Dear visitors to Gessnerallee, dear artists
With her new work ‘Collapse in 5 Acts: There Is Porn of It’, performance artist Simone Aughterlony has created a multi-layered performance about collapse, the body and fragile connections. The piece premieres on 27 February – we asked the artist three questions about it.
Gessnerallee: ‘Collapse in 5 Acts: There Is Porn of It’ links forms of architectural and structural collapse with social systems such as capitalism, progress and gender orders. What does ‘collapse’ mean to you – aesthetically, politically and physically?
Simone Aughterlony: Interestingly, we can only witness collapse as a process through what remains, the remnants of a process of decline. It is not a disappearance, but a kind of dismantling by various forces, depending on the area in which the phenomenon of collapse is experienced. With our artistic research, we try to circumvent ideas about shaping the world and striving for constant renewal, and in this sense, the work proposes a policy of reckoning with what we have built and inherited before proposing a new utopian order.
Aesthetically, the performance invites raw materials that bear witness to decay: used plastic, broken monuments, fallen pipes. However, despite the persistent presence of ruins on the horizon, the space still offers potential for habitation, visits and social gatherings. Rather than being addressed surgically, physical decay and ageing are present in the work as lived realities on bodies. Through a heightened awareness of time, different temporalities between characters and notions of time continuity, the process of collapse is not experienced linearly, but moves irregularly in spurts and sometimes sideways.
The dramaturgy of the evening is strongly influenced by the number 5 – from the 5 stages of grief to the 5 stages of decomposition to the 5 acts of classical theatre. What interests you about this numerical structure?
To be honest, I don't concern myself with numerology. However, I have discovered that the number 5 primarily stands for the concept of change and the ability to adapt to different environments and social situations, which seems relevant, at least for our current political and ecological climate.
However, through our research, particularly with regard to the aforementioned phases of grief and decay (although there were others), a sense of eeriness emerged in the repetition that fascinated us. The research for the production involved many laboratory phases and various public iterative moments before it found its current form, and the desire to structure the work dramaturgically around the five acts of a classical play further confirmed this numerical persistence.
Mysterious characters meet on stage: the king, the narrator, a fairy, the tourists, ‘The Lack’, the horse, the architect. Together they create a space of opacity, eroticism and fragile connections. What else awaits us on stage?
The characters mentioned are mostly archetypes, identifiable positions or, in the case of ‘The Lack’, a psychoanalytical term for the absence of the subject's inherent being, which drives desire. The narrator's voice speaks confidentially to the audience from a historical present and also offers its own reflections and considerations.
Through the dialogue between action and spoken word, one may recognise a similarity to some key figures in our current political reality and thus the rise and fall of imperial ambitions. The scaffolding as a device that facilitates the construction and demolition of things has become a key idea that we apply to the relational encounters within the performance, in the awareness that the connections are fragile and cannot promise eternity.
Secure your tickets now for the performances of ‘Collapse in 5 Acts: There Is Porn of It’ on 27 and 28 February, 2 and 3 March.
By the way, just one day before the premiere of Simone Aughterlony's new work, we are celebrating another premiere, namely ‘Toi(fel), Toi(fel), Toi(fel)’ by Anna Papst and Vincent Glanzmann. In the popular OPEN STUDIO format, artists from various disciplines are collaborating with sound artist, director and stage designer Dimitri de Perrot to explore productions that use sound as a central creative element. Director, author and dramaturge Anna Papst and multidisciplinary artist Vincent Glanzmann are working in their OPEN STUDIO on Papst's new text ‘Toi(fel), Toi(fel), Toi(fel)’ and taking the audience on an acoustic tour through neighbourhoods and emotional states. Secure tickets for the premiere on 26 February and further performances on 27 and 28 February.
