March 14, 2021

Exactly thirty years ago, on March 14, 1991, my first performance premiered in Amsterdam. Ulrike Kuner of the IG Freie Theaterarbeit, took this occasion to interview me for the journal gift: we discussed what motivates me and talked about my projects, my manner of working and my artistic cosmos.

 

Ulrike Kuner: The first piece in your list of works is dated 1991 and entitled Talkative Concepts of Physical Love. Taking this as your point of departure, how would you describe your development?

 

Christine Gaigg: Talkative Concepts of Physical Love was a work I created as part of my studies at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. Basically, it already contains the focus of later works: sexuality, what is real. In between – from 2000 to the early 2010s – there was a phase I call structural choreography, in collaboration with composers. First with Max Nagl, Sacre Material (2000) and ADEBAR/KUBELKA (2003), then with Bernhard Lang the TRIKE series and Maschinenhalle#1, which opened the festival steirischer herbst in 2010.

 

In the early 2010s, I began with what I call “performance essay”, performances that are critical of the media and society, such as DeSacre! Pussy Riot meets Vaslav Nijinsky and Maybe the way you made love twenty years ago is the answer?.

 

I compare my different creative phases with film genres: experimental film vs. documentaries. During the structural phase, I explored the material per se, examining sections of movement like experimental film explores individual frames, and the organization of material. My working method was, in fact, borrowed from the experimental filmmakers Peter Kubelka and Martin Arnold. For the international film festival Viennale, I transferred Peter Kubelka’s one-minute film “Adebar” (1957) into the stage format ADEBAR/KUBELKA. This choreography is so incredibly complex that the viewer has absolutely no chance of understanding how it works; the effect is hypnotic. In the TRIKE series, my collaboration with Bernhard Lang, our goal was to work out a grammar of loops, creating cross-references between sound and movement. A sort of Cage and Cunningham encounter.

 

What I do now, on the other hand, is more comparable to documentary film. I start from a socio-political issue, a theme. I do my research; I look for the appropriate format. It is a form of documentary theatre.

 

UK: Over the course of these thirty years: what is the essence of your artistry?

 

CG: From the beginning, I would say, it has been the combination of a philosophical view of subjects with a very personal approach, the socio-political claim, the search for relevance. The willingness to undergo a process. And I think I am courageous. That, in my own view, is my most important characteristic.

 

UK: What drives you to create your work as stage performances?

 

CG: Because of its living physicality, performance has an effect that is unlike anything else; it cannot be found in literature or film.

 

UK: Where do you see the audience in your concept?

 

CG: My views on this have developed radically over the years. Corona has interrupted everything, but until corona happened, I could not imagine doing anything that didn’t involve the audience in a mutual way. It was not just that the performance involves the bodies of the viewers, but also the other way around, that the viewers influence the performers. Indeed, over the course of these thirty years, I have hardly produced frontal pieces – not more than a handful – all the others involve the audience as a theatrical subject. You might call Maschinenhalle#1 an immersive concert.

 

UK: I was incredibly impressed by Maschinenhalle#1. As a viewer, I felt totally involved, because we were inside this machinery. We were no longer looking at a work, but inside it.

 

CG: You are inside, and you contribute to the work. That was also the case in my production of Elfriede Jelinek’s Über Tiere (Swiss premiere in 2007) and before that in Sacre Material, the first public performance in the courtyard of the Museumsquartier in 2001. In these large formats, the audience moves around freely and can change positions and perspectives continuously. Yes, we were all very pleased with Maschinenhalle#1 and wanted to create a follow-up project on a similar scale. For two years we tried to find interesting spaces and interested presenters. We failed at the latter. And so this collaboration dissolved.

 

UK: How would you describe the collaboration, and who played which role in it?

 

CG: Everyone took the role of their competence. It was a collective in the sense that no decision, be it ever so small, could be taken without involving the others. Everyone came to it from their own vantage point: composition, programming and automated pianos, space choreography.

 

UK: But the concept was yours?

 

CG: No. Maschinenhalle#1 was a joint development, it evolved from the TRIKE series. Bernhard and I got together because of our similar working methods. In the case of TRIKE, one can still say that it is my piece. Afterwards, Bernhard showed me the loop generator, the technology they developed at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics in Graz. Initially I was extremely sceptical, as often it is a step backwards, doing things with the help of technology which would feel old-fashioned or irrelevant without the technology. With interface technology it takes a while until you understand the point, what exactly the interface is and what it is supposed to be able to do.

 

It might seem as if the metal plates were always the basic idea for Maschinenhalle#1, but it was actually a lengthy process. In the TRIKE series, I still used the acrylic glass plates from the sets of ADEBAR/KUBELKA, where the dancers perform on a translucent floor lit from below (these same acrylic glass plates have now been used in totally different ways in five productions – sustainability rules!). This, however, is a purely visual use, as acrylic glass is not a material that conducts sound. Brass, on the other hand, does, and Winfried Ritsch had brass plates at his studio. Before we presented V-Trike for the first time, in 2007 at the Kaaitheater in Brusels, we spent a year figuring out what this combination of metal plate, movement and video projection was about. From the outside, it is impossible to say who directs whom – a societal analogy. What characterizes these works – all of them, TRIKE, V-Trike, Maschinenhalle#1 – is that anything non-essential has been relentlessly pared away.

 

UK: How do you find your topics?

 

CG: It is a mixture of personal experience and social and media criticism. However, as long as I worked with dance only, I was unable to effect what drives me now, namely making people think and sparking debates. Rough Trades (1998), for example, was about the case of Tibor Foco. A lot of research went into that, on errors of justice, money laundering, police and prostitution. I translated my considerations into dance. And the effect was that no one really understood it, so all that research was actually wasted.

 

The twelve-minute sado-masochistic male duet The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light (1998) was my breakthrough in Vienna. It is a bit like the germ cell for my later performances on sexual themes. Gradually, this became more apparent. When the Theater Neumarkt in Zurich offered me the opportunity of staging Über Tiere by Elfriede Jelinek, I did it because I was interested in sexuality, and not because I wanted to shore up moral judgments. Using Jelinek’s text surface to create a rhythmic, orchestrated in-your-face space worked extremely well.

 

One turning point for me was an event at the festival steirischer herbst in 2012, “Truth is Concrete”, at the interface of art and activism. That was when I understood that it is possible for art to be enlightening in socio-political terms. That was the impulse for DeSacre!.

 

UK: I saw DeSacre! in many settings and churches, it was incredible.

 

CG: In 2013 I was given the opportunity to produce a piece at the chapel of the Hofburg, at the invitation of the Federal President’s office and Tanzquartier Wien. When I heard two Russian artists talk about the action of Pussy Riot as a paradigmatic case of contemporary art at “Truth is Concrete”, that gave me pause. I had read quite the opposite account in an article by Erich Klein in the magazine “Falter”, according to which the Moscow art scene had reacted with anything from silence to cynicism to the Pussy Riot action. I wanted to find out more about this. Also, since I had a sacred space at my disposal, I wanted to see how things stand with offenses against religious feelings. My argumentation, i.e. the derivation of non-violence by video and movement analysis, as well as the micro-relations between Nijinsky and Pussy Riot – all that only came together during the rehearsal process. A process that faced quite a number of obstacles, as the Federal President’s office had not assumed that I would use its invitation to present a political analysis…

 

UK: So the formats develop via the content?

 

CG: Exactly. Maybe the way you made love twenty years ago is the answer? resulted from my production of Xaver Bayer’s Wenn die Kinder Steine ins Wasser werfen at the Schauspielhaus Wien. In Bayer’s case, I latched onto the text like a parasite to its host, adding something raw and sexually charged, because I felt that was lacking.

 

And in order to make it clear that what I’m interested in are the social changes regarding sexuality, I created Maybe the way you made love twenty years ago is the answer?. It is certainly my most important piece. Also for the very reason that it is so assailable. The format evolves between the improvisation of an erotic scene, reminiscent of amateur porn, and recounting my own observations and memories. The audience is turned on and intellectually challenged at the same time. That is how I develop the concepts of my performance essays – creating tension between reflection and physicality.

 

UK: What intrigues you about the physical? Sexuality, of course, but even in Maschinenhalle#1, the visitor was part of an organism, and it was a highly stimulating and vibrating experience.

 

CG: That is what we explicitly set out to do in Maschinenhalle#1: the pianos as physical objects, the vibrations. In principle, I find dance more interesting when it is not just for the viewer’s consumption. When the audience is close to the action, it is always also about the feeling, the sensation that ensues. That is why I always try to find something involving not only the performer’s body, but also the viewer’s. Stage dance could deal with any physical issue, but it is not really interested, because it has become so overwhelmingly visual. That is why I migrated towards performance. In CLASH (2016), my performance essay on the Orlando attacks, I embrace every single person in the audience at the end. Only one woman refused; the embraces with all the others were extremely intense. Because so much happens before, charging the atmosphere, people gratefully accept the physical finale.

 

UK: I had an experience in a Bulgarian performance where we were led around blindfolded. My colleagues from Berlin all said: totally impossible, that crosses the red lines of one’s safety and individuality.

 

CG: It will be interesting to see how this develops after corona. I believe, as you say, that the tendency to only evaluate the transgression and overlook the performative element has been very strong all along. What I look for in these performative formats is intimacy among strangers. This is most intense in Meet (2018), in which I interact experimentally in a small space with ten audience members. In Affair (2019) there is not even a stage or performance space, but we appear among the viewers, interacting with them.

 

UK: What are you proud of?

 

CG: Currently I am proud of Go for it let go, which we have just completed. In the middle of a lockdown, with a concept which went from Plan A to Plan B and C and D, rehearsals with N95 masks, performers who had never met before. We are not streaming it. The protagonists are women who I found by placing a call in the “Falter”. In the performance, they expose themselves. They deserve the audience making an effort to come to the Tanzquartier in order to be visible and noticeably present. That is the only way it is halfway fair. Streamed and watched on a laptop, it would be reality TV.

 

I am proud of the works that polarize and provoke, and those in which I expose myself. Not so much of success, but of what is assailable, vulnerable. That is what I stand by.

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag