In actu Negotiations of the Stage as a Spectrum of Im/possible Movements: Grounding alternative spatio-temporal experience in philipp gehmacher's series walk+talk

Abstract

In 2008 Philipp Gehmacher invited 10 choreographers to TQW Vienna to deal with the driving parameters of their practices in simultaneously physical and verbal solo-explorations on stage. He titled the events walk+talk. Oleg Soulimenko, Meg Stuart, Gehmacher, Antonia Baehr, Rémy Héritier, Sioned Huws, Boris Charmatz, Jeremy Wade, Milli Bitterli and Anne Juren participated. In 2011, the series continued in the Kaaistudios in Brussels with Martin Nachbar and Mette Ingvartsen, among others. Constanze Schellow discusses walk+talk regarding its durational understanding of time and its relational unfolding of space in a process that is enabled by a topology of interventions in the dispositives of ‘performance’ and ‘stage’. This topology serves as a common ground for In actu negotiations of the stage as a spectrum of im/possible movements by and between different voices, bodies, articulations. Only at first glance walk+talk seems to allude to the lecture performance as a self-reflexive space for artistic authors to stage their working process as work. Instead the format highlights a collective becoming-reflexive in its corporal dimension as possible-impossible movement, fundamentally reworking stage-time and stage-space. The spaces used are mapped with a topology of interventions. This seemingly bare but manipulated scenography (the (re-)writing of the space as space) is crucial for the politics of encounter and articulation in walk+talk. On the one hand it thwarts any trivialisation or idealisation of ‘empty’ space as undesigned, neutral or even democratic; on the other hand, it offers a whole arsenal of partially movable landmarks that facilitate, over the course of the shifting utilisations during the series, the self-creation of numerous spaces emerging in friction with the options given. In its constructed-ness and observed-ness such a space has always gleaned its history from “other people” and through “other things”.