Donna Miranda - Goethe-Institut TanzConnexions

Theater Tourist -- DAY 1 Here is where we are (part1)

nospam@example.com (Donna Miranda) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 08:31:47 +0200

07 July 2010

Here, is where we are.

Slightly recovered from three days of fever in Amsterdam, not (yet) a festival fever, just a bad fever. In fact to be more precise, a protracted flu I must have caught halfway through the flight from Manila to Amsterdam while having to endure the unnecessary annoyance of being seated among a group of rich Filipino teenagers on a European football tour adolescent raging hormones whose means of coping with a 13 hour flight was noisily chatting and complaining non-stop about how long the flight was. Yes, it was the worst flight of my life. But all that is over, now. And now, in Essen it feels as though I have already arrived. Jetlag out of the day, fever and chills out of the way, the sun is out today, and it seems like it will be for the next couple of days that we will be around.

This is probably my third trip to Germany, and yet I found it difficult to explain to family and some few associates where in Germany I was exactly bound for. Not that we weren't told, in fact everything has precisely been laid out for us even the hour and a half "free time" we get the day after tomorrow in between coming back from Wuppertal, before heading for Zollverein World Heritage Site in Essen. I guess it was because there was a lot moving between cities and towns for the next couple of days, traveling on the S-Bahn Interregional train line or driving without speed limits through the autobahn. The Theater der Welt is spread out between the cities of Essen and Müllheim, not really far apart from each other, in fact a convenient 10 minute direct train ride from central station (which is well-situated in front of our hotel) or less than 30 minutes drive by car. Still the idea of moving from one city to another, several times a day, carried some sort of illusory mental distance that stirred some anticipation that the next days to come won't be such a drifting walk-in-park adventure, save for Willie Dorner's Urban Drifting that takes place tomorrow. I live in a vast city, even if I live in the suburbs I've never acquired the patience for commuting to one end of town to another. Anything beyond biking or walking distance to me is 'far.' Of course, my self-reflexive subjective will force me to say: "Funny to hear from someone who is out of Manila at least 3-4 times a year." So for the sake of being succinct, it's safe to say that we were in Essen but to be more precise, we are at the North-Rhine Westphalia, or to be really precise we are at the Theater of the World.

First stop after checking in at Mövenpick Essen (our hotel) was to lobby to meet Elgin Wolf of the NRW Kultur Sekretariat. The NRW Kultur Sekretariat is the awesome organization who has brought 11 of us, curators and journalists, together under the International Visitor's Programme "Theater der Welt in the European Culture Capital: Ruhr 2010. So we are all here now, well almost, with Nayse Lopez of Festival Panorama in Brazil and Martin Ambara from Othni-Laboratoire de Theatre de Yaoundé, in Cameroon joins and on Saturday Matthew Jocelyn of Canadian Stage in Toronto will be with us.

After exchanging our customary introductions, curious incursions on each other's contexts and mandatory explanations of the hats and roles we wear or inhibit to wear at the present moment we make our way to Müllheim to catch Bouchra Ouizguen's Madame Plaza at the Theater an der Ruhr. The theater space that Elgin jokingly calls the theater at the end of the world, for its not-so-walking distance location from the Müllheim Hauptbanhof.

The discussions are carried over the duration of our short trip to the theater, and as typical of encounters such as this, each 'country' compared notes and observations on each one's specific performing arts, dance, theater making conditions. Most engaging was Matthew Karouse, journalist from South Africa, who never did once fail to situate every snippet on information within the wider geopolitical and historical context told from the lens of someone living and working in South Africa. I know so little of South Africa, or Poland, or Lebanon, or Brazil, or more so Cameroon, that I've realized that after this trip aside from the invaluable exposure to current contemporary theater practices from around the world what I will really be taking home with me is a deeper curiosity about the world and global politics affecting cultural production.

Arriving at the theater I am re-united with very good friend/drinking/eccentric discourse buddy Maja Friedrich who so happen to be working as marketing staff of the festival. Of course, we had to suspend the excitement of catching up until all the formalities, our arrival and her manning the ticketing, has been put aside. She was, after all there to work, and I was there after all to work. Meanwhile, Tomasz, Inger-Margrethe Lunde of Aftenposten, Noway and I take our first tourist drink of the day to warm up and prepare ourselves for the daunting task of watching. Curator Hanane Hajj-Ali from Beirut puts Yusuke Hashimoto, curator of Kyoto Experiment, on the hot seat and asks him about the "one thing he will die for" - a silly question to open up interesting conversation. But laughter takes over even before Yusuke manages to reply; perhaps a clever compositional step-up to move on to the more important business of the evening, Madame Plaza.

Theater Tourist -- DAY 0 We're here to work

nospam@example.com (Donna Miranda) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:18:16 +0200

What follows is a day-to-day reenactment of the days that have transpired while on the International Visitor's Programme "Theater der Welt in the European Culture Capital: Ruhr 2010" organized by the NRW Kultur Sekretariat period of 7-13 July. Accompanying this travelogue are experiences, reading incursions, watching excursions, insights, mis/encounters, performative observations, and constative gesticulations. While ideally, this travelogue should have been accomplished while on the trip which we and fellows on this program have conveniently and amusingly called theater tourist/ing, the way real hip blogs do, I have found it impossible to occupy the varied subjectivities that this entailed -- that is being present and writing about being present in the tour. So here is what I have come up instead an attempt to retroactively write the previous present in the current present, negotiating the passage of time, traversing its gaps and creating further productive gaps that can be referenced at in the future.

6 July 2010

The real privilege of being constantly mobile, save for the accumulated mileage soon to be exchanged for more free flights or a well-deserved overnight stay at a swanky four-star hotel room, or extra baggage allowance necessitated by the piles of brochures, flyers, catalogs or even books picked up along the way is not the number of new kindred acquaintances to add to the exclusive list of trusted drinking buddies from around the world, nor anonymity of being elsewhere, nor the interesting conversations that transpire between curious individuals or the possibility of being dragged to long extended summer BBQ parties but the readily available option of coming home and conveniently switch back to domesticity. Almost a decade back, artist communities have been abuzz with the word 'mobility.' And indeed this has changed the nature of work, the modalities of work, the modes of producing a work, the ownership of work, the relations to work, the distribution of work, and what has now come to be called 'work.'

I remember one winter trip to Berlin, care of Goethe Insitut's Visitor's Art Program in 2008, walking along the hip 'underground' (and by now perhaps gentrified) strip of Kastianalle, a friend making a remark: "see here people are just too busy to work." Creative types, students, artists, even some seriously dressed young professionals were all sitting by the cafes, chatting, hanging around, maybe even working on their computers in the middle of the day as if there were nothing else important to do. That was Berlin in my head. Grapevine has it that any plans to move to Berlin had to made quickly lest the more-than-hip-gentrified-with-money-to-spare crowd soon overtake the cheap, modest and underground liveliness of this newly unified but old city. I was enthralled. I wanted to move right away.

Only I knew it was not possible, given my own domestic responsibilities, given that I was not young as once was and while displacement can be challengingly fun I'm not sure if I can leave my love-loathe romance with Manila just yet (or perhaps not at all). Still, perhaps this only strengthened my desire to be elsewhere and join the band of art tourists/workers going around the circuit of international exchanges, meetings, platforms, festivals and short-term study and fellowship programs. Not that there was any overly gratifying monetary exchange for such mode of living (and working). Not that this is long-term solution to finding means of surviving off one's ambitions and fantasies. Not that this was any more glamorous than sitting in your own apartment luxuriously finishing that cup of coffee in the morning before heading off to work in the studio. Not that it was any more satisfying than the everyday petty politics of local art community. But what was appealing about it was the constant possibility and privilege of activating new connections and renewing old ones too -- the pleasure of seeing things anew; whether they were 'new' insofar as one have experienced and seen them in the past, or 'new' insofar as personal circumstances constantly re-calibrate the lens by which one experiences the world.

And so here we were, our first group picture, after seeing Jin Xing Dance Theatre & Liquid Loft/Chris Haring's The China Project where Polish dramaturg and curator Tomasz Kirenczuk coins the term theater tourist to conveniently explain our presence at the Julidans Festival in Amsterdam, the take-off point for Theater der Welt in Germany. Tomorrow will be off Essen, and be at "Theater of the World" festival. We can't wait of course. The three days in Amsterdam has been a bit challenging moving between Den Hague and Amsterdam to catch performances not to mention the very unpredictable weather. Apparently I'm the only one flying to Germany, the rest are taking the train. Why, I don't know. They must have guessed my secret desire to accumulate flights.