Digitale Bühne

A project by: Seung hee Lee (S. Korea),

Dramaturgy: Liat Fassberg (Israel),

Participants: Hamid Elhai (Iran), Marius Miron (Romania), Teri Seo (S. Korea), Ju- Hyun Lee (S. Korea).

Technical assistance: Tim Schuster (Germany)

Mentored by: Bojana Kunst , Frank Max Muller and Philipp Schulte

Supported by: HTA, ATW, Platform Sarai and the Kulturamt Frankfurt

With special thanks: Rene Alejandro Huari Mateus, Saman Roschanai, Christian I.G Alvarez, The Frankfurter Lab, Marcus Dross, Cedric Samson

This project proposal is to develop, devise and practice a process of making choreography with „Mistakes„.

– How can Mistakes become an integral and systematic part of the learning process and an approach to artistic practice?

– How may Mistakes lead to different ways of generating materials and to unexpected materials?

First call-

„The project called „Mistake in Action / Jeune femme serieuse“ will work on finding potentials on the gathering people in a capitalistic working set of the contemporary society. Then it will focus on how the signified of Mistakes would multiply through the art practice.“

This is the final version of the project’s concept, re-finalized relatively late in the process.

Concept

The recruiting process was a long phase in which we searched for our participants. Though it was clear from the start that we meant aimed for a very wide and open out-reach, we were very surprised at the outcome being that most of the candidate (and all of our final participants) were „foreigners“ to Frankfurt.

Our recruiting process was conducted of three steps- publishing ads across the city, Skype and personal auditions and a final selection process.

ADS

To start recruiting, we began with a basic Ad draft, which we posted around the city: University, billboards, art schools, UBahn and Sbahn stations, coffee shops, supermarkets etc.

Our goal was to reach as many diverse people as possible, in order to open the recruiting process to people from different social and socio-economical areas.

We then progressed to post digital ads on job-searching websites, artist website etc, as well as digital and printed newspapers.

The last phase was to post the open call on Facebook.

SKYPE AUDTIONS

Skype meetings:

Applicants who sent a response to the ads (published either on billboards, internet sites or newspapers), were offered a Skype interview in which they had to tell their Mistake story, answer questions and had the opportunity to get some answers as well.

The Skype recordings were to be used as material for the film, portraying the performative stratum of an audition\interview, in which people, while „trying to sell themselves as best they can“, are faced with the task to speak about their own mistakes.

* Although the request to film the Skype for public use was written clearly in the first email exchange, an ethical problem came up during the working process, as the Skype recording were considered for a film. Therefore a second „artificial“ interview was re-filmed with the final participants. To avoid any inconveniences, What is presented here, are the second „re-filmed“ versions.

SELECTION

The next step after the Skype auditions was personal meetings with the candidates, in which the director could get a notion for personality and team adaptability.

The important thing in the personal meeting was to explane the working process and emphasize the commitment needed for such a process- that each participant create within the group work, his or her personal (mistake)story, yet allow the story to also move from one participant to the other, to form variations.

After meeting with all participants, we then summed the „dry facts“ (gender, age, country of origin, etc.) with their mistake story (Theme, detail etc.) and our impressions from the meetings (team work capability, patience, open mind, willingness to share their story etc.)

At last we ended up with our final participants:

Cedric Samson- French, male, 43, translator,. Mistake theme: Grammar.

Teri Seo– South Korean, female, 24, dancer, living in Italy. Mistake theme: love triangle.

Marius Miron– Romanian , male,32, performer , technician and free artist. Mistake theme: misunderstanding with the police.

Ju Hyun– Soth- Korean, female, 24, artist. Mistake theme: childhood mistake.

Hamid Elahi– Iranian, male, 29, Finance student. Mistake theme: accident.