Transformative Connection
“Give me some soft light”, Doris Uhlich asks lighting technician Geri Pappenberger on Thursday. Doris doesn’t want the stage to look too much like a dazzling show. To not put too much emphasis on the performance. No strict dividing line (of light) between the audience and the stage but a little more permeability instead. Not classic rehearsals and then a performance. But to show that this is a workshop; with people who are not professionals. Exercises that become a show, scenes still in progress, always changing. “Transformation is what unites us all”, she said earlier. Here in Halle G, she is the Mistress of Ceremony with a mic in her hand. At the final performance in front of an audience on Saturday, Doris can be heard telling the performers what to do next, indicating what else could be done. “Throw the object into the audience, let’s see if that works.”
On Monday, at the beginning of the workshop, everybody starts by saying what comes to mind. Jan Pisar, for example, contributes his voice. “Gudrun. Guuuudrun. Gudruuun”, the audience hears him shouting through the hall on Saturday evening. There is no answer. Gudrun is the imaginary concept that holds everything together, abstract yet eponymous. Jan’s voice carries far. He found his way here via the Viennese street newspaper Augustin, which he has been selling for many years, to participate in the one-week workshop with Doris. Others heard about it from Obdach Forum and some from integration wien.
Most of them didn’t know each other before. At the end of the week, they stand, sit, walk, lie down, play, shout, act, perform, tell their stories together in front of spectators. Between, below and above them, transparent, inflatable objects (Ursula Klein) float and roll across the otherwise empty stage; black floor; partly coloured light reflected in the cones, cubes, cuboids and cylinders, shining, lighting up the edges and stylishly distorting what lies beyond. Look through. Interact. He didn’t know what to expect beforehand, Alex Amesberger, a participant, says during the audience discussion after the show. “But that, that’s art.”
The kind of art where human bodies interact with transparent objects, thereby revealing something about themselves without laying themselves open. Regina Amer sits in front of the largest cube and talks about the new bathroom in the apartment she now has. The bath that is going to look like a sea grotto. She walks around the cube, stands behind it and finally lies down halfway under it, with a jocular voice, still telling the tale. You cannot be crushed, not even by transparency, as long as you are still holding the mic. The cube is light. At some point, they all throw it into the air together, arms raised. It floats above them like a dancing beach ball that has lost its shape. Fog wafts around the scene, the sound (Boris Kopeinig) booming and dripping, a bright voice singing. Lyubov Leitner fights her way through the cubes with a catwalk attitude. Until, at some point, air pours out of the objects and the stage becomes a “limp landscape”, as Doris puts it, and introduces itself not only as a performance space, but as a performance in its own right. Living geometry. Dry fog, colourful light, object sculpture, bodies, energy, stage, life.
Different people should work on something together more often, Andi Kleinhansl says in the dressing room on Saturday. People with and without disabilities, people who have experienced homelessness, people who like to do something together because “doing nothing isn’t an option”, as Gerhard Petrasek puts it. An invisible web that transforms itself throughout the week and at the same time holds everything together until, at the very end, the performers and the audience are standing together on the stage of Halle G wie Gudrun over snacks and drinks. Now we want to know where Gudrun goes from here.
Ruth Weismann has been a member of the editorial staff at the Viennese street newspaper Augustin since 2017. Among other things, she studied fine arts, has written for various publications and worked as an art educator.