In Performance Route 1, performers from Helsinki and Mannheim challenge our viewing habits with choreographed resistance. A luxury automobile's surface becomes a discursive battleground and the Mannheim Vesper Church Choir turns standard ideas about privilege upside down. 

Mit:Lea Aderjan & Karoline Vogt / Golnaz Hourmazdi & Fids Schopp / Sonya Lindfors

Premiere: 28. Juni 19 Uhr
29. Juni, 30. Juni 19 Uhr / 01. Juli 17:00 & 19:30 Uhr

 

Tickets / Schedule

Bild © Zarvan Rouhbakhshan

 

Lea Aderjan & Karoline Vogt

Citizen’s stage

Only my life is a collaboration between professional and amateur performers. In cooperation with the Mannheim Vesper Choir and based on interviews with choir members, the topic of privilege is illuminated from the perspectives of those who do not seem to have any. The interviews are put together in a text that is performed in an interplay between the choir and  an actress.

This piece challenges us to rethink – what are privileges really? “This is my privilege: time,” says Wolfgang, a member of the choir.“But I take this privilege for myself, I do not have anyone who provides this for me.” Presumably, freedom is a privilege, but what in our lives makes us really free? “ I have often noticed that the people who only think about money are in a poorer situation than I am. For what more can you do than to eat a little something every day and to have a roof over your head?” Wolfgang asks.

Regie Lea Aderjan / Musikalische Leitung & Regie Karoline Vogt / Schauspiel Elena Nyfferle / Musikalische Einlagen Vesperkirchenchor.

Golnaz Hourmazdi & Fides Schopp

Audio-visual production

Automobiles have become ostentatious displays of privilege made of tin.  At the same time that Lamborghini drivers in Monaco are admired and respected, the Mannheim police department is charging a so-called ‘poser-driver’ with gross negligence and wants to ban such drivers from the inner city. The audio-visual performance “You Drive Me Crazy,” uses a luxury automobile as a surface for discourse and projection. The audience will be captured by the love of beautiful cars in a world full of powerful motors and will discover what the performance exhaust pipe puts out and what emotional sounds the purring of its motor can evoke. You will be confronted with the questions: Who receives the right to present themselves with such expensive status symbols and who does not? Who is allowed to see and be seen in Mannheim’s city squares? Auto manufacturers hire sound designers to work out the characteristics of each model – the cafes are expanding their seating areas into the streets and then, should no one be able to listen to the perfectly-tuned motor?

Audio: Fides Schopp / Video: Golnaz Hourmazdi / Speaker: Banafshe Hourmazdi / Audio- & Video Artwork: Ameisenbild

SONYA LINDFORS

Dance

We perceive the world through different categories constructed in juxtaposition – nature and culture, black and white, the west and the other, the known and unknown. Each of these constellations contains ideological power relations in which one category is defined as better, more developed and more valuable than another. Soft Variations is a score for six non-white performers from Mannheim and Helsinki. The abstract and playful choreography performed by both professional and amateur dancers opens a playing field where questions of blackness, otherness, and seeming neutrality are unsettled by bodies and movement. Through small variations, meanings are deconstructed and new ones created. The performers occupy the stage and softly challenge our existing ways of seeing. Soft Variations is a part of a series of works on blackness by Sonya Lindfors.

Choreography: Sonya Lindfors / Dance: Esete Sutinen, Zen Jefferson

With the friendly support of the Finnish Institute