Island No. 5 leer [void]

Island No. 5 leer [void]

Programming | Georg Schöllhammer, Martina Hochmuth
Project organisation | Isabella Kresse

Occasionally it seems that much of the present-day media spectacle is only staged in order not to touch on another absent one, and one can stay away from a gap that marks something suppressed: from a legacy that results from the power of politics and befalls the life of the individual.

"This place is another one" - could be the common denominator for the analysis of the repressed, hidden or buried traces of specific events and traumatic presence that link the works of the artists in dance, performance and fine art in this programme.

At its centre, as a leitmotif, are the concepts of emptiness and absence, which as an important motif of form of the modern age - the separation of space and place - have become so important. Apart from this, at a totally different conceptual level they have played a major role in dance and performance in the last decade. Emptiness and absence are figures of thinking by which the discipline finds itself through critical scrutiny, or more precisely, the question of the conditions under which time and space are structured by a performative act and presence and absence are connected with a scenic event.

Beyond the conceptual and institutional-critical self-analysis, it is precisely recently that the question of a "politics of form" have again become highly charged and thereby also the content dimension of the relationship between absence and presence. Remembering and re-occupying, clarifying and (re-) staging actual history form diverse inter-relationships in the works of the programming of Leer. Often, they cannot be revealed at first glance, and they always demand a critical analysis of the function of the theatrical form.

In their specific search for the traces of another presence, specially developed sketches for this project by Claudia Bosse, Tim Etchells/Forced Entertainment, Philipp Gehmacher and Vladimir Miller, Rabih Mroué, the works of Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi, of Vit Havránek and Boris Ondreička, as well as the accompanying lab and a videoshow what has been suppressed by the emptiness of the current spectacle of presence.

In parallel in the period from 9 to 15 January 2009, the Vienna Stadtkino is showing Leer - the film show (curated by Claus Philipp and Franz Schwartz) with films by Aki Kaurismäki, Nicolas Klotz, Claude Lanzmann, Chris Marker, Rithy Pan, Corneliu Porumboiu and Gus Van Sant as well as the Lebanon feature I Want to See.

Production: Tanzquartier Wien in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Stadtkino Vienna. With the support of Kontakt, Die Kunstsammlung der Erste Bank-Gruppe and Pro Helvetia.

Introduction to Island No. 5 Leer by the curators
Thurs. 8 Jan. 2009 7 pm
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, exhibition space

Blind Spots
Opening of the Videoshow: Thurs. 8 Jan. 2009, 7.30 pm
Exhibition opening hours: Fri 9 to Fri. 16 Jan. 2009, 12 noon to 8 pm, except Sunday
Duration of the Videoshow: Thurs 8 to Fri. 16 Jan. 2009
Videoshow

Karen Andreassian (AM), Zbynek Baladran (CZ), Régis Baudy (FR), Chto Delat (RUS), Josef Dabernig (A), Little Warsaw und Míklos Erhardt (HU), Dimitri Gutov (RUS), Monument to Transformation (CZ), R.E.P. Group (UA), Milica Tomic (SRB), Florin Tudor und Mona Vatamanu (RO), Zorka Wolly (PL) und Arthur Zmijewski (PL)

It is difficult for art to steer clear of the problems of the world. In order to grasp its own form, it has to  allow access to reality. How can it do that without simultaneously succumbing either to the tyranny of the documentary or to just a formalistic refinement of reality?

Blind Spots shows a selection of contemporary videos and performative works revolving  around the question of the capacity to express a traumatically repressed or oppressed reality.

Dead Reckoning
Thurs. 8 to Fri. 16 Jan. 2009
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, great hall
Video installation (première)
PHILIPP GEHMACHER (A) / VLADIMIR MILLER (D)

Concept: Philipp Gehmacher, Vladimir Miller, choreography and performance: Rémy Héritier, Philipp Gehmacher, Christine de Smedt

Dead Reckoning is a choreographic work for camera and projection, two male and one female performers. Four video recordings are shown simultaneously on a free-standing structure made of two crossing projection surfaces. The recording took place before four cameras positioned in a square around the dancers, likewise simultaneously.

Dead Reckoning, by Gehmacher, the successful Austrian choreographer, and Miller, the video artist, suggests the possibility of an overview, a panoramic view of a performative act, but at the same time conceals parts of it from the spectator. The reconstruction of the room and the events through the video recording leads to a fragmentation of the sight and the images of the bodies, it reduces a spatial process to the visual, the play of the camera with the reality of movement. The choreographic interaction space becomes an image space. The illusion of total overview changes installatively into a construct with niches and always only takes place through an outside. The spectator must move and circle around this reconstruction.

Production: Philipp Gehmacher / Mumbling Fish
Co-production: Tanzquartier Vienna
Philipp Gehmacher/Mumbling Fish is supported by the culture department of the City of Vienna.

Première of the video installation: Thurs. 8 Jan. 2009, 8 pm
Further presentations: Fri. 9 to Fri. 16 Jan. 2009,  5 pm and 7 pm, except Sunday

Admission: Exhibition and video installation for free
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, great hall and exhibition space: Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna

Falsche Erinnerung
8.30 pm, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, great hall
Performance (Austrian première)
CLAUDIA BOSSE (D/A)

Concept: Claudia Bosse, artistic collaboration: Liesl Raff

Since 2005, Claudia Bosse, the artistic director of Vienna's Theatercombinat, has been working on the series called tragedy producers, which carries out historical, demographic and linguistic investigations based on ancient dramas or current texts.  At the start of her work for the sketch Falsche Erinnerung [false memory]  are phrases in the form of loose questions: how can I work on something that I do not know? How do you deal with a spirit that does not yet have a form? What shape does traumatised capital have and what shape its devoted administrators? Is terrorism the result of a traumatised society? How can a personal or collective gap in the memory become the subject of a work?

And can all this be translated into a form, into a performative act?

Production: Tanzquartier Vienna

Airportkids
Fri. 9 Jan. / Sat. 10 Jan. 2009, 8.30 pm
TQW / Hall G
Performance (Austrian première)
LOLA ARIAS (AR) / STEFAN KAEGI (CH)

Direction and texts: Lola Arias, Stefan Kaegi, video: Bruno Deville, dramaturgy: Florian Malzacher, stage: Dominic Huber, blendwerk, lighting: Christophe Glanzmann, David Perez, music: Stéphane Vecchione
Assistance: Fabienne Rossier, Boris Brüderlin, with: Oussama Braun, Patrick Bruttin, Julien Ho, Kristina Kovalevskaya, Garima Manek, Aline de Mello Morais, Clyde Philippoz, Juliette Michel, Sarah Serafim

Lausanne is the seat of the Nestlé headquarters, the Olympic Committee and international schools. Daughters and sons of parents who work on the staff of multinational companies have their long-term homes here: bilingual and trilingual children who are looking for their own language, who spend their spare time in airports and whom sociologists call "third culture kids". Apart from this, in Lausanne there are migrants of Chinese, Romanian and African origin, who are hoping for a better life in Switzerland. Together with Stefan Kaegi from the successful theatre label Rimini Protokoll, the Argentinian author, actor and director Lola Arias asked eight young nomads about their utopias for the future: where do you see yourselves as adults? As managers of international companies, as new streamliners of global capital? Or as refugees, as homeless? As ambassadors?

With German surtitles.

Production: Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne. Co-production: Festival d'Avignon 2008, Hebbel-am-Ufer/Berlin, Theater Chur, Le Maillon/Strasbourg. With the support of Pro Helvetia

The Inhabitants of Images
Thurs. 15 Jan. 2009, 8.30 pm
TQW / Hall G
Lecture-performance (première)
RABIH  MROUÉ (LIB)

Concept, lecture-performance: Rabih Mroué
Collaboration : Fadi Toufiq

Three images: image 1: the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser meets the Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri; image 2: martyrs after the 2006 war in Lebanon; and image 3: Rabih Mroué in front of the picture of the martyr Jamal, who himself is sitting in front of the picture of the female martyr Wafa, who again is sitting in front of the martyr Lola, and so on. An apparently endless image-in-image cycle. The Inhabitants of Images deals with three mysterious stories in Beirut, a city dogged by images: images of people who seem to be familiar to us, others who are unfamiliar. Who are the inhabitants of these images? Some images, left by their inhabitants, have become ruins. An image as invasion: a new face crops up - sometimes an ally, sometimes an old enemy. What happened to them, in what other images are they flitting around, by what new faces have they been replaced? The internationally famous Lebanese author, director and performer Rabih Mroué attempts to find an answer.

Co-production: Tanzquartier Vienna, Bidoun magazine and Ashkal Alwan/Beirut.

A piece about a lecture
Fri. 16 Jan. 2009, 6 pm
TQW / Studios
Lecture-performance (Austrian première)
VIT HAVRANEK (CZ) and BORIS ONDREIČKA (SK)

Three central European intellectuals perform "topless", a work about a lecture. Voice 1: Vit Havránek, voice 2: Boris Ondreička, voice 3: special guest.

After their appearance at Documenta 12, the theoretician and curator Vit Havránek and the fine artist Boris Ondreička together with a guest will again be attempting to analyse the more-or-less academic format of lecture performance with elements from theatre and music performance - topless goes without saying.

Form research: places and policies of production
6.30 pm, TQW / Studios
Open Lab

With: Claudia Bosse (A), Cabula6 (USA/A),  Cosmin Costinaş (RO), Eduard Gabia (RO), Rabih Mroué (LIB), Jan Ritsema (NL/F), Milica Tomić (SRB), Fadi Toufiq (LIB), Marina Grzinic (SLO/A) and Tom Holert (D/A), presenter: Katherina Zakravsky (A)

Against the background of current (culture-) policy constellations, the question of forms of organisation in which research work and experimental production in the field of contemporary dance performance could be developed poses itself in multifarious ways. For example, in Beirut, Belgrade, Bucharest, St. Erme Outre et Ramecourt. What new forms of political production could avant-garde practices take forward? What  political and artistic subjectivity underlies them? In various constellations, the lab brings theoreticians and artists from such places together in order to present and discuss their work together with Viennese colleagues.

Void Story (work in progress)
Sat. 17 Jan. 2009, 8.30 pm
TQW / Hall G
Performance (première)
FORCED ENTERTAINMENT (UK)

Performance: Richard Lowdon, Terry O'Connor Claire Marshall, Robin Arthur, Cathy Naden
Text/visuals/direction: Tim Etchells, lighting: Nigel Edwards

We follow the two extremely exhausted protagonists through terrible cities to distant planets and futurist prisons, through subterranean tunnels and dangerous barrack-like estates and through nights that are so intense that one can no longer see a star.
The emptiness of the city and the sky are two recurring images of this grotesque and at the same time bleak contemporary fable: a roller-coaster ride through contemporary culture and its leftovers, a leap into the streets of an urban landscape of rubbish, through which the suppressed story seeps and makes waves.

In Void Story, the performers sit grouped at tables and handle manuscripts as if in a radio play. Pages are turned over, sound effects for shots, rain, broken telephone connections, machines, flowing blood, etc. are produced. In the meantime, projections play across the empty stage as if in a comic. Between the performers' voices, the sound effects and the projected images, a space develops in which the actual Void Story takes place: a performance that lives from its own absence and presence.

Forced Entertainment is among the most influential performance groups of the present day. With biting humour and critical self-analysis, they play with the conventions and expectation of the theatre (market).

Production: with the support of the Tanzquartier Vienna.
The première takes place in the framework of the Spill Festival in London in 2009.

Leer - the film show
Fri. 9 to Thur. 15 Jan. 2009, Stadtkino Vienna

Curating: Claus Philipp and Franz Schwartz
In the cinema you see 24 pictures a second and also 48 times a second you see nothing at all. From the material alone, film is a thoroughly treacherous and unreliable aid to memory. In montages, too, the gaps and jumps between two mounted groups define gaps in which things are not only "accelerated" and "condensed", but also where something literally falls on the cutting-room floor. If film makers are clever and if they know what they are doing, then they also talk about what they/we have forgotten. Leer - the film show assembles a few "narratives" - some gathered in many years' lending activity of the Stadtkino Wien -  in which this takes place in a highly unusual way. A small focus here is on the differing views of and from Lebanon, and the "blind spots" that open up in these views, even when saying "I want to see."

Fri. 9 Jan. 2009
6 pm | Want to See: Volker Schlöndorff, Die Fälschung, D 1981
8 pm | Want to See: Danielle Arbid, Seule avec la guerre, F/B 2000; Conversation de salon, F 2004
10 pm | Want to See: Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, IL/F/D 2008

Sat. 10 Jan. 2009
6 pm | Nicolas Philibert, Retour en Normandie, F 2007
8 pm | Claude Lanzmann, Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures, F 2001
10 pm | Aki Kaurismäki, The Man Without a Past, FIN 2002

Sun. 11 Jan. 2009
5.30 pm | Corneliu Porumboiu, 12:08 East of Bucharest, RO 2006
8 pm | Nicolas Philibert, Retour en Normandie, F 2007
10 pm | Claude Lanzmann, Sobibor, 14 octobre 1943, 16 heures, F

Mon. 12 Jan. 2009
6 pm | Rithy Pan, S-21, La machine de mort Khmère Rouge, F
8 pm | Gus Van Sant, Paranoid Park, USA 2007
Followed by a performance-lecture with Harun Farocki and Maren Grimm

Tue. 13 Jan. 2009
6 pm | Nicolas Klotz, La Question Humaine, F 2007
8.30 pm | Chris Marker, La jetée, F 1962; Terry Gilliam 12 Monkeys, USA 1995
Following: discussion with Jan Machacek

Wed. 14 Jan. 2009
6 pm | Aki Kaurismäki, The Man Without a Past, FIN 2002
8 pm | Want to See: Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Je Veux Voir, LIB/F 2008
Following: discussion with Rabih Mroué
10 pm | Want to See: Danielle Arbid, Seule avec la guerre, F/B 2000; Conversation de salon, F 2004

Thur. 15 Jan. 2009
6 pm | Want to See: Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Je Veux Voir, LIB/F
8 pm | Want to See: Volker Schlöndorff, Die Fälschung, D 1981
10 pm | Want to See: Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir, IL/F/D 2008

Stadtkino Vienna, Schwarzenbergplatz 7-8, 1030 Vienna T: +43 1 712 62 76 www.stadtkinowien.at

Tickets
Stefan Kaegi & Lola Arias                                                    € 18
Rabih Mroué, Claudia Bosse, Forced Entertainment     € 11
Vit Havránek  and Boris Ondreička                                    €   3
Open Lab                                                                                pay as you wish

Package:
Insel-Card (includes all Island No. 5 events):
€ 45 / students: € 35

For Island No. 5 and Leer there are snipcards ( www.snipcard.at ) with which you can get two tickets for the price of one for all Hall-G events.