my role: performer
Video documentation Melbourne (AUS)
Concept & overall direction:
The factory owners (in Linz & Vienna)
Mezzanine Spectacles (in Marseille & Tours)
Triage Live Art Collective (in Melbourne)
HOTEL OBSCURA
Linz, Vienna, Marseille, Tours & Melbourne (2015-2016)
Casual acquaintances or very intimate encounters. You have the choice.
One-to-one performances, interventions and playful elements of experimental theater can be experienced at Hotel Obscura. Immerse yourself in a scene for fifteen minutes at a time, without knowing either the setting or your counterpart in advance. Welcome to the Hotel Obscura.
(Invitation text Hotel Obscura Vienna)
Hotel Obscura is an international art project for the development and presentation of different live art concepts and live art events. The focus is on interdisciplinary, site-specific, interactive and immersive works.
Very different hotels in Austria, France, Greece and Australia become the stage for interactions with the audience (and sometimes with random hotel clientele) while the hotel is in operation. Depending on the hotel, up to 20 performative encounters in each case are incorporated into the staging in hotel rooms, the reception, the lobby, elevators, backyards, fitness rooms, outbuildings and cab vehicles. This multi-year collaborative project was initiated by Triage Live Art Collective (AU), in cooperation with Die Fabrikanten (AT), Ohi Pezoume (GR), as well as Mezzanine Spectacles, La Transplanisphère and La Folie Kilomètre (FR).
ABSEITS (Mario Sinnhofer)
The encounter in this hotel room is about people in penalty areas: about experiences of being excluded because one’s own location is not recognized according to the usual rules. It starts with drinking beer and watching soccer – including an explanation of the offside rule. The masculine connotated behaviors and competencies attributed to the performer are gradually counteracted by the skillful wearing of glittery high heels, and the open and authentic sharing of the discrimination experienced as painful in everyday life due to a non-binary gender identity. This creates a relationship of trust, from which in the vast majority of cases, within 15 minutes, an intimate conversation develops with the previously complete stranger about their own gender identity, and/or their own experiences of restriction by societal norms.
Theresa Luise Gindlstrasser
(Catalog text Hotel Obscura Vienna)
Live art, intervention, site-specific performance, one-to-one performance, social art, community art, participatory performance, immersive theater, urban gaming. Although all of these terms function as technical terms in a particular scene, a particular form of “theater,” and sometimes lead to very different results, what all of these efforts have in common is an intense reflection on the relationship between audience and actors. Reflection in the sense of: Let’s all walk together on the fourth wall!
Hotel Obscura has given itself the label of live art, that is, processes, strategies that allow interaction between audience and actors, each starting from a concrete space. This is more than just a performance for a small audience and also more than just interaction. The idea is to create a framework each time, the result is not yet determined. It sounds like a social experiment and self-awareness, and at best it has something to do with notions of responsibility.
Hotel Obscura does not try anything really new. Or anything that hasn’t already been tried elsewhere. Namely, to turn theatrical theater into truly captivating theater, that is, social encounters full of inevitability and intimacy. Nevertheless, Hotel Obscura is an extraordinary project. Here people come together not only from different countries but also with different conceptual ideas and discuss the possibilities of intimacy. The project is also unique in the scale of events. […] Gerald Harringer (DIE FABRIKANTEN), who has been following live art for 30 years, believes that the audience has largely become more mature and self-confident. This has something to do with democratization processes both in art and in the media. And that has political implications. Thus, in the very political and public, the very private, intimate can be found.
Participating artists Hotel Obscura Wien:
Club Real (DE/AT), Alix Denambride (FR), SILK Fluegge (AT), Deborah Hazler (AT), Patrik Huber (AT), Martha Laschkolnig and Markus Zett (AT) , Brian Lobel (GB), Veronika Merklein (DE/AT), Mandy Romero (GB), Mario Sinnhofer (AT), Chris Swoon (AT), Elise Terranova (AU), Time’s Up (AT), Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy (AU), Katharina Wawrik (AT), Your Cousin PIA (AT), Rea Zekkou (GR).
