EXTENDING
THEATRE
5 - 6 FEBRUARY 2021
Welcome to our two-day online program made up of conversations, artist showcases and live events as part of the latest round of our virtual workspaces project.
We have created Open Studios because artists needed and were missing new encounters, inspirations and opportunities to animate both thoughts and emotions, which are so essential in the world of theatre. The project was offered to theatre artists, researchers and audiences as a response to restrictions placed upon our mobility and social interactions following the recent pandemic – all in order to counter these states of isolation.
By partnering with the Onassis Stegi interdisciplinary cultural centre in Athens we have as of now been developing a platform for collaboration and exchange in an international context. This is a space for experimentation and free-flowing explorations of as yet-unknown forms of the theatre of the near future. Without the need to create complete works of theatrical art, we are offering the chance to consider how we can join forces in creating, growing and meeting each other through networks, platforms and technologies. We are developing a temporary community, based on an exchange of experiences and knowledge, simultaneously discovering a broad range of aesthetics, tools and practices suggested by artists from Poland and far further afield.
FRIDAY, 5 FEBRUARY 2021
Accesible all day / Edit Kaldor workspace / video documentation / ENG
Ghost in the Machine. Understanding Media. Extending the Human
→ The video documentation is accesible all day from 5th February on the website
Edit Kaldor along with other artists used her virtual workspace to explore the vague aspects of humanity's dependency on mobile devices. The starting point was the conviction that Marshall McLuhan was right when describing mobile devices as extensions of our own selves, especially so when it comes to our cell phones, which have very much become synonymous with our personal identities. Artists explored, discovered and playfully questioned their own intimate relations with mobile phones. The opening of the workspace will be accompanied by video recordings of shared explorations and experiments.
17.00 - 18.45 / Wojtek Ziemilski workspace / artists' presentations / ENG
Set Reality Free
Online Documentary Performance Laboratory
→ Participation via Zoom platform
Wojtek Ziemilski's workspace touches upon the problems of working on texts and presence in projects created online. He asked artists taking part in the laboratory sessions to consider the forms online performances might take, arising from documentary materials suggested by participants. For several weeks, the group explored various possibilities of creating, including the use of platforms, applications and simple digital tools, considering how texts are converted, received and performed. The event, which will be staged using the ZOOM platform, will involve various artistic presentations crafted by participants over more than ten sessions.
19.00 - 20.15 / Artist talk / ENG
Theatre and its extensions
→ The conversation will be streamed on www.facebook.com/studio.teatr
In conversation with Konstantina Georgelou, a performing arts theoretician, Edit Kaldor and Wojtek Ziemilski will talk about creating theatrical projects based on technologies and communication devices. The meeting will be devoted to the topic of possibilities offered by remote working online, while taking into consideration questions of the politics of participation, models of reception and strategies of taking part online. The starting point will be existing projects and research work carried out by invited artists, including experiences and conclusions from their unique, virtual workspaces as part of the Open Studios program.
Guests:
Edit Kaldor (Netherlands/Hungary), Wojtek Ziemilski (Poland)
Host:
Konstantina Georgelou (Greece/Netherlands)
Broadcast:
The event will be shared via our Facebook page.
Duration:
75 min.
Edit Kaldor
writer and theatrical artist, renowned as a unique voice in contemporary theatre. Her work is characterized by a unique blend of a conceptual, conscious form of approach to theatre with a personal tone and social context. She often utilities digital media and interfaces, focusing on metaphorical and theatrical possibilities of using technologies in the everyday. In recent years she has conducted workshops, lectures and masterclasses in art schools in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany and Denmark. In addition, she has been running a long-term research arts project at the Norwegian Theatre Academy relating to new aesthetic and social practices in contemporary performance. She is currently working on a new project dealing with expanded reality using mobile phone tech and hidden performative elements in public spaces.
Wojtek Ziemilski
theatre director and visual artist who works on the fringes of various genres, drawing on the diversity of performative arts. His works have been shown during events such as Ruhrtriennale, Prague Quadriennale and Zürich Theater Spektakel and are staged in a number of theaters in Poland. Ziemilski expands the notion of documentary performance. His works have often questioned the status of the audience and the possibilities of working. By using Devising, Real Time Composition and other tools which refer to the worlds of visual and various other media, he creates worlds which combine aesthetic experience with intellectual explorations. In his recent works, including Enter the Fullscreen at Nowy Teatr, Ziemilski explores the possibilities inherent in staging plays online.
Dr Konstantina Georgelou
researcher, dramaturg and theoretician in the field of performative arts, she lectures at the faculties of media and culture at Utrecht University. She has created Master's degree courses for artists – DAS Choreography and DAS Theatre in Amsterdam. Her areas of research relate to practical aspects of dramaturgy, (new) materialism and collaborative actions. She has published articles in the likes of Performance Research Journal, Performance Paradigm, Maska and Routledge. She co-authored the book The Practice of Dramaturgy: Working on Actions in Performance (Valiz, 2017).
SATURDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2021
Accesible all day / Chris Kallmyer workspace / video artwork presentation / ENG
→ Accesible all day from 6th February on the website
Presentation of video works by Chris Kallmyer, a sound artist and performer who lives in Los Angeles, associated with the California Institute of the Arts. His practice is characterized by a participatory approach to creating music and ways of presenting it taking into account the context of a given place. He is interested in broadening the scope of reception using different senses, such as touch and taste.
His sound works, essays and interdisciplinary projects have been staged in the likes of Pulitzer Arts Foundation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), The Walker Art Center, the philharmonic in Los Angeles. Kallmyer also composed the music for the show “Metafizyka Dwugłowego Cielęcia” (Two-Headed Calf) directed by Natalia Korczakowska.
This was created as part of a joint project between STUDIO and CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) of Los Angeles, one of the most important interdisciplinary arts academies in the US – as of 2017.
13.00 - 14.30 / Artist talk / ENG
Imagination in an isolated world
→ The conversation willbe streamed on www.facebook.com/studio.teatr
With this event, we will introduce the practices of outstanding theatre artists from Eastern Asia. They are connected by a shared interest in new modes of communication and an innovative and critical engagement with the possibilities offered by new technologies. During our conversation, we will learn about projects developed during the pandemic, about different strategies of working with new media, and about the artists' recent experiences of creating theatre in Europe and Eastern Asia. The starting points for the conversation will be imagination, its potentials and limitations, and the very need to create theatrical worlds, both physically present and virtually situated.
Guests:
Toshiki Okada (Japan), Baboo Liao (Taiwan), Jisun Kim (South Korea)
Moderator:
Maria Rößler (Germany)
Broadcast:
This event will be shared via our Facebook page.
Duration:
90 min.
Jinsun Kim
can we rethink the systems in which we function? This question inspires the works of Jinsun Kim from Korea, who took part in the prestigious residence Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and is now working in Seoul. Her shows and performances, including Deep Present and The House of Sorrow in critical and poetic ways make use of video game models, artificial intelligence and graphics engines, in order to probe the nature of our reality and the politics hidden behind it. Her works have been shown at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Wiener Festwochen and Münchner Kammerspiele.
Baboo Liao
creator of over 30 shows and theatrical projects, freely combining visual arts, choreographies, new media and contemporary drama. His works have been presented in New York, Seoul, Copenhagen, Avignon and Paris. He has received prestigious awards, including the Taishin Arts Award and Asian Cultural Council Fellowship Award. His newest projects include Corona Villa, the immersive audio play Chroma: A Derek Jarman Project and Am Königsweg based on the works of Elfriede Jelinek.
Toshiki Okada
innovative in his use of form, he is a key figure in contemporary Japanese theatre, as well as being one of the most renowned theatre artists in the world today. He is known for his use of hyper-colloquial Japanese and unique geographies. The chelfitsch company debuted abroad in 2007 with the play Five Days in March and since that time he has shown his works in more than 70 cities all over the world.
Maria Rößler
is an independent dramaturg living in Berlin. For over a decade, she has been working in the field of experimental performing arts and is working with a range of institutions, festivals and venues (Vooruit in Ghent, HAU Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin, Foreign Affairs in Berliner Festspiele). She regularly works with artists and collectives such as Nuray Demir, Samara Hersch, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke, the rubberbodies collective and Abhishek Thapar. Since 2017, Rößler has been a member of the program board of the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
16.00-17.00 / Gosia Wdowik workspace / documentation and live event / PL
THERE WHERE YOU ARE NOT
→ Documentation accesible from 6th February on the website
→ Entering workspace with the artists via zoom platform
Last year changed the ways in which we think about our bodies.
Bodies have been subjected to quarantine.
Bodies are at risk.
Bodies are a threat.
We miss bodies more than anything else.
Longing, we are caught between feeling connected and experiencing absence.
We often try to fill these absences: using technologies, we try to create a sense of presence for someone with whom we cannot actually meet.
Do closeness and intimacy achieved through the use of tech have their limits?
The authors of the project There Where You Are Not invited two persons who missed one another to take part. A meeting was organized via the Open Studios workspace – we gave them access to technologies which allowed them to “borrow a body” which would substitute for absent physical beings and could take part in this encounter in their place. Together, we consider the experience of absence and presence, of theory and practice of longing, of emotions in times of “borrowed presences”. During this event, we will look in on Gosia Wdowik's workspace – she will reveal to us the outcomes of a few weeks of artistic process and present to us the tools she uses in this project.
Concept
Gosia Wdowik
Dramaturg::
Olga Drygas
Video:
Michał Stajniak
Participants:
Olga Stawna, Filip Kasprzewski
Production:
Agata Balcerzak
Duration:
60 min.
