my role: performer
THE DINNER CLUB
Salzburg Festival / Young Directors Project (2011)
The Dinner Club is an immersive performance in the form of an approximately 3-hour evening class that takes place in an elegant villa in Salzburg’s old town, fully equipped especially for this production. In five practical workshops, participants will learn how to have fun with strangers at a dinner party in the first part. Basic ballroom dancing, the A to Z of small talk, elementary table manners or flirting are taught as well as practical tips on how to master weddings, dinner parties and openings. In the second part, a three-course dinner with live music and dancing functions simultaneously as a test for the participants, on the basis of which they receive a certificate of passing or failing the evening at the end.
“An invitation to wear your own gender like a costume.”
Concept & direction: Poste Restante (SWE) –
Linn Hilda Lamberg, Stefan Åkesson, Erik Berg
Cast:
Erik Berg, Elisabeth Eder, Dorit Ehlers, Günther Fischbacher, Paul Hüttinger, Lena Kimming, Linn Hilda Lamberg, Olof Melander Lange, Barbara Macheiner, Alvaro Ovalle, Ingrid Rusten, Nina Sigurd, Mario Sinnhofer, Stefan Åkesson
At the Dinner Club, Poste Restante emphasizes “good manners” to expose a gaping divide between the sexes. Men are treated like men – and they treat women like women. We like to think we’re equal, but how often do women actually object when a man holds a door open? Do men ever resist flattery when asked by women to open bottles and pour glasses at the table?
As gender inequality is delicately served, embarrassment and confusion become the hardest bites to swallow. The Dinner Club is an invitation to play one’s social gender like a costume. Dinner Club encourages us to reflect on our own behavior and digest the shame it may have caused that evening.
“However, other deep levels of the dinner club should not be underestimated. A certain eerie feeling becomes apparent. Applied social adaptation works as an intelligent and insightful game. We experience the sense of obligation that exists in formalized social situations that are obsolete in most contemporary contexts. The first thought that comes to mind is: things probably weren’t better in the past. The second thought: what unspoken dictatorial rules are we following today?”
(Ingegärd Waaranperä)
Poste Restante is a collaboration between Swedish artists Linn Hilda Lamberg, Stefan Åkesson and Erik Berg. They invent interactive immersive performances that focus on the spectator’s participation and individual experience. Her works require real places outside the theater and consist of processes that are surprising and yet copied from life. Together with the performers, the visitors deal with the essential questions of life, to which there are no answers, but forms through which we master them again and again.
