Niemandszeit. deufert&plischke

In 1998 Thomas Plischke created the dance-solo "Fleur (Anemone)" as part of his graduation from PARTS. In the same period Kattrin Deufert wrote the text "Myth of Europe", a personal and emotional diary of her commuting in between Brussels and Berlin while finalizing her PhD at Freie Universität Berlin. Both works grasped some of the emotional state of graduating, this no man's time: not a student anymore and not yet a professional. 16 years later deufer&plischke have themselves taught at Universities, teaching and graduating many students. And for Niemanszeit they reversed the roles of teacher, creator and student: they took both works out of the archive to give them to their graduate students. Not to produce any reconstruction, but to become students of their own works again, their former students being their teachers, mentors, coaches and deufert&plischke the performers.

In a process that took several months the graduate students reformulated and expanded the dance solo and the text with their personal experiences and memories of the time in between 1998 and today, a period that was filled with the Iraq war, the historic caesura of September 11, the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, Facebook, Google, NSA ... Images and text from this time were collected and served as an inspiration to contextualize the original material. The original files and Materials of the works were destroyed and the graduate students, now colleagues and mentors in work to deufert&plischke produced a new text and movement score to be performed by deufert&plischke together with the audience.


We started with the work Niemandszeit, in order to take a look into our artistic work from the past: Work from the beginning of our artistic careers to be precise.
The aim was not to reconstruct those works, but rather to address time, the time that is in between these works and today. One of the earliest decisions about the
performance was, that there will be a time bracket score for both, audience and performers alike.
The works we revisited were the dance Solo Fleur (Anemone) from 1998 and the Text Myth of Europe (2000). Obviously a third element immediately joined the other two: the time in-between 1998 and today, this time that we call Niemandszeit.
And we brought this time in form of 16 chronicles by the German magazine Spiegel,
each chronicle summarizing the events of one year. Then we handed our material over to artists that just graduated. Most of the artists were former students of us,
and as a consequence to our understanding of work the necessity to always address embedded politics and power dispositives at work, we reversed the situation:
Our former students were not only collaborators and colleagues to us,
but also our mentors and coaches. The text Myth of Europe was reformulated, i.e. in several steps of the process the text was confronted with the newspaper articles taken of the chronicles, material from these articles was inserted into the existing story and gradually blended with personal memories and stories of Rosalind Goldberg, Ana Laura Lozza, Lee Meir, Miriam Jakob, Flavio Ribeiro and Kareth Schaffer. For each step the material was handed to another person in a circular fashion, so the stories lost their "personal" author, and developed their identity with the contribution of many authors instead. Each story was thus reformulated several times, and gradually, over a period of 2 months composed into the performance text by Kattrin Deufert, Lee Meir, Miriam Jakob and Flavio Ribeiro.
Parallel to the text production Rosalind Goldberg, Ana Laura Lozza, Thomas Plischke and Kareth Schaffer examined the newspaper articles and memories for physical references (a.o. indications of space, physicality, timing and mental and physical states) and translated their findings into 4 scores. Then 4 segments of 1 minute from the video of the dance solo "Fleur" were extracted and each segment served as a source for movement material for one score.
From both - text and movement - a score for the audience got extracted that will be live performed and different each evening. Choreography, Landscape, Text, Sounds,are all textures, woven fabrics. Holes that are connected only with other holes, like our reality, like our genealogy: deficits, memories, ruptures, discourses.

Continuing with our development of a New Epic Theater, part of the responsibility for the performance is handed over to the audience.
As the social reality of theater always also includes the audience there will be a score for the audience.

So welcome to Niemandszeit! It does not belong to us, not to you, not to anyone!
Come and spend it with us! Theater for us is always a No man's Time: it is not in the control of a director, nor performer nor the audience. But all together have to get involved in it, not with it!

Concept / Realisation: deufert&plischke
Choreography and Performance Text: Rosalind Goldberg, Ana Laura Lozza, Lee Meir, Miriam Jakob, Flavio Ribeiro, Kareth Schaffer
With a contribution by Valda Setterfield
Production Management: Barbara Greiner
A production by deufert&plischke and Tanzfabrik Berlin e.V.
With the support of the European Network "apap" - advancing performing arts project – Performing Europe.
Coproduction: bit teatergarasjen, Bergen, Kunstencentrum Buda, Kortrijk, tqw Vienna
Supported by the Berlin Senate Cultural Affairs Department

This event was prepared in cooperation within the framework of the Polish-German anniversary year 2016 ŚWIĘTUJEMY! organized by the Goethe-Institut and the German Embassy on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Treaty of Good Neighborship and Friendly Cooperation.

Tickets (normal/group/entrance fee): PLN 40/25/20 

See also

I agree to terms and conditions More.
Terms and conditions More.