PHANTOM STAGES
Performance Lecture at Hidden Lines of Space Kunstverein am Rosa–Luxemburg–Platz, Berlin. 13/07/17.
Theatre designers conjure fictional worlds by creating floor plans for performers to inhabit in the rehearsal room. These plans are flat, phantom worlds that hold the possibility of habitation, suggesting fragments of objects, walls and architectures. They are often drawn out in spike tape on rehearsal room floors, ‘blocking’ the terrain of the stage, serving as a set-up of instructions to the bodies and objects that will eventually occupy the set. The plans exist between the present and the future, a set of possibilities of ‘what might be’ but is yet to come. Theatre floor plans are paradoxical, they are theatrical because of their absences rather than their excesses and therefore hold a unique relationship with the possibilities of theatrical representation.
The exhibition is part of a larger research project initiated by Annette Hans & Julia Horstmann that investigates the format and concept of the floor plan. Featuring work by Alice Aycock, Fran Cottell & Marianne Mueller, Hella Gerlach, Julia Horstmann, Emma Waltraud Howes, Jonas von Ostrowski, Mirjam Thomann, and Moi Tran.
More about the exhibition and project can be found here.