published in Visslingar&Rop: Feg Teater February 2008

The Theatre

Theatre was originally a public activity engaged in a public space. It was drama and story as much as it was a lived situation of socio-political exchange. Theatre was an activity that provoked differences in society, if not through direct critique so through allegories. Today theatre is a private activity and its site has transformed into private space. It has lost its potentiality for actual exchange. Audience participation substitutes the once activated spectator today absent in the theatre. What has happened to theatre? Has it lost its very specificity to be a site where individuals share and exchange in processes of subjectification?

International Festival’s project “The Theatre” is an attempt to re-enact the theatre in order to blow life back into its machinery. Not through a performance but through an actual theatre: to produce in situ a full size theatre structure however erected and maintained as a performance within the common realms of performance budgets. Its fundamental idea is to change all that in theatre that is not theatre, starting with its most common denominators: the building, the site. The finished building, with a stage of 12 x 12m with opportunities for a very flexible spatial set up, will be offered to a group of curators and arrangers to be occupied with any program, and toured over a three years period.

The process will function as a kind of open source architecture which currently involves some 30 different groups or individuals from the fields of architecture, performance, visual arts, theory and beyond. They are all involved on a long-term basis to conceptualize, construct and erect the building. The building process functions as a university in progress, or a large scale workshop which is an inquiry, a site for knowledge production and a performance to which the public is invited to follow. The first initial manifestation of the project is commissioned by Steirischer Herbst and will be realized in Graz during the autumn of 2007.

The Copenhagen Syndrome

There is one major difference between Superman and Spiderman. Peter Parker disguises himself into Spiderman to become what he desires and to deceive the world from knowing his true identity. Superman on the other hand has Clark Kent as his alter ego; longing for mediocrity, searching to fit-in and dreaming of being average. So the question is: What do you aspire to be? Mr Nobody transformed through spectacle to be loved and recognized, or Superman.

November 2001 was the starting point for the construction of the Copenhagen Opera House, a limestone, Sicilian Perlatino marble, maple wood, gold leaf, smoked oak extravaganza. The project was donated to the Danish State by shipping magnate A.P Møller. A true philanthropic enterprise clouded by the fact that all costs were tax deductible, in the end forcing the Danish state to buy the project. The final cost to realize ,“...a world class opera- and ballet house with an acoustic that sums up centuries of experience and the latest practical and scientific advances, combined with almost unthinkable technical solutions”, ended at 350 000 000 €.

A significant amount of money, although not extraordinary, in the on-going trend of erecting large-scale, flag-ship projects for contemporary art. All these projects have in common that they legitimate extraordinary architectural ambitions for the sake of promoting contemporary cultural activities. So what does 350 million € mean? The Copenhagen Opera House has 1 700 seats divided on two different stages. Over a year the maximum capacity would mean a total of 600 000 visitors seeing some 20 different productions yearly. If the same amount of money was handed to International Festival this would mean the construction of 1 750 new Danish performance venues, with a total capacity of 175 000 seats, a audience (three nights a week) of some 26 250 000, presenting a possibility for 87 500 production yearly, and some 480 (only duets, and not including technical or artistic staff) performing artists at work every night; turning the state of Denmark into becoming the largest patron of performing arts in the world, maybe even in the history of mankind. That is what 350 million € mean.

Parthenon Performance/Sunset Architecture

How many times do you need to go see the Parthenon?
How many times do you need to see the sunset?

The search for more and more elaborated forms of architectural expression continues to produce a homogeneous architecture of spectacle. This obsession with external attributes and style goes hand in hand with the mediatization and packaging of spatial experience. It focuses on what architecture looks like and very little what architecture does, narrowing the field of architecture rather than expanding it in a time were the competition for space and modes of spatial production are fiercer than ever.

The idea to build for the future is a paradox and fundamentally a big hoax. We build for the past, architecture is always much more about connecting with history, unabling possibilities rather than facilitate them. First we build buildings and then they start to build us. For example the theatre, what we experience when we are going to the theatre is a totally controlled situation. We as an audience perform ourselves through protocols of convention, the artists on stage are professionals inhibiting a specific situation which they have rehearsed for months, and technology is everywhere to ensure that the experience becomes homogeneous. This is a point where strategies for architecture, which fundamentally deals with concepts of control, and theatre as operation, meet. This set-up has served architecture and theatre alike throughout history, producing specific situations of control that can be adapted to serve different political, economical and cultural goals. The other side to this is of course that it cancels out multiple ways of being together.

If we use traditional definitions of architecture as the science of designing buildings and structures, from the macro-level of town-planning to the micro-level of creating furniture, then the organizing of a temporary event could not pass as architecture. But if we think architecture in an expanded field, were we propose architectural concepts that destabilize the finitude of structure and undermine opportunities for labelling. Instead we could produce a platform, hovering above the modular structure, which is being re-constructed again and again. An architecture that suggests different models for production and maintenance based on social interaction and exchange. Instead we propose architecture of change, an architecture produced through protocols of performativity rather than ideas of permanence, the building site as on-going manifestation, constantly shifting and adopting to different needs and desires. A theatre built from everyday materials that are easily removed, altered and transformed in a multitude of configurations. The material of events, construction sites, mobility, disasters, celebrations, streamers, confetti-bombs, flyers, smoke-machines, invitations, foam, fireworks.

The Theatre project point towards the potential of architecture becoming pro-active, through the interaction it promotes, relations instead of representations, and by emphasizing the actualisation of architecture it pushes performativity to the foreground, becoming multi-enabling and connecting architectural strategies to the everyday. Architecture produced as the Olympics but in reverse. Lonely gold medallists stepping down form their tribunes, multiplying through finals, semi-finals and qualification rounds. In the end all participants are gathered, marching around the stadium, and full of confidence and enthusiasm they walk out into the world. Together.

Tor Lindstrand