Lentos museum in Linz / Choreographic Platform Austria 2006

Intensifiers is an on going project of different events about being hypnotiezed by the surroundings. Frans Poelstra, Robert Steijn and Martin Siewert let themselves be influenced by an exhibition, a party, the architectur of a space.

They translate their experiences in short acts, dancy movements, songs, music, texts etc, they created in the moment. They function as drugs. They intensify, what is already there subconsciously in the space.

Text-thoughts and proposals before the event Hosting Matt Mullican in Linz/ Lentos museum / choreographic platform Austria 2006

Two days we inhabit the space, designed by and with work from Matt Mullican.The challenge is how to intensify his work, the space, he created without drawing too much intention to ourselves as performers. The idea is how to expand the sensitivity of the artwork and at the same time how to discover our own creativity in this space within our own aesthetics, ideology and working methods. Thinking about his earlier work, we saw on several exhibitions in Europe, we are eager to do something in this space and we imagine that it could fit together. It’s a challenge for us theatre people to relate to a very specific architectural setting with very specific connotations. As dancers we think in movement and duration…How to spend our time there creatively? In a way we can intensify or deepen or counteract the experience of the visitors.We think of two days performing during exhibition times & festival times.

becoming curtains

Although we will be all the time in the space, we do not want to be always explicitly present ourselves as performers. So we have to play with appearance and disappearance. Do we become a curtain ourselves – that’s is always our deepest wish, to actually disappear in the surroundings – or do we limit our performative attitude into an objectified impersonal carrier of his iconography? Do we investigate in impersonal actions, referring in movement, gestures, imagery or text towards highly personal icons.

we like shyness

The presence of shyness could be a nice theme to work on as a inviting attitude towards the audience….In a way we have to bridge the artwork and the public, and where do we stand, are we close to the world of the artwork, or close to the world of the public. A lot of questions, which want to be answered in the rehearsal period.

possible functions

We will investigate the following functions we can have in the space towards the visitors of the exhibition.

1. We could be hosts, and consider the space is our home, our living and the visitors as our personal guests

2. We could be the guards of the museum, with a little different task than usual, we could be the dancing guards for instance.

3. We could be the servants of the iconography of Matt Mullican, expanding the ideology of his work into the space.

4. We could be guides, explaining the work in our own way, with our own methods.It seems the best to mix all these different roles, during the day, so different visitors will experience different situations within the space. But we will have to investigate all these different roles separately.

And what we did?

We let us selves hypnotized by the work of mullican and the music of martin (siewert) and lost ourselves in the doing. We were also performing when there were no visitors, it was like a trip and both we had a moment that we became overly sentimental, ope and had to cry. This happened never before to us. We apprciate the work of mullican even more. We discovered his playfullnes almost like an obsessed child, which can not stop being amazed about everything