SPIELART has been exploring and researching new trends and movements in the world of international theater since 1995, in order to present them to audiences in Munich every two years. The antennas are aimed at unusual forms of expression and aesthetics, current topics, strong personalities, and impressive productions. SPIELART, however, also always concentrates on posing questions about theater itself as an art form, and on consistently re-exploring or re-establishing theater with approaches from the fringes. Important accents of the festival’s platform are also its entrenchment in the city’s cultural life and the dialogue between the city’s artistic and institutional energies.
So far, during the course of eight festivals SPIELART has presented over 200 productions, performances, lectures, and installations, many of which were German or world premieres. SPIELART has introduced a multitude of artists who had been more or less unknown beforehand, and nowadays they can be seen on important European theater and festival stages.
Romeo Castellucci | Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio
On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God, Vol. 1
25.11. | 20:00 – 20:50
Münchner Kammerspiele, Schauspielhaus
26.11. | 20:00 – 20:50
Münchner Kammerspiele, Schauspielhaus
In the center of the space: a giant portrait. Jesus looks the audience in the eyes, in a questioning and challenging manner, and he is simultaneously an observer and an observee. In front of him is a designer living room, a demented father whose infirmity is harrowing and his son who seesaws back and forth between patience and aggression, trying Sisyphus-like to change his father’s diapers. United only in their despair over the indignity of the situation.
In this almost wordless theater piece condensed into the essentials, Romeo Castellucci deals with the icon of Western culture per se, Christ, an icon that stands for passion but also for mercy and love, and comprises the basic conditions of human existence in an unrelenting sharpness.
“In this piece the gaze of Jesus becomes a spotlight that bathes the events onstage in a changeable light. The light could be good or evil, offensive or innocent. I know more than a thousand painters who have spent half their lives reproducing the inexpressible, almost invisible suffering on his lips. Now he’s not here anymore.” (Romeo Castellucci)
Toshiki Okada | chelfitsch
The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise
18.11. | 21:00 – 22:30
Muffatwerk, Muffathalle
19.11. | 21:00 – 22:30
Muffatwerk, Muffathalle
“What I’m relating now, what’s going through my head, I have never told anyone before. It’s a secret, no one knows it. I will say what the secret is. I would like to have a better life. At any rate better than now, a more fulfilled life.” That’s how Toshiki Okada’s new piece starts, THE SONIC LIFE OF A GIANT TORTOISE, in which his main subject is the everyday life of contemporary couples in Tokyo. In their mid-thirties, well off, in representative work relationships and in loving relationships. Everything seems to be perfect on the surface. But beneath the surface surreal abysses open up. Is Japanese society with its rigid restrictions and social rules the theme, or is it the search for meaning in a globalized world?
Juha Valkeapää, Taito Hoffrén
10 Journeys to a Place Where Nothing Happens
18.11. | 21:00 – 22:30
Tent at Gasteig
19.11. | 22:00 – 23:30
Tent at Gasteig
20.11. | 17:00 – 18:30
Tent at Gasteig
20.11. | 20:00 – 21:30
Tent at Gasteig
21.11. | 20:00 – 21:30
Tent at Gasteig
22.11. | 17:00 – 18:30
Tent at Gasteig
22.11. | 22:00 – 23:30
Tent at Gasteig
23.11. | 20:00 – 21:30
Tent at Gasteig
A mobile home parks next to a big military tent in the middle of a city. Two men are baking a cake there and they’re happy to have visitors. Taito Hoffrén and Juha Valkeapää tell stories from their lives as artists and stories of woodcutters in Finland, with and without words and in a completely relaxed manner. With soft music and videos, on which hardly anything is discernable other than “video snow,” they create in their tent a venue of deceleration in the municipal machinery. The Finn Juha Valkeapää (b. 1967) likes to present his singing talent onstage in his performance pieces. Sound designer Taito Hoffrén (b. 1974) plays and produces non-commercial (ethno-) music.
Gisèle Vienne
This is how you will disappear
30.11. | 21:00 – 22:15
Muffatwerk, Muffathalle
01.12. | 21:00 – 22:15
Muffatwerk, Muffathalle
A demonic forest. In the forest are three protagonists: an ambitious gymnast striving for perfection, her authoritarian trainer, and a rock star with a pre-disposition for self-destruction. And the disquieting certainty that something terrible will happen.
The French choreographer, dancer, and puppeteer Gisèlle Vienne retells big, archetypical stories for our times with the author Dennis Cooper and the musicians Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg. She’s a master of the uncanny, fascinated by the ambivalence of beauty between order and destruction, Apollo and Dionysus. The hyperrealistic forest becomes a symbolic space, which provokes an unsettling, nightmarish desire. A scary and beautiful synthesis of the arts: visual arts, performance, dance and music.
artaia-creativesinresidence on II INTERNATIONAL RESIDENTIAL WORKSHOP DIRECTED BY JOHN STRASBERG
bigart on Network Feedback request – entry from Julie Tolentino
Anonymous on Network Feedback request – entry from Julie Tolentino