, a group based in Sweden, seeks to blur the distinction between performance and architecture. +Full Report
I had a chance to do a one question interview with Tor Lindstrand, known to the Archinect community as the leader of LOL Architects, about the project.
QR: What is 'The Theatre' and what are you hoping to accomplish?
TL:
International Festival's The Theatre is both an architecture and performance project. What makes architecture a performance in this project is the collaborative process, production and building of a full-scale theater to fit and accommodate differing programmatic and environmental contexts. The Theatre will then be used by others for diverse programs and activities, as a possible re-articulation of the circulation of performance practices in Europe and as a shift towards a more participatory way of conceiving architecture.
Furthermore, for International Festival the project is a questioning of subjectification, in relation to class, gender, age, ethnicity. The Theatre stems from a desire to understand how the theater, as a mechanism performs, and how these spaces are inherently politically biased. The Theatre will be realized in 2007 as a co-production with steirischer herbst and will be available for use until 2010.
The project will be up and running in Graz from 21/9 until 14/10 then it tour to TATE Modern in London in May 2008, Montpellier, France as part of a research project at the Dance Academy from July 2008 to December 2008, and then to Berlin and Stockholm in the autumn of 2009, ending up in Zagreb and Bucharest in 2010.
Tor Lindstrand also invites those of us that may be around Venice this Saturday August 18th to come out and join them for a pre-event show: The Pause.
8 Comments
Sophistry. Rearranging seating to suit a performance and calling it "performance architecture"?
Looks pretty dull too- bleachers in a warehouse next to some storage containers.
I had a hard time telling if it's a real deal, or another experimentation on Second Life, with the lifeless space called an 'event' like a sophisticated term.
That's the problem when computer dorks rule the world. :)
'What makes architecture a performance in this project is the collaborative process, production and building of a full-scale theater to fit and accommodate differing programmatic and environmental contexts.'
I said that in my #rd year crit and got blasted for being lazy and not doing real work
Good crit.
A barn raising is the best example I can think of for "collaborative process, production, and building".
If its the process, why don't they show it. The people, the food, the party, the community, the colors, the fun...
Thanks for the comments. The reason that there are no pictures of people and so on is because we don't start to build until Monday. So of course we could have done images and fake public life, happy kids with balloons and all these tricks we learn in school or we can start doing the real thing and maybe hope that something change. If that means building a boring shed, I would take that over any homogeneous spectacle that architects, especially students of architecture, seems to be so deeply in love with. /multi-colored love to you all
Tor, you are right about inane illustrations of fake public life. Perhaps the point of this project would be better illustrated with no illustrations at all.
A traditional barn raising is successful because there is a real and integral connection between the Amish ciulture, the act of building, and the resulting architecture.
How is this project is fundamentally different than raising a tent for a travelling circus?
"Universal" space was big in the 70's- making it neutral so users could configure it as they saw fit and not be constrained by the "architecture". I don't know of any successes, only failures.
Stroke, maybe you are right, the images have been produced to give us and people related to the project a view of what it might be, with all its flaws and problematic points. I think that the mayor difference to a circus tent is that it is produced as modular structure, the different parts are independent of each other, containers taking care of kitchen, security, storage and toilets. Can be adjusted to each location where the project will stand, the mayor structure a simple steel construction with inflatable rood and facade and a transformed green house structure working as the foyer. A circus tent have to be placed in a very specific situation (i.e. flat and wide). This structure can be built up in a series of different configurations. And I agree with the remarks of the failures seen in many examples from the 70's. I think the crucial difference in this project is that it is initiated by artists and thus proposes completely other notions of circulation, ownership and possible empowerment for the performance scene. Our practice between architecture and performance tries to push the idea of the social, away from what it looks like and towards what it does. So really away from the concept of the universal and towards something very specific, but not in relation to aesthetics but rather in what way we can become active. Hopefully a production of potentiality. A project in becoming, constantly shifting and transforming over the coming three years.
It does not need to be 'multi-colored' or filled up with photoshopped happy kids to illustrate the liveliness/lifelessness of a space. Tor's comment on Aug 29, 07 10:53 am suggested his unnecessary and biased restrain to these superficial factors, however, which implies that he enjoys a particular 'style' of rendering without colors and without a human viewpoint, i.e. some design decisions in the drawings that are not discussed.
Either we can blame our perception of lifelessness on our biased points of view, or we can blame it on the renderings being simply ineffective in illustrating the idea, no matter how brilliant it may be.
Nevertheless, when I hear a statement such as "seeks to blur the distinction between performance and architecture", it can be architecture of millions of possibilities, i.e. there is no necessary link between the statement and the resultant form. The lack (or the arbitrary neglect) of context is one of the reasons to blame, and it is also why it feels more like Second Life than real life.
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