Monday October 5, 2009 at 8pm
Language: English
Free Entrance |
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  About the event |
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"Doing is better than feeling."- Bertolt Brecht
The performance "The New Man" builds on changes in perceptions surrounding art that developed after the First World War, as artists searched for a new relation to life and society. It explores four different positions. The poet Bertolt Brecht develops the Lehrstueck for a state without classes, where gestures, social postions and by that society as a whole come into play. The dancer Rudolf von Laban proposes Bewegungschoere, choirs of movement, in which collective vibrations disperse power itself. The director Wsewolod Meyerhold experiments in the young Soviet Union with biomechanical exercises for his actors to renew their bodies and by that shape a new kind of subjectivity. And the comedian Charlie Chaplin stumbles across all of these utopian visions and their promises. The audience of "The New Man", which is split up into four groups that rotate every fifteen minutes, are immersed each time into one of these positions through radio messages that also propose related gestures and movements, thereby creating varying blueprints for the new man.
LIGNA began in 1995. The group consists of the media theorists and radio artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen, who since the early nineties have been working at the “Freies Sender Kombinat“ (FSK), a public non-profit radio station in Hamburg. They run a program called LIGNAs Music Box, which asks listeners to call in and play their favorite songs via the telephone. In numerous shows, interventions and performances, LIGNA has explored the effects of the dispersed radio voice as well as, more generally, radio as a means of dispersion. The work of LIGNA often refers to the remote possibilities of radio use in order to develop new formats of radio practices. Focusing on the reception side of radio, LIGNA looks for ways to turn the situation of reception into a performative intervention in a place. Listening to the radio thus becomes a collective production, which bears uncontrollable results.
One of LIGNA's models of media usage, the Radioballet (invented in 2002), provides radio listeners with a choreography of excluded and forbidden gestures in formerly public but now controlled spaces. They have staged performances in Vienna, Barcelona, Liverpool, Dublin and Lisbon, among other places. |
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