The Builders Association USA
After their celebrated world premiere of "Jump Cut" at SPIELART 97 the Builders Association opened SPIELART 99 with their production JET LAG, an ironic multimedia parable about the mobility and media publicity of our time, with Diller + Scofidio from New York.
Marianne Weems founded the Builders Association in 1993. The group, consisting of established American artists from different fields, produces multimedia performances in which the mode of expression of television, cinema and architecture is examined. The New York multimedia duet Elizabeth Diller and Riccardo Scofidio explore the interfaces between graphic arts, architecture and performance.
Forced Entertainment Great Britain
Forced Entertainment was founded in 1984. Since then the group has been working more or less in the same formation, developing themes and expressive forms during the working process. Using fragmentary remembrances, ideas and set pieces from old and new stories, they create masterful, comprehensive compositions by means of ingenious timing.
The story of SPIELART is to a large degree also the story of Forced Entertainment, which celebrated their first guest performance at a German festival with their work "Speak Bitterness" at the SPIELART festival in 1997. Since then, SPIELART has coproduced every important new creation by Forced Entertainment, such as the 24-hour performance "Who can sing a song to unfrighten me?" in 1999, which was performed throughout Europe at all of the important festivals; the piece "First Night" in 2001, which split the audience into two camps of those who were shocked and those were captivated; and "Bloody Mess" in 2003, the preliminary result of a work-in-progress that was completed in 2004 for the twentieth anniversary of Forced Entertainment.
"One of the most influential new British theater companies of the last twenty years." The Guardian, London
Roy Faudree / No Theater USA
Roy Faudree is an actor with the famous New Yorker Wooster Group. In 1974 Roy Faudree founded with Sheena See the experimental theater company No Theater. American critics referred to it as the "best-kept secret in experimental theater" (National Public Radio).
Roy Faudree has been producing the Young @ Heart Chorus since its first show in 1983.
Alexeij Sagerer / proT Munich
When you talk about independent theater in Munich, then the first name that comes to mind is Alexeij Sagerer. "Theater heute" wrote that he was probably the most important experimenter in the entire independent scene, and characterized him as a "Woyzeck-like director," who doesn't use the calculations of culture management, but rather strives for and works with his own structure in an almost monomaniac manner.
Alexeij Sagerer was born in 1944 in Plattling, Lower Bavaria. He has been living since 1969 in Munich, where he founded his theater group proT that same year. He and his theater group received the Theater Award of the City of Munich in 1997
Cornelie Müller Germany
Cornelie Müller, music- and theatermaker and confidential sound adviser, works as a freelance director and producer in the borderland between music and theater. Essential components of her work process involve working closely with actors as well as musicians, structuring the musical and scenic developments into an order of events, and the visual arrangement of the space. Numerous works have been created that allow the spaces to produce sounds and that make music visible. For years now she has been dealing with folk music and regional identities in the field of tension of today's realities.
| | Jan Lauwers/ Needcompany Belgium
Jan Lauwers, born in 1957 in Antwerpen, studied painting in Ghent and founded the Epigonen Ensemble in Brussels in 1979. Needcompany was founded from this ensemble in 1987. Since then the ensemble has had guest performances at all of the well-known theater festivals and on all of the well-known theater stages in Europe.
Jan Lauwers already was a member of the avant-garde in Flanders in the early 1980s, which unleashed a radical change in the arts. Lauwers' background as a visual artist had a huge influence on the way he approaches things in the theater, and resulted in an extremely individual and in many ways pioneering theatrical method of expression, which examines theater and its meaning. In addition to Jan Lauwers, Grace Ellen Barkey and Viviane De Muynck should be mentioned as key figures in this artists' collective.
Gob Squad Great Britain/Germany
Gob Squad is a group of English and German artists that have been producing performances, installations, films and live events since 1994. The group experiments with different media and new technology.
In 2001 "The Finalists," the winner of the webscene competition, was produced as part of the SPIELART festival.
"The Finalists," four Internet identities, leave their traces in the World Wide Web: They develop fictional characters on various home pages during the festival by using the expressive means of the Internet - favorite links, videos, photos, and chats. During the phases of live-streaming, "The Finalists" communicate with each other and with the audience. The unlimitedness of the possibilities brings to light obsessions, self-destructive acts and bizarre fixations. The audience join in and chat along, and participate in the identity game and in the struggle for attention in the universe of unlimited possibilities ...
Romeo Castellucci/ Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio Italy
Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio was founded in 1981 in Cesena and was named after the famous painter and architect of the High Renaissance, Raffaello Santi, who is better known as Raphael. Since then, this theater group led by Romeo Castellucci has been one of the most radical representatives of "nuovo teatro" in Italy. Starting with iconoclastic theater (iconoclasm: image breaking; opposing and destroying icons), the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio has developed its own theatrical language over the course of twenty years working in theater. The group attracted worldwide attention during recent years in particular with their contemporary adaptations of classical material and their richness of images. Romeo Castellucci has been considered to be a trailblazer of avant-garde theater in Italy since the early 1990s. He was the director of the Theater Biennale in Venice in 2005.
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