The New Man - Four Exercises in Utopian Movements at Aberystwyth Arts Centre Monday 2 – Tuesday 3 May. 4pm, 6pm and 8pm.Doing is better than feeling. Bertolt Brecht The New Man is an exercise in active reception. After the shock of the First World War, the dissolution of subjectivity and the final breakdown of the bourgeois concept of art, very different artists looked for a new function for their art production, searching for a new relation to life and society. This modernist approach was later buried under the experience of Facism and the repression of Stalinism. LIGNA’s performance The New Man explores three different positions – with a fourth which cuts across the others. The poet Bertolt Brecht develops the Lehrstueck for a state without classes, where gestures, social positions and, in this way, society as a whole come into play. The dancer Rudolf von Laban proposes Bewegungschoere, choirs of movement, in which the collective vibrations disperse power itself. The director Vsevolod Meyerhold experimented in the young Soviet Uni–on with biomechanical exercises for his actors to renew their bodies, shaping a new kind of subjectivity. Finally the comedian Charlie Chaplin stumbles across all of these utopian visions and their promises. The New Man is a performance without actors and stage. There is nothing to see except for the activity of the audience. Dispersed in the theatrical space, they are listening to a radio play, that not only deals with the four aesthetic positions mentioned above, but proposes gestures and movements according to the different blueprints of the new man. But the audience is not listening to the same things at the same time. It is split up into four groups. For fifteen minutes each group is listening to one of the positions, then their program is changing and their role is transferred to another group, while they are receiving a new position. In the end every group of listeners will have tested and quoted every attitude, gradually gaining insight into what is going on around them – into their own production. The audience will play the same play four times with different roles, being actors and viewers at the same time. The New Man thus provides an authentic situation, intimate and strange at the same time. The performance evolves into a kind of sociological experiment, in which the body, its common gestures and movements are called into question as being societal. The decisive relation between the individual experience of the body and its collective appearance is discussed and the question arises, what kind of collective productions can be possible nowadays, in a society where everyone is shaping his and her body as their own, following undisputed paradigms. The New Man calls for turning the production of gestures and movements into a public, collective affair. Therefore it offers the theatre or exhibition space to a collective of producers. Together they produce the situation they participate in – but without being able to control it fully and to eliminate the foreigness of the others, with which they exchange movements and gestures. The New Man is a play in the third person, exploiting the iterability of the gesture and thus reconsidering the aesthetical paradigms of Brecht’s Lehr-stueck - Learning play/ Teaching play. The hope that all social institutions could come into play and the conditions we live in can be changed, is redicovered - dispersed between the different positons of the play. It is put up for discussion at the premiere party, which is held at the end of any performance of The New Man. The New Man is a production by the performance group LIGNA. The play was originally written in German as Der Neue Mensch and premiered at the Kampnagel theatre in Hamburg at the end of 2008. The English version of the piece was already shown at the Beit Lessin Theatre in Tel Aviv, the Beirut Art Center and the Tanzkongress in Hamburg. As of now The New Man resp. Der Neue Mensch has been performed more than 50 times. LIGNA (Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen) works since 2002 on new forms of performance- and media art, which regard the audience as a temporary association of producers that generates unforseeable, uncontrollable effects. Models of this media usage are the Radio Ballet, which provides radio listeners with a choreography of excluded and forbidden gestures in formerly public, now controlled spaces or the Radio Concert for 144 Mobile Phones, which lets the audience participate in a process of collective composition. www.ligna.blogspot.com Tickets are £10 (£9). To book contact Aberystwyth Arts Centre ticket office on 01970 62 32 32 or go on-line www.aber.ac.uk/artscentre |
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Thursday, April 14, 2011 |
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