This could be one way to write a history of recent performing arts: By following artists’ attempts to speak on stage, in staged situations, at all. By Tracing the trials and errors of finding a spoken language that is not pretending to be intrinsically motivated, not presumptuous, not fake.
New York’s legendary Wooster Group hiding behind stunning playback virtuosity. The almost-as-legendary British theatre company Forced Entertainment not daring to say word live on stage for almost a decade, only using pre-recorded soundtracks until they came up with the idea of reciting lists and using Q&A games: functional speech instead of feigned psychology. Theatre maker René Pollesch being inspired by the mono-emotional rapid speech of the director and writer John Jesurun. The She She Pop collective rehearsing the quotidian sound of amateurish authenticity that later became mainstream in Reality TV. Rimini Protokoll sending “real people” onto the stage instead of performers. How can one stand in front of an audience and speak without falling into the trap of false representation?
For some years, Zorka Wollny also kept tiptoeing around this problem. When there was voice on stage, there were no bodies. When there were bodies, there was no voice. Silent dancers in galleries; invisible sources of sound. Once they finally appeared together in one space, they still were separated: Some bodies moving, others singing.
It was the form of the choir that finally offered a solution. A solution that had aesthetic and ethical reasons and consequences.
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Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Portugal, Greece. A little later New York, London, Tel Aviv, and Istanbul, then Brazil, Japan, Korea, Argentina . . . the year 2010 kicked off a decade of demonstrations all around the world. The catalysts igniting each instance of unrest may differ, but artists were and are almost always among the first to take up the call for social justice and strengthened democracy. No matter the site (squares and parks like Tahrir, Zuccotti, Syntagma, Taksim, and Maidan), no matter the backdrop (Tokyo after Fukushima, Niemeyer’s iconic parliamentary architecture in Brasilia, or beneath umbrellas in Hong Kong), the same question arose: how could art – how could artistic strategies and tactics – play a relevant role in these movements? A renewed interest in the concepts of gathering and creating public spheres in which society not only is mirrored but constantly tried out, performed, tested, reimagined, or even reinvented, fundamentally changed the artistic discourse.
And so it is neither by chance, nor without larger context. that Wollny’s trajectory of bringing bodies and voices together began around the same time. Oratorio for Orchestra and Warsaw Citizens’ Choir (2011) mixed professional musicians with activists and engaged citizens, translating the genre of the oratorio into a secularized “form of expression for pluralist society, a polyphony of opinions and postulates”. From improvisations and numerous conversations, a libretto of political demands emerged. Behind Oratorio stood the deliberate choice to move orchestra and choir out of the safe space of the concert hall and onto the streets of Warsaw.