On the 10th of March I visited the International Performance Festival Second in GlogauAIR in Kreuzberg. An evening with five different performances. The nice thing about this evening was that all the performances were completely different in approach and style.
Nabi Nara had a performance about loving someone to death. She took a boy out of the audience. Undressed him, kissed him all over with lipstick so he became a candy. Then she asked the audience to blow up heart shaped balloons while she taped the boy completely with double sides tape. Then she covered the boy with the balloons. After that she kissed all the balloons until they snapped. I thought it was a nice visualisation loving someone so much that you brake him/here. Five guys from Finland puled flags out of their asses and let the audience limbo underneath. And Alvaro Terrones had some sort of swimming ritual in a teacup. I liked the performance of Dimitriego Paragullo the most. They walked back and forth through the audience and talked about what they would never do on the stage. They really knew how to build up the tension with just words and body language. Sometimes they did what they said they wouldn’t do and sometimes they didn’t. It felt like they were going to do a lot of crazy stuff but in the end they only talked and looked at people. The things they said they wouldn’t do only existed in the imagination of the audience.
I think it is a vague line when something is performance art and when is it theatre. Or maybe it should be categorised as fine arts. The nice thing about this evening was that it showed how different performances can be. It made me think about my own work. For example ‘chosen’ Is it performance art or is it theatre? Maybe if it is presented as performance art people wouldn’t have the wrong expectation they have when they go into the theatre. It looks like performance art allows you to be more experimental in the forms you use. People are not so focused on the story