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PERFORMATIVE MEDIA THEATER
SURREANCE (2005-2006)
A Performance for two Performers and a Medium
(click to enlarge)‘Surreance’ focuses on the relationship between media art and the mediumistic, or the between the rational and the irrational. The project consists of a performance carried out by two ‘mediumistic’ performers, who bring the material world and the spiritual together by the occultist practice of a table séance. Carried out in the presence of the public, the séance is used to embark upon a quest for the ‘marvelous’ through a kind of ‘tuning’ of the mind. The audience experiences the performance activities visually and aurally as the performers create a channel to the energy fields of bygone surrealists manifested in a soundscape of haphazard radio modulation and the projection of a multi faceted world of images. The performers interact with each other by using an occultist instrument to accomplish a task of “unveiling”. A collection of group photos of the surrealists have been blackened out and are brought forth as the performers work together and ‘scratch’ the photos open into the present. Similar to a ouija board, the final images always results by the performer’s subconscious movements with the controller. These movements create a technique of painting very similar to the surrealist practice of automatic writing.
Performers: Art Clay & Franziska Martinsen
Performance Space: Digital Art Weeks Festival 06, Zurich
GESPANNTE GEFÄHRTEN (1996-2002)
A Sit-Com for the Stage for Two Actors & Chamber Ensemble
(click to enlarge)The piece is for two actors and a small chamber ensemble consisting of bass viol, bassoon, and percussion. The work fits into the genre of music theater, but is more of a sit-com in character. The title of the work, which loosely translates as „Strained Relations“, implies the central theme of the work: the unlikely meeting between the American writer, Gertrude Stein and the Soviet politician, Andrej Gromyko. Dramatically, a bizarre connection is made in ‘virtual space’ between the two diverse personalities in an ironic manner by focusing on each figure’s roles as survival artists, their stubbornness, and insistence on being part of the world stage. The stage setting is designed to give the impression that the work is actually taking place on television and that the audience is sitting in the studio during broadcast. Audience laughter blends in a natural manner as in an actual sit-com. The music combines lyrical humor of a Satie with the juggling vitality of a Stravinsky, but it is something highly own and fitting for the „Song of Individuality“ (Getrude Stein) and the „Self Preaching Chorus of a Communality“ (Andrej Gromyko). All in all, the twentieth century calls for to march forward!
Production Team: Art Clay, Franziska Martinsen, Maira Thorgevsky, Dan Wiener & Erratum Ensemble
Performance Space: Gare du Nord, Basle, Switzerland
→ Click Here to Watch the Video Clip
SPINOZA IST (2000)
Theater for New Media for Three Actors & Electronic Music
(click to enlarge)Spinoza’s independent character, his innovative thinking and his differences with Church and State drive the drama to unfold and move forward from early schooling to banishment. The project has been coined by critics as a ‘Spinoza-Sammelsarium’ and is a seventy-minute experience in the life of the philosopher Spinoza. It lets the audience experience Spinoza’s as a philosopher synaesthetically: Sound- and video effects aid in the unfolding of a complete Spinozian cosmos and lead the viewer to witness that the cutting of lenses and the sharpening of the mind have light at their base. Stylistically, the work is a new media theater piece with performative character, conceived for three actors, live electronics and a twenty-seven-part cube. The drama’s journey begins with his formative years as a student and continues until his banishment from Amsterdam by the church, the state and the synagogue. The various stations in Spinoza’s life are transfigured into being by the diconfiguration of the cube. He begins in „School“, where the students are formed by the preconceptions of those in charge. The path winds further through to the „City“; Existence as willing cogs, endless movement and rush, in which mankind is pulled into. A „Ruin“ results out of the elements of the City and Spinoza finds himself at the end of his life. He ponders over his life as a lens grinder and philosophy. Church and State, who are responsible for his censorship, come forth. The „Banishment“ ends the work and closes to the final transfiguration of the cube. On elements of a wall one reads CAUTE, the Latin word for CAUTION.
Theater Group: Art Clay, Franziska Martinsen, Urs Jaeggi & Erratum Ensemble
Performance Space: Städtische Bühnen Freiburg; Pumpenhaus, Münster, Germany
→ Click Here to Watch the Video Clip