The doing of disco. The extra-ordinary working session on The Theatre at the Haus der Architektur in Graz is over. The International Festival network are stronger and more confident than ever. Love as the power supreme has been resurrected and the brightness of our common future is blinding.

Steirischer Herbst

International Festival bring you flowers, offer you gifts, kiss your feet and praise you as Lords. The meeting in Graz was pure magic, a piece of crap shady business with naked assistants in the wings..., excellence and and and a power date. You are so V8, so ACDC raw power and considerate, sensual, elaborate, erotic as Simon and Garfunkle or The Cardigans. You are the heat of the night, the bar in the middle, the VIP lounge and the voluptuous cross dresser in the unisex bathroom (www.portaloo.com). We recall a trajectory from confession-booth, to Dark room and Black Box (Marcus you are gifted), where size doesn’t matter but theatre is everywhere. We recall concepts of theatres fluffed up in feather jackets and bling (Eric you use of a pen...). The Dolce Gamabana/Delueze Guattari Plateaus of a cheese like structure (damn you are so intellectual snow will fall in Africa this Summer), with spectators stepping down in the D&G so called Holley Space (re-baptized by Brian “The Esoteric” Massumi into phase space) to be transformed into nomadic blacksmiths oion the spot: We Salute you. Or the Tom Clancy like Op Centre Bar where The Theatre over night transformed into a nuclear submarine on a mission. Not to mention The Theatre as kick ass corporate machine, a community in whose language scruples is non-existing (Certain Sicilian families close to the theatre are know for giving offers you can’t resist or a horse in the bed). Man the Fireworks the Fireworks, and construction always going on on on... T’was very interesting to experienced Freeze Art Fair this weekend and how a tent – its fuckin’ big (www.thetheatre.at) – and can produce the must banal Bilbau effect.

And this is just the beginning and the love we feel for each other is mag-fuckin-nificient. The workshop was great. The presentation was amazing. Steirischer Herbst LOVES us and the book is in the making.

We have a project together, whatever now together means, we are setting standards, and blue sky is just the starting point of the adventure we are heading for. The only problem is that I write this letter, saying thanks to all of us and you, when in fact there should be no thank you or even better 18 letters in my in box where we all celebrate each other as Olympic.

The Theatre is like Superman and never a Spiderman. We don’t need no nothing in the centre dressed up to look like a black widow, we are Supermen dressed down into the mediocre of a newspaper man. Underneath that skin there's an endless story and its spells The Theatre.

Silly is the new pro-active, Shabby is the new cool, and Over The Top is the new new.

Right, the book goes to print in Wednesday contribute also with something you didn’t produce yourself. Texts, blogs, images, love, a saucepan. We are the book and a book is many things.
Upcoming event is to work on the webpage, work on our economy and work hard hard on the tour/future plan, and to engage and set up a academically connect research platform so that we can all get a fellows ship for five years after we are done with
Steirischer Herbst.

Book yourself for the some of the weekends in February, its coming up soon, and before that we will announce some meeting of
cell character all over the world.

The International Festival Olympic Games in Reverse: The winners take of their medals, step down and unite with their fellow competitors. Afterwards they all gather in the Stadium and march backwards, banners high and full of hope, backwards out of the arena.

International Festival didn’t do it again! Not even to the semi finals: losers, halfwits, mediocre, a waste of time and an entire zoo of other promising terminology and they were chased off the grounds. In fact International Festival decided already after the first test that their real talent is in the pompom girl circuit. Blessed are those that find their niche.
But “The Theatre” so made it. We shall clear the picture, who ever came in is of zilch importance, but the winners to come marching our hand in hand of the Stadium were all from one and the same absolutely incompatible team “The Theatre”.
There was a time when sports and politics merged, “The Theatre” set a new standard, the glove of the Black Panthers are from now replaced with sock puppets and skinny guys appearing at the winner podium with a skull? Rumors from secure sources confirm that Steven Spielberg is writing on a script for his film “London2006 – The Backwards Olympics”.
“The Theatre” marched out with good news behind it and only fear in front of them. No promises made – as they can only be kept, but plenty of fear – it can only get better, and we hold hands when we by default sneak, silent as mice, up the stairs to the attic with no windows… or was it the basement. Well, “The Theatre” is no box and no castle and both or and also, so why not go down the stairs to the attic and whisper: Monster Monster, you can come out now. We wont hurt you and you dont really want to eat somebody anyway, do you?
Monsters, dont eat stuff without identity. It doesnt really make sense to have a monster being content chewing away on roots or regurgitating heavily after swallowing an old warehouse in one piece. The Theatre thus is out of any zone of danger, but walk up to the monster like the blind girl to Frankensteins monster. Hillo Love, was up? And monsterian it shall be and remain, however much the end of the banana monstrosity is, but this is a new kind of monster: reversed to the extent that the monster will construct Frankenstein.

The Olympics took place in GASWORKS close to the Oval in a tiny white space which made the participants relate to each other in ways unseen in the first meeting in Tensta Konsthall. The enthusiasm was excellent, disagreements fundamental and absolutely superficial. After Fridays session and dinner at the most alternative restaurant in Britain everything was open landscape - totally and we got drunk, screamed and reached an amazing peak on Saturday night when young ladies standing on the bar of The Belushi and poured cheap champagne on a busload of baseball cap boys with mouths like newborn birds.

You want to something about the results. Forget about, who do you think we are. We did it, we did it, we did it. We marched out followed only hope and the heartbreaking roar of the audience. A Wow of amazing V O L U M E and Celine Condorelli with the torch with a light pfffff extinguishing the Olympic fire (She was fantastic). Excellent organization from GASWORKS, horrible sleeping in Blades Hotel but a hurricane of love, an orgy which must have made de Sade himself doubt, and yet we have no idea of who were there. And as we marched out into the sunshine we recalled OMG as the thematic with which we left Stockholm and replaced it with love, tenderness and a third word that I have forgotten.
Next meeting coming up 7-9 July in Berlin (put it in your agenda), next up is deep in work process that now seems to take diagonal paths, International Festival is looking for a proper designed pompom outfit pink and white and are already practicing on their choreography.

We thank you all, and has just bought two domain www.thetheatre.at and www.thetheatre.se look out for them, active in a couple of days. Austria was the cheapest there was and .se just for the sake of domestic politics (they will be directed to the same site). It is open for everybody and everybody will be able to edit all material with super simple tools. There will be tutorials to post texts etc. and a lot of loving. We thank you all, for the fab fab humor and terrifying temper, and for being totally irresistible: More then just physical, deeper than spiritual, your ways are powerful, irresistible to me.

International Festival "The Theatre" Seminar #2 takes place at GASWORKS in London the 5-7 May. An exclusive group gather togeher for the weekend making sure that the world will change.

International Festival says "Yeah", Rolling Stones in Rio yesterday night is simply peanuts with their 1.2 million spectators. Holy Shit. But who need to change - to the bad - 1.2 million Brazilian's idea of music when one can change the world? International Festival "The Theatre" rely on you: On our path to innovation we discovered something beautiful.
"Hallo, it's me Tiger Woods!"
But in order to make the revolution slow and fantastic it is known that good preparation is a winning concept. So after getting the Stockholm Syndrome in Tensta Konsthall discussions has evolved around a second seminar that wanted to take place in London. (International Festival The Theatre vs. The Globe)
International Festival's very own Celiné Condorelli has found a magnificent situation in a gallery called Gasworks that has a small but graceful space that they want to offer us the weekend 5-7 may.
Certain people's transformation to predators of the savannah will cured by a white calm clean and no talking space. The location is excellent, the sun shining and the spirit of London is soooo present.
Set up is as in Tensta with travels and accommodation organized by International Festival, for you that are not institutional. Alessio of Gasworks has already hooked us up with a Colombian hotel where Che stayed for his winter retreat 1987 and are elaborating International Festival's already deep connection to the cartel. We so don't need no more sponsors.
At present the invitation is carte blanche but as soon as we together have recovered from the mental damage of Linklater - the Irish pub - some small think-tasks will appear for our communal do-tank.
All the old and some new (tell us who you think these new ones are) are invited to share new adventures. Bring your mobile phones, open your secret Skype account and connect with the world. Issues of ownership, licensing and a whole lot of permission will be under the microscope. For now, gear up and tasks, definitions and requests will be shared and given in a the few days.

Keep it in mind, keep it in your heart: 5-7 May - It's London Calling at you service.

After all we've been through/I know we're cool

All units are GoGo

International Festival: The Theatre” takes as a series of departure points for the realization of the project - to develop and build a full-scale theatre on the basis of a budget conventionally issued for a theatre/dance performance - during Steirischer Herbst 2007 a number of seminars. These seminars are to be held on a quarterly basis in different cities in Europe, inviting old and new guest for discussions and processes. At each seminar a public session will be held where the invited guests give presentations of their own work, practically and theoretically. Some of the presentations will be given specific weight to the project itself, others will be concerned with local projects or with more general issues concerning performance and architecture in its widest possible meaning.

Here you can find the collected presentations from the public session the 4 Feburary 2006. You can download them via torrent. Find more information on V2V and on BitTorrent.

Platforma 9,81

Platforma 9,81 gives in this presentation an overview of their work based in Zagreb. Marko Sancarin gives special weight to their project Invisible Zagreb in which the architectural office mapped abandoned areas of the city and its surroundings.

Platforma 9,81 was created in 1999 as a reaction to the inability of the architectural scene to establish an interdisciplinary and open dialogue within the scene and externally in regard to the problems of urban space culture, digitalization of the environment, influences of globalization to the perception of space and the needs of new educational methods in architecture today. Their projects have a profoundly public quality and regularly draw together a large number of people from different domains of life. Their relation to architecture and urban planning is marked by an informal approach, non-institutional strategies of action, tendency towards research and away from habitual practice.
Platforma 9,81 have so far realized a number of media projects /1:1000, Architecture Live, Architecture to the People, Open Programme, Mobile Living Room/ that have dealt with the problem of built-up environments and have popularized the contemporary relationship with architecture. The realized projects and installations have a program link to art, media and urban culture /Zone of Movement of the Blind, installations for Vote ’99, the interior for the program Art Lazareti in the quarantine of Dubrovnik, the display of the 26th Youth Salon/. At the meeting of architecture students on the island of Vis - EASA 2002 – they coordinated workshops and lectures and participated in the organization of the event. The workshop "Light" was exclusively organized and carried out by Platforma 9,81. Platforma 9,81 feel especially proud to participate as members of the active art and NGO scene in Croatia, a scene incorporating a critical mass of people and knowledge in aim of realization of developmental urban culture projects. We collaborate with numerous Croatian and foreign institutions that work with architecture and culture.Platforma 9,81

Testbedstudio

Testbedstudio offers in this presentation very interesting models for collaboration and shared development from concept to finished project. Anders Johansson is presenting a series of projects with strong vision to change conventions of public space and their modes of efficiency. Anders Johansson opens his presentation with a document from Volksbuhne in Berlin where architecture as performance is being actualized.

Testbedstudio with offices in Malmö and Stockholm are working with architecture from a number of perspectives connecting expertise from a multiplicity of fields. Their projects emphasize research and investigation combined with a strong social focus. Testbedstudio

Ortlos Architects

In this presentation ORTLOS lays out their activity as a kind of matrix, an infinite, constantly changeable field of the creative entries of those who shape it. From a certain size on, the constructs show the first signs of selforganization. And so it has been with ORTLOS right from the beginning. It is a kind of virus that is spreading, and although in the background, it makes you gradually sink into a world whose laws correspond to a different logic. ORTLOS is an instrument for the nomadic working methods.

ORTLOS architects was founded by Ivan Redi and Andrea Redi as a network of interdisciplinary partners, with a commitment to the on-line working methods as well as their strong interest in expanding classical architectural tasks by simulating virtual environments to be applied to future realities, with the use of cutting-edge computer technologies. Their work has been published and exhibited world wide, among others at La Biennale in Venice 2000. They are currently teaching at TUGraz.
ORTLOS architects have recently brought out their new book “ORTLOS: Architecture of the NetWORKS”, 2005 - Hatje Cantz Verlag.
Ortlos

International Festival

In this presentation International Festival speed talks through some visions on architecture and performance in relation to mobility and spectacle. The conclusion is simple: On the path to innovation we discovered something beautiful. Its not enough to change, real change implies to change the way things change.

International Festival is a platform that operates between architecture and performance, emphasizing the performative potentiality of space and relations. International Festival brings in context-specific projects, challenging social conventions and ways of communication through methods of filling in, shifting via oblique perspectives and ontologies of exchange. International Festival dislocates performance from its dialectical dispositif in order to produce possibilities for multiplicity of production and performance where the spectator become activated.
International Festival is formulated as a project that always finds and occupy holes in a context, and at the same time is a matter of being radically generous. International Festival in so not a matter of institutional critique but instead a generous gesture which acknowledges the heterogeneity of institutional frames.
International Festival is luxury for everyone. It's everything you could ever want it to be.
International Festival

Celine Condorelli

Celine Condorelli gives in this presentation in depth orientations of three central projects in her and Support Structures activities over the last few years. Celine Condorelli's work bring archicture into fields of social and political complexity where spaces addressed open for introspection of their inherent hierarchical and productive coordination. Specific notice is taken in respect of how and when collaboration or shared work produces autonomy rather than concessions. Celine Condorelli and Support Structures work produce this certain kind of autonomy precisely through offering space and activity as open ends.

Celine Condorelli is an architect. She is teaching at London Metropolitan University and her practice is concerned with architecture as interface, through art and architecture collaborations. Recent works include developing Support Structure, an RSA Art for Architecture and Arts Council England project with Artist-Curator Gavin Wade, through several exhibitions including at the Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2003, and The Economist, London, 2004, as well as taxi_onomy with artist Beatrice Gibson, supported by Arts Council England, the British Council and V2 Rotterdam.
Support Structure

BADco. Nicolina Pristas and Sergej Pristas

Nicolina and Sergej Pristas opens in this presentation for a number of contemporary strategies of performance. In the work of BADco., a collaborative performance team based in Zagreb, modes of information flow and spatio-temporal conditions are investigated in ways where the dialectics of critique is phased to comprise an affectual opportunity rather than a territorial pressure. In their latest work Deleted Messages BADco. produce a kind of performance close-up in which the audience, without transforming into something else, lose, or rather multiply, orientation. This multiplication however is not homogenizing but an opportunity for desire production of an inorganic capacity.
Nicolina and Sergej Pristas address here as well the complexity of space not as space but as place; a social and situational aspect without outlines rather then a geometrical and orientational space.

BADco. is a Zagreb-based collaborative performance group. The core of the group are: Pravdan Devlahovi, Ivana Ivkovi, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristas, Ivana Sajko. The artistic work of BADco. is not so marked by the choice of subject matter as it is by the production of various problematic aspects of working in/as collaboration i.e. through specific ways of self-organization of the authors involved in a particular project during the process of work. Authors see their performances as performance machines which can enter various referential contexts such as social, political, intimate, dance and artistic contexts in general. Instead of thematic naming which stands closer to the traditional ideas of theatre the group prefers thinking in terms of eventality. Some key words for our thematic interest are: vitalism, virus material, collective, flesh vs. body, strategies of observing? BADco. was founded in 2000 while some of the authors worked together on the project Confessions in Theatre &TD. It was founded as a non-profit organization to produce collaborative performance work. So far the group has produced the following performances: Man.Chair (2000), 2tri4 (2001), Diderot's Nephew or Blood is Thicker than Water (2001), Solo Me (2002), RibCage (2002), Walk This Way (2003), Mass (for Election Day Silence) (2003), Deleted Messages (2004) and Fleshdance (2004).
BADco.

International Festival - The Theatre: seminar one is done
The two days was totally confusing, full of hearsing and gnizing.

This seminar opens the second phase of The Theatre a project initiated by International Festival. In a series of gatherings relations between architecture and performance will be discussed, regurgitated, transformed and shared in a fireworks of conversations, coffee breaks, lectures, film showings and other kinds of presentations. It is the start of a two years process which will be crowned with the opening of International Festival - The Theatre in Graz during steirischer herbst in September 2007.
Temporality, mobility and experience are keywords during the fi rst weekend that will be visited by several international as well as local Swedish forces.

Tensta Konsthall, the Swedish partner, hosts the event that culminate with a public session 4 February, 15.00-21.00.

If you are insecure and want to find the way etc. Check out International Festival - The Theatre or simply Tensta Konsthall

"Theatres are for theatre, what phonebooths are for mobile communication."

Over the last 100 years architecture and its conditions has changed enormously. During the same time similar things has happened with theatre. But what has happened to the theatre building and our understanding of it?
If theatre is theatre and a building is a building, then a theatre building must be an exhibitionistic house or a building making performances. Worst-case scenario implies that the building is there to make theatre static. Either or, the context theatre building,
independently of if it's national or street theatre; produce an enormous amount of relations which all are charged by a particular social, economical and political context.

Practice, practice, practice. Changing behaviour requires that we rewire our brains for progress and invention. So the only way in which we can assure this change is by rehearsing. International Festival is a project oscillating between performance and architecture issuing what new kinds of collaborations can grow within the cultural sector. The Theatre aims to comment on contemporary cultural practices
and economies through an active attempt to construct an actual working alternative.
Not a multidisciplinary house but a disciplinary-multi structure which is specific to performance and architecture, which works through its disciplines towards a multiplicity, or even multitude notion of cultural production. It activates through a number of related steps functioning as a think tank but also as a multidirectional meeting point where many cultural players and creative teams can share and produce experiences. This project makes the theatre at once into a university, a building site and a space for active confrontation with not only what we see but also how we exist and become contemporary participants in our society here and now over national borders through
specific local contexts.

Introduction

International Festival*s project The Theatre, in collaboration with Steirischer Herbst, takes its departure in the performance of theatre-buildings. It is simultaneously shifting the understanding of performance, as the project aims to perceive the building itself as a continuous, ongoing, staging. Every relation is a theatre and every building is a stage.

The formal program suggest to produce a fully functioning theatre building (12 x 12m stage, and 150-200 seated audience) including all necessary facilities on the basis of a larger scale dance/performance production budget. The structure should be mobile to enable three years of international touring.

The realization of the project is connected to high level architectural respectively performance related educational frames. A number of architectural and design groups will be connected to the project to develop different parts.

The first, out of the eight seminars that will be organized in different cities, takes place at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. A number of architects and performance related artists have been invited to discussions and presentations. The seminars that will take place on a quarterly basis will bring different perspectives on the project together in order to build up for large range of participation, from architecture and performance but also from other fields such as management, marketing, economy and ecology.

The primary function of the seminars is to produce a vast and heterogeneous knowledge economy that can trigger new modes of production and organization in order to erect a building which is not a manifestation of, but rather a document of a process of differentiation. All information surrounding the project will be made available via the Internet in order to stimulate participation. The projects aim is to work under open-source licensing as far as the projects nature allows.

The finances of the project are mainly public funding from Sweden and Austria. Further funding from both public and commercial sources will be investigated. The project was initiated by the non-profit organization International Festival that will claim ownership of the built structure up until 1 January 2010 when it will be dissembled; no intellectual property will be claimed.

Tensta Konsthall 3-5 February 2006

The seminar - 3-5 February 2006 is initially an introduction to the project set up around a series of closed discussions relating to temporary architectural structures. The talks will further venture into mobility in contemporary performance work and opportunities of organization of the project.

An open session: 4 February 15.00 – 21.00 - will consist of a series of presentations of the invited initiatives.
During this session International Festival – The Theatre will also be presented.

The guests consist of local and international initiatives from architecture, design and performance: Platforma 9,81 (Zagreb), Ortlos (Graz), Céline Condorelli - Support Structure (London), Uglycute (Stockholm), Kein.org (Munich), Testbedstudio (Stockholm), BadCO. (Zagreb), Steirischer Herbst (Graz), Unfriendly Takeover (Frankfurt), Front (Stockholm) and International Festival (Stockholm)

Program

Friday 3 February 18.00 – 21.00 Tensta Konsthall: Introduction
(closed session)

I love theatre and theatre loves International Festival initiated The Theatre in the autumn of 2005. The project's first phase is finished and a second phase has just started. International Festival summarizes the project and makes an invitation to the upcoming production phases.

Presentation and round of trigger talks.

Saturday 4 February 10.30- 13.30 Tensta Konsthall: Temporary Architecture
(closed session)

“Changing behaviour requires that we rewire our brains for progress and invention” What does temporary structures imply today? How can we shortcut aesthetics and gain momentum through limitation?

Temporality as architecture, representation, organization and knowledge production.

Saturday 4 Feburary 15.00 - 19.00 Tensta Konsthall: All Architecture is Theatre
(public session)

On our path to innovation we discovered something beautiful!
The invited groups present their work and visions. 35 minutes presentations including Q and A.

International Festival presents The Theatre in public for the first time.

Sunday 5 February 10.30 - 13.30 : Performance Mobility / The Next Step
(closed session)

Architecture is merely performing a function. The Theatre goes beyond the function and competes on the basis of providing experience. Contemporary economies emphasizing experience and transformation, in combination with entirely new modes of distribution and circulation has had a strong impact on performing arts over the last ten years. New kind of work has been developed producing new logistic needs, relating to mobility both geographically and as a mode of production. Can new aesthetic strategies form a kind of alter modern, connected to a new international of cultures and the struggle for autonomy, but also to possibilities of producing singularities in representational democracy?

The Next Stop: Closing discussion and preparation for the coming conference in April, London.

The event was created in collaboration between: International Festival, Steiriescher Herbst, Tensta Konsthall and Kein.org. It was supported by The Swedish Arts Council.