Labyrinth
A City Project
Cartographic operations in public space, by Tommy Noonan and Georg Hobmeier in the course of the Österreich TANZT Festival from Wed 18 to Sat 21 May 2011
What sort of city is St Pölten? What are the people who live here like? Can one develop a social cartography of the city together with the inhabitants themselves? In one of the Festspielhaus's continuing concerns with the city of St Pölten, in this season too there is again to be a "city project". In reference to one of the central motifs of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges – the labyrinth – the dancer Tommy Noonan and the performance artist Georg Hobmeier go on an artistic tour of discovery. Their performance will concern itself with the cartography of cities and bring these to life in the original size, and at three completely different venues: Buenos Aires, Freiburg im Breisgau and St Pölten. In each performance the "Labyrinth" project will integrate and involve local artists and residents of the respective city in the project. In the course of the preparatory period a performance is to emerge that guides and accompanies the spectators through the city. One becomes a witness of diverse types of performance and installation, choreographies and improvisation, which take place in public on the streets and squares as well as in private apartments and businesses in the city. An interwoven performance develops that is inspired by the city and at the same time helps shape its structure. One is not only to encounter the “banal” everyday life, because alongside the performers a number of extras will also contribute to renewing the customary picture of everyday normality.
Labyrinth is an experiential journey, in which an audience is guided through a particular area of a city through a combination of storytelling, sound collage and performance. The minimal yet complex layering of such elements is intended to create an experience in which the city itself is enhanced and appears to perform. In a presentation of Labyrinth, an infinite number of possibilities, stories and histories emerge in each stranger, each street and every random event, whether they are performers or people passing by. Through such actions, the audience loses the definition between the imaginary city and the real city before them, and must constantly re-evaluate the reality of his or her environment.
Labyrinth grows out of a broad platform of public space performance work, know as "Area", developed by Georg Hobmeier and Tommy Noonan. "Area" projects have been supported by festivals and cities across Europe and abroad (SKITe/Sweet and Tender: Porto, Tanzwerkplatz: Amsterdam, K3: Hamburg, Theatre de la Cité: Paris, the cities of Innsbruck and Salzburg, and Forum PRISMA: Mexico City). Further Area events have taken place in the cities of Brussels, Zürich, Frankfurt, Berlin, Athens, Bangalore and Buenos Aires.
Labyrinth represents a new stage in the investigation and
development of such public space performance projects, drawing from each
involved artist's background in fields such as Literature, Theatre,
Dance, work with amateur groups and New Media and Technology.
For more info in the "Area" platform, please visit:
area - choreographic operations in public space
Area in Freiburg, Salzburg, Innsbruck @ vimeo
Area Global @ vimeo
How
In each city, the installation of Labyrinth requires a two-week preparation period, during which the artists have access to a rehearsal studio and a supporting institution who provides logistical, PR, and communication support. Before work begins, a performance space is chosen in the city, in dialogue with the artists and the supporting institution. The space is chosen based on factors such as
- 1: a dynamic and layered presence of life, movement and overall activity
- 2: the presence of heterogenous or colliding groups based on age, race, class, or other elements that might create various boarders
- 3: a particular geographical fluidity, wherein an audience may move easily around and/or through the space.
The preparation period sees the development of a narrative text based on the space in question, as well as the collection of various audio recordings from the space. Additionally, a laboratory-workshop is conducted during this two-week period for amateurs who live in the city. The workshop will investigate the space in question, and will develop a kind of group performance that will occur in the public space during the presentation.
On the day of the performance, the audience arrives in the public space where they are met by a "Greeter", and are given a small device with earphones. They are instructed to put the earphones on, and when they do, they discover a voice, which begins to relay a narrative based on the space around them. Over the course of the performance, the audience explores the particular area of the city - sometimes guided, sometimes interrupted, and sometimes left to search themselves in the particular combination of text, sound collage and live performance. All of these elements serve the ultimate purpose of enhancing, opening and fictionalizing the city space itself.
Why
There is today a proliferation of performance and installation work oriented towards public space. It would be too easy to consider all such work and research under simple categories, such as "site-specific art" or "post-dramatic theater", to give two oft-used terms. To do so would be to miss the opportunity to both engage in the wide offering of various projects, as well as to critically understand the ways in which each work is operating and engaging with public space differently.
The function of Labyrinth is to create - in the mind of the spectator - an imaginary map or model of the space which that spectator may already intimately know. Through basic suggestion and suspension of disbelief, Labyrinth functions like a stage-set, filled with performers, yet representing only the place on which it is actually constructed. In this way, Labyrinth playfully renders vivid and present the quote of William Shakespeare: "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players..."
Yet it is not the play nor the players which is the point of Labyrinth - it is the world. In many public space projects, the relationship between city and spectacle remains within a theatrical logic: The city frames the spectacle or the performers, or it is contextualized by a certain "topic", which is watched and understood by the audience within the context of the familiar audience-spectacle relationship. Labyrinth inverts this relationship, utilizing the presence of theatrical elements only to throw focus and uncertainty onto the environment and the presence of the spectators - thus offering up the environment itself to the contemplation of the public.
Herein, Labyrinth does not try to contextualize nor understand a given public space, but rather enters it into a sense of play and of possibility. Spaces which we pass by or live in each day open to reveal a myriad of other possibilities and potentialities. The psychological geography of our city-space (and thus ourselves) becomes open for re-consideration. Though playful and clearly fictional, the work still opens a very important possibility for the public to re-claim space from the various ways in which it is regularly coded and understood (whether that coding is political, economic, historical or subjective). When the public enters into the game of reconsidering and literally 're-seeing' their city, then perhaps this is a brief experience towards the possibility of critically re-considering the codes of environment which we each inhabit and create.
