claudia bosse / theatercombinat

In Residence:
January 25, 2011 - February 13, 2011
Discipline:
Theatre
Country:
Germany, Austria

theatercombinat represents a highly experienced production company for independent art and theatre works to create and produce challenging and expansive experimental formats. It is a partner of institutions such as Kampnagel Hamburg, Tanzquartier Vienna, the Braunschweig National Theatre, FFT Düsseldorf, HAU/Berlin, the Montenegro National Theatre, or festivals like Theater der Welt, the Wien Modern music festival, and Theaterformen, one of Germany’s biggest international festivals for theatre and performance, which opened in 2008 with artistic director Claudia Bosse’s staging of “The Persians” by Aeschylus.

Founded in 1996 in Berlin and based in Vienna, Austria, since 1999, the artistic formation led by director Claudia Bosse assembles actors, performers and dancers as well as theorists, sound and media artists, architects, visual artists and technicians in order to engage in research into theatrical concepts, texts, the body, space and time, pushing theatre beyond its limits in search of new, collective and adventurous ways to create and to communicate with the public.

Claudia Bosse is a graduate of Germany’s highly renowned Ernst Busch School of Dramatic Arts. From 2006 to 2008 she was associate director at Théâtre du Grütli, Geneva. Her works, marked by spectacular and radically diversified approaches to performance and theatre, include spatial choreographies, hybrid theater works in open-plan spaces, choral speech choreographies, theater projects involving various segments of the public, urban interventions, installations and discourse. From 2006 to 2009, Claudia Bosse developed theatercombinat’s theatrical series “producing tragedy” together with Chris Standfest, Gerald Singer and others. The series included for example a staging of “the persians” (Aeschylus) for the opening of the Festival Theaterformen with a tragic chorus of 340 citizens of Braunschweig, Germany, assembled on the stage of the National Theatre, “turn terror into sport” (Shakespeare) with 100 participants tap dancing in public space in Vienna, a staging of “phèdre” by seneca/racine in french language in a choreography of naked bodies with actors around 60 years of age, following the metric score of the original baroque art of speech, and the award winning urban composition “bambiland” with a text by the Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. Since 2010, she has been working with Austria’s multi media award winning sound artist Guenther Auer and other artists on research into political theatre hybrids based on speech-, text-, and sound-readymades and autofiction.

Currently she participates in the project “Pieces of movement for orchestra” by Tanzquartier Vienna with the ORF radio symphonic orchestra. In June 2011 she will be showing the urban intervention “the tears of stalin” in Prague in the frame of “Intersection” – Prague’s quadrennial for performance, design and space.

 

Vampires of the 21st century or what is to be done then? is a project in search of the (historical) subject in hazardous territory. Social experiments, aesthetic utopias, revolutionary gestures (unredeemed promises of history) fill a resonating space embodying our desires for freedom.

Texts following motifs by Seneca, Stoker, Marx, Baudrillard and others are stripped of their authorship, exhausted by auto-fictional narratives of the actors. Sprawling hybrids of textual fragments, auto-fictional speech, structures of dialogues with oneself, with the others or with loud speakers and sound documents deal with questions of identity, sexuality and political action. A different authorship of the actors. A different responsibility.

Choreography of queer bodies, amplified and non-amplified speech, ruptures between sound and vision create a site of the present, of interrogation, of doubt. Spectators are accomplices, witnesses, partners in dialogue, stumbling in the restraints of cognition. A skinning of language, a skinning of hearing. Theatre as area of action and instrument of the present.

Having staged a version in German they would like to create an English/French version staged with the audience surrounding the action to integrate spectators and actors differently, testing the boundaries between theatre, performance, and speech opera.

During the residency, a team of artists on site will initiate dialogues with the surrounding non-artistic community about questions of identity, artistic and social practices, and political attitudes. This will help develop an audio archive of new perspectives to be integrated in the project.

 

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