategy…

Using an Brecht/Piscator aesthetics? Letters instead of images…

What about inviting a chess expert ~>strategy

lunch break at Rubens

we watch the first part of Kubrick’s „Full metal jacket“
> the general walking through the rows of soldiers, holding up a Donut with his right hand…

You toxic tube/dance

Learn how to dance without all the artsy crap.

In 2008 we learned how to act without all the artsy crap; which meant we taped into the net and watched all the “how to act” clips and proceeded to copy them, applying their acting techniques to the best of our abilities.
Now it is time to dance…
Our only learning source will be the net and the endless how to “dance instruction clips”, and “ask the expert” sites. Its simple, we surf, we watch, we copy, we dance…no workshops, no classical training, no Western European performance technique, just good old fashion dancing advices from the World Wide Web.
We will concentrate, mainly, on the most popular dance videos on the net. Dances by people who dance at home and film themselves via web cams or other relatively inexpensive recording devices. The only rule we will abide by: no professional dancing instruction videos.
Our dances will be put back in the net with links to their respective references.
We hope that some viewers will join us dancing.

Participants: Michael Strohmann, Anna Mendelssohn, Yosi Wanunu
Production dates: Oct 10, 2009 Tanzquartier Vienna and Nov 19, 2009 Spanish Fighters Ljubjana

X Wohnungen/X Apartments

X Wohnungen / X Apartments is a site-specific project that follows two unique guided tours through the „Stuwerviertel“, part of the 2nd district (Leopoldstadt) in Vienna. Each tour consists of seven performances, events or installations that inhabit and respond to a series of private flats.
A variety of artists including performers, directors, dancers and architects collaborate with the occupants of each apartment to examine the every-day life of the Stuwerviertel, and piece together the narratives and biographies that can be found there.
The audience embarks on a parcours, which leads spectators from one venue to another. They travel in pairs and stay for 10 minutes in each flat, before leaving to the next.
The journey between the venues becomes part of the game, in which the audience’s perception of the architecture and their immediate urban environment is constantly shifting. Each 10-minute encounter introduces a new narrative to the journey that redefines an increasingly complex and personal relationship to the site. The boundaries between private and public, familiar and foreign, reality and production, are blurred.

Participants: Iris, Nitai und Kamala Jucies, Michael Strohmann, Eva Wolfesberger and Yosi Wanunu
Production dates: Sep 24 – 27, 2009, brut Vienna – Stuwerviertel/Mexikoplatz Vienna

My dinner with toxic dreams

“My dinner with toxic dreams” serves as the closing chapter of our ongoing theatre cycle. The idea is to finish with an intimate dinner with a small number of audience/participants in a non theatrical setting. Using the structure of the film “My dinner with André” by Louis Malle, we conduct a dinner/talk around our finding concerning the theatre cycle; but also talk about our personal journey and our take on theatre today. Formally speaking “My dinner with toxic dreams” is also about the theatre of the 60s, its success and failure, its influence on performance art today and the way the relation to audience participation changed the way we view spectatorship nowadays.

The director: Yosi Wanunu
The actress/writer: Anna Mendelssohn
Presentation dates: March 9 – 25, 2010, restaurant “schon schön” Vienna

GOO

In the last few years we’ve been working with kids/young adults on what one can term: ‘the creative impulse’; which mean, we put the working on one’s craft as a secondary practice, optioning first to challenge kids/young adults to find their own voice. We work with the assumption that before a kid/young adult learns how to act, shot a video or a edit a clip, he or she has to have something to say. Something that it is truly theirs; not a copy of the art they consume, or a ‘text’ that was fed to them by well meaning adults. We don’t discount craft; we just found out that if a kid/young adult finds his or her story/voice, they will find the way to realize it. Too many kids/young adults know how to use a camera; the story they tell are copies of the films, TV show, video games, they see day in and out. The same can be said in regard to kids/young adults acting, too often it looks like just another version of the adult stages or performances. So, instead of working on a show as an end product, we spend the time creating many “shows’ on a daily basis. We call it the story factory; which mean, to us, a constant production of stories, ideas, abstract thoughts, movements and talks with not so much emphasis on the ‘how’. In the end of the process, the body of materials we generate is immense; be it, stories, theatre scenes, interviews, video clips, dances and talks. We, the adult, are their to serve the creative impulses of the participants, it is their job to come up with the ‘stories’.

GOO is part of the statewide theater project Macht/schule/theater, initiated by the Austrian ministery for education, art and culture, Kulturkontakt Austria and Dschungel Wien.
To follow the process of GOO please visit GOOland. For past examples of our work with kids/young adults see Winter Academy.