The team bring their productions to life with a network of international dancers, singers, artists, film-makers, and character actors. The theatrical performances, which are often discursive and always subversive, are based on the participants’ own stories, an assortment of experiences defined by a variety of religious, political, and social contexts.
The works focus on existential themes such as religion, power structures, and the search for identity. The performance is characterized by the clash of particular cultural codes, represented by the performers themselves: they act out their gestures, facial expressions, costumes, and attitudes, countering and supporting one other. The actors confront the audience with their own pointed remarks about politics, the fear of failure, or African gangster pride, while fellow performers simultaneously translate what has been said. The costume designs make reference to African clothing culture and to the sculptural performative art of the 1970s and Europe’s avant-garde.
During the Skulptur Projekte, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen are using the Theater im Pumpenhaus as a production site for new performances and fragmentary re-enactments of existing plays. Six days a week, visitors can come there to witness rehearsals, activities, and work on the new production, which is entitled Kabuki noir Munster. In collaboration with the Japanese kabuki dancer Toyohiko Fujima, the actors are developing a performance in which they try to come close to the kabuki codes to gain a deeper understanding of this form of presentation.
Japanese kabuki was created in the sixteenth century as a complex theatrical form that unites dance, chants, shamisen playing, scenery, and the actors’ dramatic expression. Unlike the Western conception of theatre, the scenes in a kabuki performance do not change—the depicted scenes have a ritual character. As the script is recited in the original Early Modern Japanese, even Japanese viewers are given information about the performance via headphones. Through the evolution of this new piece, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen hope to reflect on their own routines and incorporate existing ritual and spiritual dimensions into a new aesthetic form.
Nicola Torke
