Life Long Burning – Performance Situation Room Activity

Research-Lab 24 July – 9 August 2017 at Impulstanz festival, former post-office, Zollergasse 31, 1070 Wien

Hosted and conceived by Peter Stamer on invitation by the Life Long Burning Network

with and by Lyndsey Housden, Viktorija Ilioska, Milan Markovic Matthis, Vladimir Miller, Dusan Music, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Octavian Prostean, Juli Reinartz, Peter Stamer, Florian Tröbinger, Paul Wenninger, Yosi Wanunu

„We must open our empty hands and show that really there is nothing up our sleeves. Only then can we begin.“

Peter Brook, The Rough Theatre In: The Empty Space

First mock-ups by Peter Stamer

We tackle the question of how to create a space from a virtual angle. So instead of using manifest building material we create a virtual space with the help of performative narratives. Using methods of visualisation we look more thoroughly into what it is to create a ‘common imaginary’. Looking at the given theatre situation in f.e. Vienna next to the aesthetic question there is an actual need to fantasize together in order to fight off or at least become aware of the threats knocking on the door – not just in Austria but all over in Europe and beyond.

12 people from various backgrounds – directors, performers, visual artists, an architect and dancers – set out to create an ‘IMAGINARY PERFORMANCE HOUSE’. Taking on narrative techniques this research project starts with performing our collective imagination in order to develop further and alternative aesthetic strategies that ‘create worlds’ by words, bodies, movement, with the help of our most precious faculty: imagination and creativity. We play around a lot, enter a physically enacted idea of architectural planning and create space by means of choreography, narration, along the fault lines of wording worlds and ‘worlding’ (if this word exists at all). So, in a nutshell, we point to the future which we try to ‘remember’ in an emancipatory and politically intense process of creating and claiming space. And we come empty handed.

Open Door on Tuesday, 8 August 2017, 15 – 17 h

Mock-up in the studio by Peter Stamer

With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union