Fest Theaterfestival Schwindelfrei - world wide me

The word “encounter” means to touch, to meet, to gather, to collide. From the soft touch to the violent collision, from the philosophical encounter to the mealtime discussion, we at schwindelfrei want to look at the world from new perspectives via the most direct and local of art forms -- the performing arts.

Our lightning-fast access to global information, the products that we eat and wear on our bodies every day, our common responsibility for climate change and dwindling natural resources, our governments’ wars, and our digitally mediated international friendships have created an unprecedented feeling of the global Self. But what happens when we meet people that think, look, talk and create art differently?

We aim to bring together different people, ideas and artistic strategies during our festival -- in everything from conversational dance to open improvisations about fate; from straight-up theater with audience discussions to a walk highlighting cultural clashes; from a live-stream with Delhi to theatrical installations about faraway homes. We are driven by the belief that every truth is subjective and can be enriched by new perspectives. Over the course of ten days, the artists will encounter each other at workshops, rehearsals and shared lunches, and the public will encounter the artists and their pieces in intimate spaces during the international itineraries. We ourselves don’t know how these encounters will turn out: the eight performances have all been produced specifically for schwindelfrei. But to paraphrase philosopher Alain Bodieu, to have a real encounter one must be prepared as for an adventure. We invite you, our audience, to take part in a live collective adventure encompassing Beirut and Heidelberg, Delhi and Dar es Salaam, Mannheim and Muscat.

Festival Manager: Nicole Libnau
Curator: Sophia Stepf
Tech Management: Ingo Joos
Assistance: Charlotte Wiesner, Laura Braun und Kevin Rigby

PDF Programm 2014
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Isack Peter Abeneko (Dar es Salaam) - Born Original Die Copy

Born Original Die Copy..!" (“Born original the copy..!”) is a dance theatre piece that explores the human condition and our connection to the world through movement. In the piece, the emerging choreographer and dancer Isack Peter Abeneko from Dar es Salaam meets Ayda Rahmana from Mannheim for a ten-day encounter in which they explore their individual connections to the world. Has the world shaped us or are we shaping the world? Are we originals or are we copies? What has made us the way we are? In this context, they explore questions of education, poverty and migration and the construction of identity: Are we local, national or international citizens? Who do we want to be and whom do we copy? Are we born with an original and natural connection to the world? Do we die as copies?

Isack Peter Abeneko is a dancer, choreographer and artistic director at the Company Lumumba Dance Theatre in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). Besides contemporary dance, Isack is involved in various styles of African traditional dance, theater, bass guitar and percussions. He teaches in Spain, the Netherlands, New York and Germany.

Choreography: Isack Peter Abeneko

Dancers: Isack Peter Abeneko, Ayada Rahmana

Lighting: Ingo Jooß

PDF Programm 2014
PDF Dokumentation 2014

Jonas Frey / Joseph Simon (Heidelberg) - JE (UX) –TU (E)–TORIAL

JE (UX) –TU (E)–TORIAL is about the dissemination of practical knowledge, trends and creative works through the YouTube video platform -- in particular urban-contemporary dance culture, which, thanks to tutorial videos and the Internet, has been spread to even remote parts of the globe. Thus people from around the world can become teachers and inspirations, helping develop a “community.” Can a person teach him or herself solely through tutorials? Or are other people necessary? And how do people learn together?  What problems do people encounter as they learn?

The piece demonstrates the expanding possibilities of online learning. The two young choreographers and dancers, Jonas Frey and Joseph Simon, investigate their identities as dancers and their existence in relation to others. To what extent does the Internet make us similar or different?

In their work, Jonas Frey and Joseph Simon combine urban and contemporary dance culture -- a mutual interest they developed at the ArtEZ School of Dance/Arnheim, the Netherlands, where they both studied contemporary dance. They also bonded over their shared passion for b-boying.

 Choreography & dance: Jonas Frey, Joseph Simon

Video: Felix Felixine

Amitesh Groover (New Delhi) - Encounter

All you need for this encounter is your own personal perspective. You log into your device and connect to somebody in New Delhi, 6134 km away, via streaming audio and video. Together, you read a script that contains blank spaces. You are both encouraged to share ideas that make you who you are, as you read to each other about beauty, memory, death, time and crisis. 


In this new form of international wireless theatre, discover the impact a spontaneous live encounter with a stranger can have on you. In Alain Badiou’s words “The encounter is a beginning, a contingent, a chance element of existence …. It is at the point of acceptance: accepting or refusing what is happening to you.” This encounter is yours, it is happening right now and it will never be repeated again -- ever.

Amitesh Grover is a media artist, game developer and theater director based in New Delhi. He investigates the overlaps between digital technologies, game design, public installations and performance and cross-cultural works. His works have been shown internationally in Asia, South America and Europe.

Concept/Installation: Amitesh Grover

La-Trottier Dance Collective (Mannheim) - Please ask your destiny

In earlier times, the invocation of “God” and “fate” allowed us to unburden ourselves of the notions of free will and coincidence. Now, God has been replaced by terms like “universe,” “brain” or “evolution.” Can these really be used to describe the world, or are they just describing new, false associations? What is “fate” today? Éric Trottier asks the international and regional schwindelfrei artists about their own personal conceptions of fate and, using these different perspectives, will create an improvisation that probes this age-old concept. An experimental set-up is built on the stage in which dancers’ fates are challenged by changing artistic conditions. 

Éric Trottier comes from Canada but, through his work as a dancer, choreographer and director, has lived in various countries. In Mannheim, where his Company Manheim is based, he encounters different global perspectives. He most enjoys using Francophone philosophy and psychology in the research for his pieces.

Director / Scenography / DJ: Éric Trottier

Dramaturgy: Dr. Laura Bettag

Music: Jörg Ritzenhoff

Dance performed and created by: Michelle Cheung, Katharina Wiedenhofer and Tobias Weikamp

Inka Neubert/TiG7 (Mannheim) - Til death vs. depart

The performance “til death vs depart” is an attempt to grapple with the culture clash that emerges when people are confronted with contrasting concepts of marriage. Some Shiite groups engage in “temporary marriages” -- unions available to men outside of their primary marriages that can last from a few hours to 99 years. This concept goes against the concept of monogamous Christian marriage, which originally didn’t even foresee the possibility of divorce.

Inka Neubert and Norbert Kaiser have recorded interviews with Mannheim residents on the subject. The author Maja Das Gupta has written a text in dialogue with these voices, to be performed by an actress. The audience is led to the venue along different stations in public space.

The Theaterhaus in G7 (TiG7) has been a venue for free theater in Mannheim since 1989. The TiG7 welcomes guests from around the world while remaining committed to local theatrical work. Its program includes theater projects, student works, contemporary dramatic arts and literature, as well as English-language theater and political cabaret.

Director: Inka NeuberT

Video: Norbert Kaiser

Scenography: Lydia Rakutt

Performer: Mascha Rauschenbach

Boris Ben Siegel (Mannheim) - The Lives of Others

By chance, two men sit next to each other in public. They don’t know each other and have no plans to meet -- they barely notice one another. The only thing they share with each other, and many others, are identical-looking cell phones. As they go on their respective ways, they mix up their smartphones, leading them to unwillingly and unintentionally learn about each others’ lives in a virtual process that is both uncontrollable and unmaneuverable. The information contained in their smartphones decides what the men learn about each other -- a text message urges the conclusion of illegal dealings, photos suggest a double life. The events raise questions: Should a man get mixed up in the affairs of a stranger, even if it means, for once, doing the right thing? What is he prepared to sacrifice?

For 12 years, under the leadership of Coralie Wolff and Boris Ben Siegel, the theater oliv has produced works by famous dramaturgs as well as local writers at its own theater and elsewhere. Since 2009, the theater oliv is headquartered in an old sandstone basement vault at the Alter Messplatz.

Scenographical advisor: Coralie Wolff

Creative advisor: Claude Stockinger

Staging and technical installation: Oliver Buchalik

Performers: Boris Ben Siegel, Ricardo Ibba

Theaterkumpanei (Ludwigshafen) - Zaadgaah - Heimat im Kopf

“Zaadgaah - Heimat im Kopf” (“Zaadgaah - Home in the Mind”) explores the journey undertaken by Iranian migrants from Marvdasht, in southern Iran, to Ludwigshafen. For the past six years, Ludwigshafen’s Theaterkumpanei has collaborated on projects with creatives working in Iranian theater. For schwindelfrei they interviewed Iranian refugees in Ludwigshafen and, camera in hand, went on a search for locations the interviewees remembered in Iran.

 

The interview texts are condensed into a monologue and presented in a theatrical installation with documentary photos and music. What happens to the Self on the journey through geographical and cultural spaces? What remains, what wants to be retained, what is shaken off, overwritten, corrected?

The Theaterkumpanei has operated as a professional free theater in the Ludwigshafen area since 1989. The ensemble develops prize-winning theater productions for children, teenagers and adults under the name KiTZ international.

 

Director: Peer Damminger

Photography: Dominic Jan Geis

Text: Bita Samimizad

Research: Ali Pirouzi

Zoukak Theatre Company (Beirut) - Death Comes Trough The Eyes

“Death Comes Through the Eyes” is a performative conversation on death, the value of life and the quest for immortality in its new contemporary forms. The piece springs from a need to address our region’s current political situation and the new relationships to death forming within it. At an age when fighting fractions use mass death as leverage in the media, the simple death, the non-heroic or non-epic death of the individual, has lost meaning and been replaced by the death of the immortal.

The work aims to confront factors that deify individual immortality with those that banalize mass death -- for example, the continuing presence of people on their Facebook pages after their death and the countless deaths of miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose extraction of Coltan helps create the same screens on which which those same Facebook pages are viewed. We aim to play out the dialectics of death and immortality -- and the questions they raise -- with the audience in order to better understand our current roles as humans, citizens and artists.

Maya Zbib and Omar Abi Azar are theater performers, directors and founding members of Zoukak Theatre Company in Beirut. Their performances and public interventions deal with marginalized groups and tour internationally, to the Avignon Festival and London International Theatre Festival, amongst others.

Concept: Maya Zbib / Omar Abi Azar

Director: Maya Zbib

Performance: Maya Zbib, Chrystèle Khodr