#a.e.zimmer

[performamagazine]

Venice International Performance Art Week

Interview by A.E.Zimmer

Top: Ilija Šoškić, Panoptikon 2012 (-1969). Photograph © Monika Sobczak.

Bottom: Boris Nieslony, A Feather Fell Down On Venice. Photograph © Monika Sobczak.

Read "Venice International Performance Art Week" in Performa Magazine. 

Zierle & Carter, At the Edge of Longing. Photograph © Monika Sobczak.

BBB Johannes Deimling, Blanc #9. Photograph © Monika Sobczak.

[performamagazine]

Berlin, The Playground for Performance

Part Two of Two

By A.E.Zimmer

A.E.Zimmer: With this festival, you’re negotiating a gap in the public understanding of performance, both from the perspective of the artist and audience. As a burgeoning series, how does MPA-B try to engage those unfamiliar with performance art?

Florian Feigl: We learned that there exists quite an interest in events that provide an introduction to performance art, its history and traditions. Besides the professional and already-interested audiences, "first-timers" like coming to watch lectures and video presentations.

We drew two conclusions: There exists a sort of visual illiteracy regarding performance art. People want to get an idea about where to place what they might witness, experience. People are dubious about what to expect when going to see performance art; naked people inflicting pain on themselves is a common expectation. There exists a very restricted imagination of rather conceptual approaches. However, this year’s edition of MPA-B included a series of practical workshops directed to both professional practitioners and students as well as non-professionals and amateurs interested in a practical approach to performance art. Due to basically nonexistent funding, fees had to be charged for the workshops, but it would be great to offer this possibility for free.

Francesca Romana Ciardi: A lot of how MPA-B engages those unfamiliar with performance art has to do with visibility. Obviously, the media has played an essential role in this. This year, for example, we were featured in a number of national newspapers, online platforms and radio interviews which helped us bring the relatively unknown world of “Performancekunst” to a much broader audience. Thanks to this kind of exposure, we were able to better promote our program, which this year featured a wider range of performance projects and a greater geographical outreach than last year, which arguably catered to a much more diversified audience. From performances, site-specific actions and lectures to book launches, talks, exhibitions and participatory initiatives, MPA-B 2012 offered such an assortment of projects that we have seen the emergence of a new audience engaging with the performance art scene of the city.

A.E.Zimmer: What is required when cultivating an appreciation for live performance?

Francesca Romana Ciardi: To start, it is important to have an openness and receptivity that go beyond the simple expectation of entertainment.

Florian Feigl: Very generally, a certain openness to unusual and surprising impressions to be witnessed on a visual, intellectual, and emotional level. Meaning to, intellectually and otherwise, take part in processes that above all mean to question one’s own points and perspectives in order to make for new ways of thinking, seeing things differently, take part in processes that most probably would not have been accessible without the performance, no matter whether you are an audience member or artist.

A.E.Zimmer: Do you think a sense of community is facilitated by the experience of live performance? Is this community necessary for performance art to thrive?

Francesca Romana Ciardi: I believe live performance carries with it a sense of reflection, wonderment and ritual, and in the shared space of its making and doing, it connects people as if they were part of a constellation that expands and merges with presence and time. As makers or viewers of live performance, we carve out and fill a space that speaks to our experience and which, for as diverse as it can be in its individual manifestations, can consolidate us into a community. However, I believe this affiliation or projection of belonging to a community (here I am paraphrasing Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities) is not necessary for performance art to thrive as it is a very resilient, independent and self-determining art form and a very individual, personal and self-involved journey can advance regardless of its existence within a more or less definable and intangible grouping. 

A.E.Zimmer: What are your hopes for the future iterations of MPA-B?

Francesca Romana Ciardi: I hope MPA-B will evolve into a fully sustainable entity, with the ability to offer micro-collaboration grants to its program partners to develop performance art projects that can be incorporated into its framework. Through sustainability, we envisage the possibility of expanding our program, invite international guests and create partnerships with local institutions and universities to further promote dialogue, critical discourses and practice-based exchanges between performance art practitioners and the public. Ultimately, we hope to be able to reclaim the space and prominence that performance art deserves within the city's cultural panorama mainly dominated by subsidized dance, theater and music festivals; to celebrate its breadth, experimentation and creative force and to allow it to enrich the city culturally and artistically in new meaningful and groundbreaking ways. 

This is the second half of Performa Magazine's interview with the organizers of Month of Performance Art, Berlin.  The first half is posted here.  

This interview has been edited for clarity. All photos courtesy of Leon Elias Donath for Month of Performance Art, Berlin.

A.E.Zimmer is a writer and regular contributor to Performa Magazine.

[performamagazine]

Berlin, The Playground for Performance

Part One of Two

Interview by A.E.Zimmer

Enter Month of Performance Art- Berlin, or MPA-B– an exhaustive, month-long platform held this spring, devoted to spreading live art and performance to all corners of the city. Still in its infancy, MPA-B’s second year in action has already amassed an impressive following, this year’s highlights including performances that observe thresholds of human fascination with disgust, a “Love Mass“ officiated by one Reverend of Love (naturally), and a Surrealist taxi shuttling passengers to and from unheard-of destinations.

I spoke with co-founders and curators Francesca Romana Ciardi, Florian Feigl, and Jörn J. Burmester to discuss the genesis of their great event and their hopes to perfect the confusing, seductive tango between live performance and and audience.

A.E.Zimmer: How did your lives first intersect with performance? What has drawn you to performance as an artistic pursuit?

Florian Feigl: As a teenager, I had some contact with underground filmmaking and industrial music. Living in a small provincial town in West Germany in the mid-1980s, I started out experimenting with sculpting, live performance, filmmaking, and industrial music with a very small group of people. Those practices were almost always crossing borders; sticking to just one practice wasn’t useful- it was a limitation. Liveness definitely was a very important characteristic of our practice. Time-based work with a strong emphasis on process is still what I'd describe as my prime interest in terms of performance.

Jörn J. Burmester: Performance has always been central to my life. As a child, I was playing music. As a teenager, I became fascinated with theater, and was lucky enough to get my start in what was then called project theater and today would be called devised theater: stage formats developed collectively by the groups that performed them. Eventually, I got bored by theater and its focus on individual psychology and more or less fictional narration. 

I was exposed to a variety of conceptions of performance art, both as a form of visual art and as radically different experimental theater, while studying Applied Theater Studies at the University of Giessen. It first presented itself as a chance for liberation, a chance to do perform what I wanted, a space without rules. 

Francesca Romana Ciardi: I first became interested in performance while living in London. I moved there in 1996 when I was only 18, unaware that the city was going through the cultural renaissance known as "Cool Britannia" from which brutally revealing and touching phenomena such as the In-Yer-Face Theatre of Sarah Kane emerged, as well as more dubious, terribly consumerist ones like the Spice Girls. 

I remember going to illegal parties and watching incredible performances transform abandoned factories and disused buildings into places of magic and mystery, and then later trying to reproduce some of their aesthetic qualities while experimenting with old video cameras borrowed from college. But it wasn’t until a few years later that I started performing when I joined the international physical theater company Theatralia and began a series of collaborations with artists working across film, theatre, music and dance.

However, my passion for performance, more specifically performance art, was ultimately cemented when the Brighton-based collective Leonard invited me to take part in their show Grass at the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow in 2007. I knew I had finally found a language in performance that fully resonated with me, and,  free of stage and aesthetic conventions that I had experienced up to that point as a performer, enabled me to take greater risks, thus becoming more receptive and responsive to my surroundings. It also led me to experience real strength and enjoyment, not in being stylistically and choreographically accurate and prepared, but in simply being myself: exposed, vulnerable and honest, armed only with my body and ideas.

A.E.Zimmer: How did you come to Berlin?

Florian Feigl: I'm a performance artist and curator. Besides my artistic and curatorial practice, I lecture, write and teach performance art at art schools and universities.  Berlin seems to be a good spot to get along with practices that tend to not fit into many boxes-which nonetheless have huge potential to be applied to the most diverse topics and situations. The wide range and easy access to all sorts of practices, culturally, artistically, socially make it a pretty surprising and inspiring experience to be in this city.

Jörn J. Burmester: I moved to Berlin in 1985, escaping a quaint but rather boring background in West Germany, to pursue my then still-active interest in theater. After working in a variety of independent theater groups as an assistant director, dramaturge, technician, producer and sometimes actor for some years, I went on to study in Giessen and New York, tried my hand in writing for the theater, was forced to take a job in the corporate world, and finally decided to stop compromising and do only what interested me in 2000. It has been a steady mix of group and solo work since then, and it still is a continuous learning process.

A.E.Zimmer: How did MPA-B come about?

Florian Feigl: At the end of January 2011, Performer Stammtisch (the Berlin-based artist network founded by Burmeister) invited activists from various Berlin-based organizations, project spaces, artist networks, artist-run spaces and galleries to discuss the general situation of performance art and performance artists in the city, and how to possibly improve it, demand more attention, and introduce it to broader audiences. Already in that first meeting we had the idea to install an official Month of Performance Art. The idea was to frame the ongoing practices of various artists during one month of the year and put them into one program, to make visible the vibrant activity that is going on between artists. Three months later, the first Month of Performance Art took place.

Jörn J. Burmester: I founded Performer Stammtisch in 2003 and have hosted it with Florian since 2007. We held regular meetings to watch and discuss performance art. In February of 2011 we called a special meeting, inviting all independent producers, curators and organizers of performance art we knew in Berlin, to discuss ways to collaborate and improve the general situation for our art form in Berlin. The idea of MPA was developed during that meeting, and to our surprise everyone agreed to create the Month of Performance Art, with the first edition taking place only three months later. The basic idea was to join forces to promote a better understanding of the Berlin performance art scene among ourselves and the general public.

A.E.Zimmer: Florian, I'm interested in your referral to the art of performance as a "general situation". Language often grows broad when talking about performance and its reception as an artistic practice. Why do you think this is?

Florian Feigl: I am not quite sure if it isn’t a misunderstanding. What I tried to point out was the general situation of performance art practitioners regarding possibilities to keep up their practices, exhibit, perform, etc.  However, I understand this as a very productive misunderstanding. Performance as a "general situation" describes a growing misunderstanding that confounds the artistic practice with all sorts of performances in very different contexts such as public, economic, social and, of course, the varying cultural performances. From my point of view, the main difference between artistic practice and the other understandings of performance is the non-utilitarian, process-oriented approach of the artistic practice. But let me be very clear: a non-utilitarian, process-oriented  approach is critical. This approach to art is a pretty precise line to be drawn between performance art and performance in whatever other sense: we talk about art and not about running shoes!

This interview has been edited for clarity.  All photos courtesy of Leon Elias Donath for Month of Performance Art, Berlin.

A.E.Zimmer is a writer and regular contributor to Performa Magazine.

[performamagazine]

The Forgotten Bellwethers of a Sonic Revolution

By A.E. Zimmer

“Please stop! No more!”

The pleas squeaked from a 1913 audience, witnessing the sound of the Futurist Movement. In an intimate Italian villa, Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori– roughly sewn instruments made of wooden boxes and conical amplifiers–unapologetically cranked the sounds of the early twentieth century– the sound of the cog and the wheel clacking, of machines charging towards industry. 

As supernatural as they are mechanical, the intonarumori are the forgotten bellwethers of a sonic revolution. Now considered the earliest pioneer work into noise music, Russolo’s Futurist sound is raucous yet spectral, as if the frequencies come not from a city’s concrete but someplace far ghostlier. Upon listening, one wonders how and why can a machine “haunt” us? Perhaps the eeriness of the Futurist sound is due to its aural disturbance of a symbolic tradition. When the symbol of excellence turns from man to machine, might those made of flesh feel slighted?

These crude, toothsome-looking instruments blare a telling caterwaul. Their whirring sounds express a confrontation and collaboration with the technologies that redefined human production in the early twentieth century. The sound of screws disambiguated from human context, the intonarumori do not quite reveal the nature of the machine as much as they reveal man’s anxiety before it– his ghostly disappearance, the warp and shrink of his authorial voice.

For Performa 09, Performa celebrated Russolo’s noise with a one-night-only concert, Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners. The performance involved original scores and contributions from over fifteen artists, complete with Luciano Chessa’s meticulous re-construction of the intonarumori in full. Since then, the reassembled noise intoners have toured to the Maerzmusik Festival, Berlin; Transart Festival, Rovereto, Italy; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Flaneries Musicales de Reims, France; and Art Basel Miami Beach.

A.E.Zimmer is a writer and contributor to Performa Magazine.