Contemporary European Theatre Directors

In this pocket publication Flanders Arts Institute examines new ways of working internationally in the arts. Joris Janssens collects insights and light bulb moments from the research & development trajectory (Re)framing the International.

Still, this house is better than me. It’s going to be torn down and each piece scattered, but it will become something else. The wood will become desks, tables… Now it’s time to empty this house. – Snow in March

If you want to find yourself, there is only one way. Kill anyone who reminds you of you even if just a little. Someone who reminds you of your past, present, and future, all of them are your enemies! They will confuse you, ruin you, take away your freedom, estrange you from this world, and in the end, bury you alive. – The Master Has Come

The baby is my scar. A symbol of my hopeless future. But I don’t consider my scar or my bleak future a bad thing. I don’t regret anything. Though I chose a different path, at least I chose it. It was my choice. I don’t care how things turn out. Even if the end of that destructive path is death, I’ll accept it. Because I chose it. – Red Bus

“When Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil invited Célio Turino to develop a programme to democratise access to culture, no one could have imagined the extraordinary initiatives that today cross Brazil from one extreme to the other: from semi-arid sertão to the sea, from Amazônia to the fertile lowlands of the South. The Ponto de Cultura programme has provided instruments for the multiple voices of a diverse nation to find expression in music, literature, petry… Turino’s book is a map of living Brazilian Popular Culture, disseminated to every corner of a nation that is finally seeking to be a country for everyone.” -Emir Sader

Would you like to start changing the world from your living room? What if your neighborhood made its own money? What would happen if all animals, including humans, had equal rights in the park next door? Have you considered that you are flying through space right now? Sibylle Peters, director of Theatre of Research, a Hamburg-based theater dedicated to creating social experiments together with audiences of all ages, invites readers to reimagine the world–and act on it. Based on 20 years of performance-based research, and guided by children’s wishes and concerns, this book of at-home experiments shows you how to change reality through play.

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of The Cholmondeleys dance company, founded in 1984 by Lea Anderson, Teresa Montano, and Gaynor Coward. Inspired by the DIY culture of post-punk UK, they wanted to create something that resonated with their friends, blending dance with the energy of fashion, music, and club culture of the 1980s.

They named themselves The Cholmondeleys, like a band. Emerging from this vibrant time, their performances featured collaborations with British artists, including choreographer Lea Anderson, costume designers Sandy Powell, Emma Fryer, Simon Vincenzi, composers Drostan Madden & Steve Blake, and lighting designer Simon Corder. Together with their sister company, The Featherstonehaughs (founded in 1988), they produced over 87 works, both live and on film, performing in the UK and internationally. This rich creative legacy is captured in an archive of images by photographers such as Chris Nash, Pau Ros, and Matilda Temperley, now presented together for the first time in this celebration of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs.

Documents the work of fourteen performance artists who marked the personal and political resonances of the new Millennium in a series of site-specific actions. Contrasting with the epic, populist and homogenising nature of the official celebrations, these works focused on forgotten and ephemeral experiences, enacting small but significant interventions in the public sphere.

Playing Public: Performing Participation with Pens, Planes, and People is an A5 format artist/research publication and project archive focusing on participatory game Flight Club and the years that preceded its creation. Charting my participatory art journey from prior experiments and involvement with community groups and public-facing, performative events leading up to the production of Flight Club and its iterations, written and photographic documentation combine to show how this game emerged and developed through participation, community and open-source collaboration.

The reinforcements mounted by our profane masters have transformed the theatre into a boulevard or, closer to home, into a good-old thoroughfare. In other words, the theatre is a space that hasn’t changed at all. We have to reinforce its mountainous profanities yet again, a little less old-fashioned perhaps, but similarly escorted by those necessary moralists-in-mind and a concomitant mania for marvels. So, here we are.

My dramas- in which I seem to lean on the ludicrous which must be kept so, in order to be accountable, the inspiration of such a work being precisely its utter and insulting reality-must not be born of ‘today’ but of the spells and numerologies of the old masters, the drowsy and doddery in their chic flannel slippers and their well-practised blandishment.

Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.

This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the relationship between the normative imagination defined as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of affective capitalism. Porta analyzes gender, fashion, artistic creation, and surveillance from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that now comes not from the state or mass media, but from citizens themselves. These, united in a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones, and driven by a juridical compulsion, become the axes of societies of control. In this way, the distinctive pathology of our times gives rise to a globalized game: normopathy for all.

Dinner with America is the second in a trilogy of performance installations addressing the complexities of cultural identity in the 21st Century. Where the first piece in the trilogy, Mr Quiver (Nuffield Autumn 07), explored Indian and English stereotypes, this piece questions what America means to us.

As the performance space shifts and transforms around the audience, it gently uncovers themes of consumerism, rights, ownership, voices, hopes, harvest and division in a visually compelling and unusual piece of work.

This booklet was published in November 2008 to accompany the touring production of Dinner with America by Rajni Shah Theatre. All images, films and texts were made during and as part of the creative process. They are designed to illuminate both the core and outlying ideas that inhabited the artists’ thinking at the time of making the show, between February 2007 and November 2008.