The Public Space Programme

catalysts for the relational remodeling of public spaces

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Edgelands is focused on British sites, but the implications of the term, and the idea allow us to spot them everywhere.

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An old edit of David Banks on the run.

There has certainly been an explosion in the practice of parkour, the originally French activity in which the participant, or the traceur, makes their way through, or maneuvers the environment around him in a way that suits their taste at each time - mostly staying away from simply walking up a flight of stairs or leaning against a bannister to enjoy the view. I first remember traceur David Banks as he cat-crawled up and down Glasgow's Buchanan Street 16 times clocking an amazing 8 miles in one go to raise money for families affected by the earthquake in Haiti. He crawled for 10 hours. Later, after he had received his coaching qualification, I attended a couple of his sessions and I was blown away by the level of technique and stamina required to carry out the simplest routine. I asked him a few questions about his relationship with parkour.

How did you learn about parkour and what made you passionate about it?

It’s hard to give a straightforward answer to this question, as soon as I learned about parkour I realized it was something I had been learning my whole life. The only problem was, attitude and imagination are central in parkour, yet our natural behaviour is somewhat suppressed as we get older. For example, growing up it was quicker to get home by climbing fences than taking the pathways. It was more enjoyable and liberating to climb a tree than observe it. As we grow we imitate the behaviour of those around us, as this happens our ability to act and play becomes limited and narrowed. I try to hold onto the attitude of my five-year-old self, it’s what drives my training and heavily influences my arts practice. When I was five I wanted to be a superhero, I wanted to use my body and my mind to save the world. I’ve been preparing and trying to do this since. For me, parkour is about trying not to forget more than trying to learn. I want my practice to help and inform people but as I get older what was black and white becomes grayer.

Parkour treads a strange path between many practices, some see sport while others see dance or performance, what is your understanding of it?

I see within the parkour community today something similar to what has been seen in the experimental theatre scene for years. People are constantly challenging what is considered parkour in the same way people are constantly challenging what is performance. Go to any jam (meet up) nowadays and you will find something far removed from what the founders, the Yamasaki, did in the disciplines birthplace in Lisse. The founders trained with the ethos of strong man strong body, they trained and challenged each other so they could become useful - not only to themselves but to others. Yet, time passed and the founders broke up, the discipline has since spread around the planet and you find different practitioners training for different reasons - reasons including to stay fit, for stage, to be useful, to feel free, for money, for ego or just for the fun of it. Personally though I do see the act of choosing to move through ones environment how you please, regardless of its structure or form, as a political act. Is that performance? That’s up to you.

What about when you are not "officially" running, does parkour reveal itself in any parts of your daily routine?

Everywhere, it has given me a more positive attitude in which to live my life. I find everything about it transferable. I spend countless hours trying to overcome obstacles with parkour in my physical environment that when they come up elsewhere, I once more try to overcome them. I sometimes remind myself of movements I’ve done when faced with a problem. I tell myself cheer up and keep trying, remember that movement the other day? Took you 10 attempts to get it but you figured it out and then you got it 10 times in a row, there’s got to be a way and your going to find it. This attitude although at the forefront of my mind sometimes, is often subconscious. The ability to appreciate my immediate environment through movement has given me the ability to appreciate the other things around me in my life, whatever crosses my path.

When I had the chance of experiencing parkour I felt a sense of play. There was sheer enjoyment in returning to a childlike state of exploration, but in retrospect that state was also one of disobedience to a perceived structure. How do you see it, is there a conflict? Or maybe a symbiotic relationship between the runners and their environment?

I think conflict does arise. Not because our environment is a certain way but because we’ve all learnt to interact with it in the same way. I’m blessed with what I’ve got. I’m strong, healthy and that’s provided me with a choice. There’s countless ways to climb a staircase, its just most people only choose one. You do however, come across people who simply don’t want you to move differently. They perceive us as reckless daredevils, you can train for years and some people will still simply think you’re an idiot. I try my best in these situations to explain to these people why we do it, how much we prepare, how all the risks are calculated. I try to make them understand that if how I moved was reckless I wouldn’t be able to have these conversations; I would be long gone or badly injured.

What about the law, property and public, how have you encountered these perimeters?

Less and less frequently. I’m part of the Glasgow parkour community who have been around for over 6 years now. Over that time we’ve built a good relationship with property owners and security at the places we like to train most, it just takes time. For example people have been training at Glasgow University since the scene here began, that’s a long time. A long time where nothing has been broken or vandalised by us. A long time without an ambulance ever getting called. Over time people clock this and tend to just let us be. Interestingly, the recent release of a parkour coaching qualification that’s recognized by the British Government, the first of it’s kind, has sent waves through the community. I work for Glasgow Parkour Coaching, which gives me the opportunity to train with public liability insurance. We could essentially just show a copy of that in most situations where were being moved on but we continue to just smile, explain what were doing then get going. We come back in the future of course but we want people to accept and understand what were doing, not just tolerate it. They might even end up having a go.

Any final words? A fun anecdote or a brutal wound?

“And what he really meant, was he couldn’t swim.” That’s for my Daddio, he’s my hero. He’s also a laugh; I reckon you all should meet him. Did you know he saved someone from getting run over by a train and someone from a burning building? He’s done a lot of interesting shit, interview him next.

Interviewed by Sigurður Jónsson.

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http://en.free-voina.org/

There was a report on this group of Russian performance activists in today's paper. They are a group of radical thinkers who take to the street in reaction to corruption using art as their form of protest. Their actions have included painting a massive penis on a drawbridge that faces the KGB and toppling police cars - some manned.

It strikes me that their manifesto (goals and objectives) has a finite time-frame, unlike any other manifesto I've read. It is like a massive to-do list rather than a passive prose on how things ought to be. Voina are romantics; they are nostalgic:

4. Rebirth of Russian laughing culture, traditions of absurdity and sarcasm in context of high art, that is Rebirth of lively merriment in the art-spaces. Creation of political street-art in Russia in the best traditions of skomorokh and carnival middle-age art.

This can be juxtaposed with the "three vociferous statements" of Mayakovsky's 1915 manifesto "A Drop of Tar":

Destroy the all-canons freezer which turns inspiration into art.

Destroy the old language, powerless to keep up with life's leaps and bounds.

Throw the old masters overboard from the ship of modernity.

Life is hard; art is the solution.

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http://www.insideoutproject.net/

An amazing opportunity to be part of French street-artist, JR's massive, global photograffing project. JR has just received the TED prize of 2011 and the TED network has helped in getting this behemoth task underway. Don't lose out on this, we sure won't.

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Richard Layzell is a British artist who spent six weeks in Shanghai "exploring and responding to one square mile of the city." His writing is highly attentive and evocative and you can easily lose yourself there for hours on end. The Public Space Programme is very interested in learning more from Mr. Layzell.

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Paula Lamamié de Clairac during her residency

We asked Paula Lamamié de Clairac, one of the residents of RPSP 2010, to give us some insight into how she engaged with the process.

How did the residency impact you work as a dance maker? I remember you were using public space as site for creating material.

The most interesting thing of the residency was to experience instant compositions, to improvise with the different materials such as the rules of other artist, the people and landscapes of the streets. It is very inspiring to have the freedom of creation without a lot of research and critical thinking that normally is the first step in any creative process, although letting inspiration flow with the elements that are found can work as a research as a way to materialize something as the same time you are actually doing it. This freedom had an effect in my vision as a dance maker, remember me the importance of let impulses and desires (inspiration) go out before judgments.

After using Public Space as a creative site what was it that made you choose and indoor site to final present a work?

Actually the work we did for the residency was most of time outdoors, but we also prepared a piece to do in the theater, that was somehow separated from the RASP, but it was very inspired from the work we did outside. The indoor performance called “No perfect moment” had to be with the idea of “chance” and we were trying to put on stage the improvisation of the movements and decisions that we all have to do all the time in life. Also we used the audience as a life public that had to adapt to us in the same way we had to adapt to them, so, somehow it was an experiment of breaking a set idea of being in a theater as a passive agent, and instead showing how actives we are always in any situation by choosing our actions.

How did Public Space get interrogated, exposed, revealed through your work with the residency?

The city of Reykjavik showed different faces through our interaction with it. On one side we discovered a city that is used to art interactions and seems to feel comfortable with them. However by the passing through the streets we felt the obvious differences between this culture and for example the Cuban one, were we also did a performance in the streets. I remember very clear that the possibility of touching people by the performance was immediately rejected. Another face of the city was showed by filming and talking to workers -all form abroad- that anonymously are building a city without the recognition that an artist or a person who works in a cultural field can have. Without notice them, people is painting and sculpting a city everyday. And this was maybe the most interesting discover that we made from my point of view. It is something that we could research in any city to think about the classes structures of contemporary world.

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The Workshops

Flying Low and Passing Through Inga Maren Rúnarsdóttir and Paula Lamamié De Clairacdrew on their exclusive training with David Zambrano, with whom they undertook an intensive course in the world famous Flying Low and Passing Through techniques. These workshops offered an exciting opportunity for dancers, choreographers and artists looking to further their professional and artistic development.

The workshop was be split into two parts: Part One offered a purist approach to Flying Low technique and was aimed primarily at dancers. Part One provides an introduction to a professional training in Flying Low.

Part Two looked at Passing Through technique and explored how this practice can be applied to the creation of work for public spaces. This workshop culminated in the Passing Mob, which saw the participants travel like a cloud of people, or a shoal of fish through the objects and people of 101 Reykjavík finally ending on Lækjartorg-square where there was a passing party. Richard DeDomenici Richard worked with artists from the UK, Iceland and Spain (12 participants in total). A three-day intensive workshop on and around the topic of protest guided by DeDomenici’s anarcho-surrealist approach to live art. In line with DeDomenici’s effective working methods, the participants and DeDomenici took to the streets on the last day and disseminated their message.

Stella Polaris Stella Polaris was founded in 1985 by Merete Klingen and Per Spildra Borg and since then the company have toured all over the world – showing work and running workshops in Sweden, Finland, Palestine and the ’94 Lillehammer Winter Olympics to name just a few. The vision of the company is to burst open the borders between fantasy and reality, and give the audience an experience without the boundaries of time and space; give extensive pedagogical work based on artistic, social and spiritual beliefs; and to create a more vivid, spiritual and open world, based on the universal principle of love. The Reykjavík Public Space Programme is invited the people of Iceland to join this remarkable company for a full four-day workshop that has been 25 years in development.

The workshop explored acrobatics, juggling, song and dance, mask and puppetry and culminated in participants joining the company to perform Stella Polaris’ ‘The Dream of the Shaman’ on Reykjavík Culture Night. There were roughly 600 audience in attendance and 25 participants joined the workshop over the four days.  

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THE RESIDENCY - a break down

The main residency programme involved three artists: Paula Lamamié De Clairac (ES), Inga Maren Rúnarsdóttir (IS) and Árni Kristjánsson (IS). There was also the planned inclusion of Kviss Búmm Bang (IS), but they pulled out at the last minute due to an over commitment. The decision was unilateral on their side, but understandable to a point as they would not have had the full time or energy to put into the project. Although not part of the official line-up, Swedish dancer Anna Asplind’s time with PSP could be looked at as a residency as she worked closely with the other residents during the 2 weeks she was preparing her Dancewalks-piece, 1224m in Reykjavik. The three artists engaged for the three and a half weeks with rules sets provided by artists including Tim Etchells and Georg Hobmeier. Many performance experiments, running under the umbrella of micro-performances, were undertaken and audiences were invited to partake via text message. The text messaging was a huge success with a good-sized audience attending whenever these micro-performances were set to take place.

Micro Performances Micro-performance as a form is a practice that was developed out of the residency and refers to a short performance or happening that can be attended for free. It is a tool we employed in the residency as a model for developing work, but also opening the work to audiences and artists of Reykjavík. Failure and play were central components and a key learning prospect was finding ways to salvage material from a seeming failure.

Rule-Sets Due to the lack of artistic discourse in Iceland engaging with Public Space the residency was made of three artists that demonstrated an interest in developing an artistic discourse in this area, but were very new to Public Space as a platform and as an object of study. The rule-sets thus served as a bridge and access point for artists from different disciplines into approaches and ways of thinking about the work they were producing. The rule-sets proved very challenging at times but still offered inspiration.

Performances Pieces that were performed for example include Passing Mob, where dancers occupied the central of Reykjavik. Also one can mention the piece Meeting Slavo, in which the audience were taken on a tour of the harbor to witness the everyday occurrences that take place there, and explore whether these activities could be made performative as a result of their framing. The final performance experiment involved introducing audience to a Polish boat painter called Slavo and learning the story that he paints all of the commercial boats in Reykjavík on his own. Borrowing to Give was a piece developed by Árni from Tim Etchells’ rule set and he experimented with what it was to ask people to give him money, in order to pass onto others. The elements Árni was particularly interested in were how money is valued in terms of what is deemed acceptable and unacceptable usage of it. What is value for money? Árni worked a lot with exploring the relationship between ritual in Public sites that dictate a different performative discourse, imitating rituals and dances he had learnt during his time spent in Costa Rica in search of a means of making this abstract activity carry meaning in the centre parts of Reykjavík’s 101. Inga Maren and Paula developed En Route, a dance piece in which they improvised, following a predetermined route through the city, each movement feeding off the architectural/design elements in their closest environment culminating in a Pas-de-trois with the Einar Jónsson sculpture museum.

Culture Night On Menningarnótt (Culture Night), Reykjavík’s main cultural event of the year, The Public Space Programme was invited to manage a series of events that would take place in and around the Reykjavík City service centre that had recently opened. The space dictated the performances that took place; Árni posed as a city official asking people about their feelings towards the building, questioning how we relate to the structures around us; Amber Hickey installed herself discreetly for her piece Pick/Touch/Smell and Sigurdur Jonsson had an introduction of PSP, handing out rule-sets to people who were interested in trying them out for themselves.

Future The residency model will hopefully continue this time in collaboration with ANTI festival. PSP is working hard at the moment to put the cogs in place for Residency programme #2. This time with a much more intensive focus on six artist (four Iceland based and two international) to for a temporary six-week collective to develop a work for a Public Site in Iceland. PSP took a lot from facilitating and coordinating the first residency and will certainly take this learning forward to create a meaningful, focused experience in Residency #2. More details to come...

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Pick/Touch/Smell is a direct and intimate piece that actively explores the tensions between perfection and reality, fabrication and embodiment, fragility and strength. The first in a triptych of pieces exploring elements of female experience, the audience and the performer are collaborators in the creation of this work.

The artist installed herself in the new city service centre on Menningarnótt (Culture Night) as part of PSP’s line-up there. The building housing the service centre is controversial and has been described cold and unwelcoming. In that light it was poignant witnessing Hickey where she had planted her nude body, covered in bright, luscious smelling flowers, among the grey and harsh concrete.

Amber Hickey is a multimedia performance artist based in Zürich. She is a graduate of the BA Contemporary Performance Practice programme at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Her main focus is to merge her artwork with active anthropological research and social critique. She aims to create work that is open to evolution in relationship with the surroundings it is performed in and the people who experience it.

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Anna Asplind 1224m in Reykjavík (Download the audio track here)

Dancewalks

Dancewalks is a series on choreographic audio tours by Swedish artist and choreographer Anna Asplind. Asplind worked with Reykjavík Public Space Programme for two weeks and created 1224m Reykjavík.

1224m in Reykjavík

An audio route around Reykjavík 101 was designed for participants to follow. The participants follow choreographic direction via the audio and dance collectively through the streets of 101. Anna Asplind was born in Sweden where she started to dance in 1997. Between 2004 and 2008 she studied dance at Sceneindgangen in Copenhagen and at Balettakademin in Gothenburg.  During her time in Berlin she also started her work with Dancewalks which you now can find in Berlin, Gothenburg, Karlstad and Borås. Anna works site-specific in different environments with improvisation inspired by the interaction with the surroundings and the people.

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From the performance programme of RPSP last August. Homo Ludens collaborated with the local bus terminal BSÍ to create this performance which montage a series of happenings and explored the affinity and absurdity of connections between people in the public sphere. Our existence is a reflection of what we think it should be. We think, therefore we are. We connect, therefore we understand. The connections are chaotic and turbulent, neither regular nor linear. They grow from each other, from the nothing and everything, enveloping us, like the ginger with its unpredictable growth, going in all directions. The tree, its opposite, grows up.  Ginger connections are arbitrary. As connections grow, so does understanding grow exponentially which inevitably leads to the universal enlightenment of mankind. Suddenly a sound, like the blowing of a violent wind coming from heaven, will fill mankind with the reconciliation of Chaos and Order. Order and Chaos. Our existence will no longer be a mere reflection of what we think it should be. It will become the reflection of what we want it to be. --- Fjöltengi was a great success and received positive feedback from most people who came to watch, knowingly, or simply came across it as they passed through the bus station. It's distinction lay in the fact that the creation of this piece was a direct result of our call out for performances exploring public space. It blurred the proverbial line between art and life in a theatrical yet subtle way, resulting in the amusement and bewilderment of those who witnessed it. A direct response to the site it played out in and very specific in its use of symbolism, stereotyping and acoustics. An especially memorable situation arose when a stag party came into the space - in many ways using it similarly to the performers, the unexpected calm of waiting - and then realised they were in the middle of a performance.

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From the performance programme of RPSP last August.

In the framework of the forces of nature, the past meets the present. The performance, which is not set in a specific time, explores human nature and where rebellion and submission meet.

The performance tells the story of a community that has recently been through an undisclosed trauma. Outside forces enter the community urging people to leave the past behind and embrace modernity. Unwilling to accept these ideas, the people rise leading to unforeseen events.

The performance was created predominantly by a group of young Icelandic theatre-makers, many of whom are currently studying at Rose Bruford Drama School in London, U.K. The performance was performed in the Elliðaárdalur-park.

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The Stella Polaris Workshop and performance (by publicspaceprogramme) took place from August 18th to 22nd, 2010 as part of Reykjavík Public Space Programme. Click on the links or image to see more!

Stella Polaris, along with a group of Icelandic performers from their workshop, performed The Dream of the Shaman – a performance inspired by Nordic mythology – a ritual celebrating life, nature and history, on Menningarnótt (Culture Night), 22nd of August 2010. We asked Anna Zehentbauer, one of the participants to reflect on the experience:

"Participating in Stella Polaris’ workshop was an amazing experience. We were introduced and invited to the work and ethos of how the company works in a playful and generous way. We had sessions of collective acrobatics to music, indoor as well as outdoor, which for me was vital because we did work with big expressions but also smaller more detailed expressions where smaller spaces were needed. The spaces we worked in really suited the type of work we were doing. For example when working on impulse work, acrobatics and physical improvisations to music we worked indoor where we got the chance to explore the work in in a smaller and intimate space, where as the stilt walking, juggling and stick work was done outside; which gave us more space and freedom to explore, fail and learn.  All the work we did ended up in a performance which was performed in the big park. This space was big, and our expression were challenged by the space as it is endless. The audience was helping in defining the playing space which helped us in our performance and the encounters we had with them through the workshop that was wonderfully taught by Stella Polaris. They took us all on a magical journey in their theatrical and world full of colours, emotions, big expressions, laughter, tricks, and larger than life characters. It was a fantasatic to be able to be part of that through The Reykjavik Public Space Programme."

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The guidelines for each rule-set are as follows:

4 to 5 rules

Instigating an experiment that relates to public space

The rules should excite you, and inspire in you a desire to see the outcome

As part of last years residency The Public Space Programme commissioned a series of rule-sets by internationally renowned artists dealing with public space in some way. Click here to download them or send us an email to buy the book.

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Richard DeDomenici also gave his performance lecture "Did Priya Pathak ever get her wallet back?" as part of RPSP  in August 2010. Alexander Roberts caught up with Richard before the lecture.

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Sociological voyeur and live-art activist Richard DeDomenici ran a 3 day workshop on and around the theme ‘protest’ as part of the Reykjavík Public Space Programme 2010. DeDomenici is an observer; a prolific challenger of procrastination that has churned out anarcho-surrealist interventions since his graduation from the University of Wales Institute Cardiff in the 2001. Although attendance could have been more consistent, if felt as though the workshop was an enjoyable learning experience for most.

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Interview with Georg Hobmeier

Performance artist Georg Hobmeier donated one of the rule-sets that formed the basis of the Reykjavík Public Space Programme's residency.

I had the great fortune of working with Mr. Hobmeier while still attending the Royal Scottish Academy in Glasgow, where he, as part of his visiting lectureship, directed a performance installation called UNIT. Tackling questions of submission and authority, UNIT led the audience and performers through a series of chambers or compartments where in some cases the performers brandished mp3-players that seemed to govern their actions.

Commands coming from a foreign, electrical apparatus and controlling the body, whether it be a music player or electrodes, has become somewhat of a thing for you Mr. Hobmeier, where did it all start?

Georg Hobmeier: “My older work is very much informed by the idea of computer generated choreography and control, very much based on the use of technology.” He explains, “Originally we wanted the choreography itself to be controlled by a computer program which would then send dancers around, focusing on the pattern being created in a city…” “You say originally?” I interrupt; “Yes… Something went wrong – basically the funding for the project. Then we thought about cheaper solutions and this resulted in a massive, massive trend! One might see it as a downgrade but this downgrade actually resulted in the use of mp3-players and in some ways it went even further like in UNIT where the idea of receiving a command was in the foreground.”

Other works by Mr. Hobmeier and his associates also engage in the dialectics of power. Waveform, a solo performance for a dancer's body controlled by himself and a set of wireless electrodes; Frontiers, a multiplayer game where you take on the role of a refugee or a border patroller on the edges of "Fortress Europe"; and Area, a performative argument confronting the patterns of an urban space. I took part in one of the Area workshops a while back but the newest installment to the series, areaGlobal, sees participants in five countries across the world follow a audio track consisting of movement instruction exactly at the same time. In what way has your relationship to this technology developed over the years?

GH: “The basic principle of AREA is that you encounter someone [taking commands from a mp3-player] and then you follow this person, observing them by choosing your own perspective. This was our basic aim. In the two following projects that we are working on now, Verlorung and Labyrinth, there have been a few changes. I think Labyrinth is a good example of how the AREA ‘game’ evolved because it removed the strong physical presence of the performers to, let’s say, a degree of 80%. There is a little bit of performance left – which is very subtle – but it is much more about the experience of the audience and suggestions they receive themselves via mp3 or radio.”

What does that mean for the reading of the piece?

GH: “Well, it becomes a game of suggestion, a narrative overlay that redefines the perception of the people concerning the city and this is a very subtle and almost invisible thing. Something that I actually quite like.”

When performing the areaGlobal score, I couldn’t help to wonder about the level of confrontation ingrained in the structure of the performance. Any comment?

GH: “Yes I agree with that. I am just in the middle of editing some audio for the second part of yet another area project called Fast-forward and its melancholic rewind and there is tons of confrontation in the recording. Interestingly enough you get a little more information when listening to the thing rather then seeing it, you get a good sense of the disturbance it creates. Also, I like the conflict that it creates for the bourgeois, middle-class audience that likes to follow us on our little journeys and I had a nice afternoon listening to screaming Turkish teenagers who were throwing the vilest insults at us while we tried to stay in a very stoic and concentrated mood of performance.”

Sounds like a great afternoon, but what about positive audience participation, there must have been some?

GH: “There are several but I would like to take one very particular example. I went to my hometown to make a version of “Fast-forward…” Now, Tyroleans are a very particular bunch, very open and direct but they have kept a form of curiosity, in their hidden valley at the end of the World. When we went to a large mall that had just opened we did a very simple choreography with hands, very precise. And suddenly everyone, there must have been a hundred people, started to join in. For a moment there was a large change in the social structure and the behaviour of these people.”

Like a flashmob of sorts?

GH: “It didn’t have the nature of a flashmob, it wasn’t determined, it was ephemeral and it had a spontaneous yet choreographed.

Another thing that I was drawn to during the Area experience was the element of visibility, and on the Area website there is a mention of the visibility/invisibility border, would you care to elaborate on that?

GH: “For Area, me and Tommy [Noonan, dancer and director] came up with this scale of how to categorise and perceive our material in order to work on the dramaturgy. Basically it is a two-dimensional graph, which has two axes. Axis nr. 1 relates to the invisible vs. the visible; axis nr. 2, crossing through that, ranges from readable to unreadable – this is called the WTF-scale. Area developed over a long time and had lots of different places but it had a one-dimensional nature. The performers, with their sports gear on, were very visible. The idea of blending in was not yet considered as an option as we were busy with the movement part and how to experience the city. But when we did performances with larger groups we considered the question ‘what does it mean to blend in?’ How can you be part of an environment, you know? We became aware of costumes, dressing up, as a tool. I am quite fond bold physical action, and Tommy Noonan is very fond of very small, discreet actions that cannot be perceived and this is basically what constitutes the scale. It’s not about right and wrong. It’s like a modulator; it really changes the energy of the performance.”

In areaGlobal, participants from three continents execute commands from an audio track simultaneously, what has been the initial feedback from that event?

GH: “To use a very simplistic American phrase: I think everyone had a great time. I know that some had problems with the instructions, but it wasn’t originally meant for people who had never done it… I know the people in Bangalore had a really strong experience. We in Buenos Aires also had very strong experience but that was also because everyone was very experienced and so the material functioned quite well. It was also interesting to experience the city from a totally different perspective.”

Do you think choreographical work like this contributes differently to the politics of a certain location?

GH: “Well I mean, public space has very different dimensions, I don’t know if I would call them political but it’s more on a social level – how do people inhabit these spaces and what are the so called rules?”

So there is at least a socio-political aspect to the work...

GH: “Yes maybe, well, this example is not so much about areaGlobal but this was during rehearsals of “Fast-forward…” we did a track in front of the holy halls of opera at high season and so the police was around. The inner city drunks and junkies were also around. But there we were, doing a weird mix of going back and forth, elaborate synchronised motions and really erratic behaviour. The police basically read it ‘ahh, this is from the festspiele [theatre festival] it’s art.’ But the junkies were really amazed that we were allowed to do that, “why are they not getting arrested” they kept saying, “when we do that we get arrested!””

Haha, in any case you seem to be striking a chord with the socio-politically displaced. What’s next? AreaIntergalactic?

GH: “The thought of moving in different dimensions is interesting, but no,” he laughs, “I want to repeat areaGlobal and make a version that is more accessible and then spread it a little bit further. I want to create a technical frameset making it easier for people to upload material themselves. I’m not interested in making art that is really ‘something’, unique, bold art that the critics love. I would love to start a trend. One can only hope! What we will do, we will develop more hybrid forms, between theatre and audio. Further than that, no plans for different planets, but you never know what comes up!”

Well that’s all; thank you Mr. Hobmeier for taking the time to answers these questions. I hope we meet again soon.

GH: “I thank you for these questions Mr. Jonsson, and to the reader: I wish you a very good day… night… or morning.”

Interviewed by Sigurdur Jonsson