Wintersemester 2023/24

Hölderlin Vorträge 2023/24

Mittwoch, 15. November 2023, 18h

Vivian Liska (Antwerpen/Jerusalem): Die Abwehr des Dezisionismus aus dem Geiste des Judentums. Kafka, Scholem, Benjamin

Campus Westend, IG Farben-Haus, Raum 457

In Kooperation mit dem FzhG

Ein zentrales Merkmal im Denken zahlreicher deutsch-jüdischer Autoren und Intellektuellen des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts ist die Spannung zwischen einer Temporalität der Plötzlichkeit und Unmittelbarkeit einerseits und einer Zeit des Aufschubs – des Wartens, des Zögerns und Verzögerns – andererseits. Im Vortrag soll diese Spannung gegen den Hintergrund von Carl Schmitts Dezisionismus und seiner Auffassung der Entscheidungsmacht eines quasi göttlichen Souveräns reflektiert werden. Dabei werden Denkbilder in den Schriften von jüdischen Zeitgenossen Schmitts – Franz Kafka, Gershom Scholem und vor allem, und, explizit in Auseinandersetzung mit Schmitt, Walter Benjamin – herangezogen, die diese Spannung im Licht der jüdischen Tradition konfigurieren. Gezeigt werden soll, wie ihre respektiven Ansätze als Kritik an den Voraussetzungen des schmittschen Dezisionismus gelesen werden können.

Vivian Liska ist Professorin für deutsche Literatur und Direktorin des Instituts für jüdische Studien an der Universität Antwerpen und seit 2013 Distinguished Visiting Professor an der Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Forschungsschwerpunkte: Deutsche Literatur der Moderne, Literaturtheorie, Deutsch-jüdische Denker und Autoren. Herausgeberin der Zeitschrift Arcadia (mit Vladimir Biti) und der Reihe Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts (De Gruyter). Jüngste Buchpublikationen: Fremde Gemeinschaft. Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der Moderne (2011); Giorgio Agambens leerer Messianismus (2011); German- Jewish Thought and its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (2017); Prekäres Erbe. Deutsch-jüdisches Denken und sein Fortleben (2021).

12. Dezember 2023, 18h

Eylül Fidan Akıncı (New York/Arnhem): Choreo-dramaturging the Anthropocene

Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum, HZ 10

The new climatic regime is manifest in our lives with an unprecedented urgency, but the planetary damage has been ongoing for much longer. Likewise, ecological activism and discourse have a global history, while we are groping for resistance and solace within a politically and digitally induced amnesia, obfuscation, and denialism. These are only the starting conundrums of what I consider to be characteristically the Anthropocene episteme. By positing the Anthropocene as a crisis of sense and sensibility, this lecture will argue how performing arts has a unique advantage to figure, rupture and radically transform this widespread yet unevenly distributed doom scenario.

I will outline the intricate web of choreographic and dramaturgical frames for articulating and activating ecocritical communities and courses of action. Drawing on works of Pina Bausch, Eiko Otake, and Mette Ingvartsen among others, I will demonstrate how the choreographic experiments within the past half-century have allowed us to recognize and negotiate with nonhumans in their autonomy and agency, in their meaningful mattering. Inextricably, the dramaturgies of these works have opened a counterfactual space, where ambiguous and interdependent relations can be discussed, violence readmitted, and the audience implicated beyond gesture or codified participation. Through assemblages of immersion and alienation, the spectators are corporeally primed for cognition, representation, and debate. Through this overview, I question what the Anthropocene forces contemporary performance to do: Double-bound in fires, deluges, and plagues of tragic proportions, how do our stages address multiplicities in which nonhumans are equally sensuous, autonomous, mobile subjects of history?

Eylül Fidan Akıncı is a performance researcher and the house dramaturg of Theater a/d Rijn. She received her Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her writing has appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, Performance Research, and Etcetera Mag, as well as in the edited collections Performance in a Militarized Culture (2017) and The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art (2020). In addition to her seminar “Articulating Ecodramaturgies” at Goethe University, Akıncı has taught at Hunter College, Baruch College, Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, Fontys Dance Academy Tilburg, and Amsterdam University of Arts. She pursues her ecocritical performance practice through collaborations with Taldans and Wunderbaum.

06. Februar 2024, 18h

Krassimira Kruschkova (Wien): „Das unfassbare Archiv. Eine Soloperformance von Arkadi Zaides im Kontext des zeitgenössischen Tanzes“

Campus Westend, IG Farben-Haus, Raum 1.411

Arkadi Zaidesʼ Choreographie Archive (2014) fokussiert das Camera Project des israelischen Informationszentrums für Menschenrechte in den besetzten Gebieten B‘Tselem, das Videokameras an Palästinenser:innen verteilt, um eine kontinuierliche Dokumentation von Menschenrechtsverletzungen zu ermöglichen. Das gewählte Filmmaterial zeigt ausschließlich israelische Soldaten, Siedler, Aktivisten in verschiedenen konfrontativen Situationen. Die filmenden palästinensischen Menschen bleiben abwesend, hinter der Kamera, anwesend sind allerdings ihre Bewegungen, Stimmen, Standpunkte. Es geht um den paradoxen Absenz/Präsenz-Modus der Archiv-Praxis und – wie der Vortrag auch mit anderen künstlerischen Beispielen (von Meg Stuart, Rabih Mroué, Walid Raad, Francis Alÿs, Shaymaa Shoukry, Jonathan Burrows/Matteo Fargion u.a.) vorschlägt – um die situativen Paradoxe der Poetik und Politik von Performance heute.

Zaides beteiligt seinen Körper kritisch am kollektiven Bewegungsmaterial seiner israelischen Gemeinschaft, indem er Gesten und Bewegungssequenzen, die er als Filmprojektion nochmals archiviert und aktiviert, immer wieder stillstellt und nachstellt, simultan zum Filmmaterial und dann auch separat, ohne die Filmprojektion. Sein Re-enactment erinnert und prüft, probt zugleich den Kontext – einmal, zweimal, mehrmals –, indem er die filmische und narrative Perspektive immer wieder wechselt, unterscheidet, kritisiert. Indem er derart die Komplexität und Unfassbarkeit des Konflikts darstellt, stellt er seine Undarstellbarkeit aus. Indem er niemals dasselbe wiederholt, wiederholt Archive die Differenz selbst und öffnet jede performative und figurative Position, Positionierung, Perspektive ins Plurale. Die Ambivalenz der Filmsequenzen – gerade in ihrer puren Bild-Faktizität – wird von Zaides choreographisch differenziert: Derart von der Situation abgeteilt, wird er – wie wir – Teil davon.

Krassimira Kruschkova ist Tanz- und Performancetheoretikerin. Seit 1995 Lehre an der Universität für angewandte Kunst und an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. 1994 Promotion und 2002 Habilitation an der Universität Wien. 2003-2017 Leiterin des Theoriezentrums am Tanzquartier Wien. Mehrfache Gastprofessuren an der FU Berlin, an den Universitäten Wien und Salzburg. Kuratorin zahlreicher Vortrags- und Performancereihen. Publikationen u.a.: Hg.: Ob?scene: Zur Präsenz der Absenz im zeitgenössischen Tanz, Theater und Film (2005), Mithg.: Tanz anderswo (2004); It takes place when it doesn’t. On dance and performance since 1989 (2006); Dies ist kein Spiel (2008); Uncalled. Dance and performance of the future (2009); 8 booklets SCORES #0-#7 (2010-2017).

14. Mai 2024, 18h

Jasper Delbecke (Gent) „Tracing the Essay in Performing Arts. Five Essay Pieces“

Campus Westend, IG Farben-Haus, Raum 1.411

The talk will expand on the emergence of “the essay” as a form, concept, and method within the field of performing arts during the mid-2010s. Drawing inspiration from the rich tradition of the literary essay and informed by the contemporary proliferation of the essay form across cinematic (essay film), photographic (photographic essay), installation-based (essay-installation), and exhibition-related (essay-exhibition) domains, Delbecke dissects the reasons behind and manifestations of this form within the field of performing arts during this specific era. Through the lens of five distinct artistic practices – those of Muraya Ogutu, Silke Huysmans & Hannes Dereere, Ho Rui An, Mobile Akademie Berlin, and Jozef Wouters/Decoratelier – Delbecke scrutinizes the formal elements present in these works. Furthermore, he examines in study how artists turn to the essay form and/or adopt an essayistic mode of working in response to the activist imperative prevalent in socially and politically engaged forms of theatre, performance, and the broader arts landscape since the turn of the millennium.

Jasper Delbecke is an art and theatre scholar whose academic work attests to a curiosity in how the (performing) arts deal with past events and the politics of representation of personal, local, national or global histories. From this interest, he has a scholarly fascination with innovative forms of documentary theatre, new modes of storytelling, the format of the lecture performance and the conceptualization of (semi-)fictive exhibitions or museums. In August 2023, Delbecke obtained his doctoral degree in Art Studies in August 2023 at Gent University, having previously earned his Bachelor of Arts in Art Studies (2013) and Master of Arts in Art Studies (2014) at the same institution. In 2010, he finished his Professional Bachelor in Education, specialising in history and arts at Artevelde Hogeschool (Gent). From October 2023 until January 2024, Delbecke serves as a part-time guest professor at the Department of Art History, Musicology, and Theatre Studies at Gent University.

11. Juni 2024, 18h

Katalin Trencsényi (London): „Expanded Dramaturgies of Curating“

Campus Westend, IG Farben-Haus, Raum 1.411

Starting from Marianne Van Kerkhoven’s ideas about micro and macro dramaturgy, the lecture explores the notion of curating beyond staging performances and shaping a repertoire and examines how festivals are creating “cultural gathering spaces” (J. Applebaum) and “spaces for dialogue” (H. Perry) outside the walls of their building, venturing into site-responsive, process-focussed, and interdisciplinary practices. For illustrating this move from product to process, from consumption of art to civil participation in local issues of concern, the lecture presents examples from the work of two festivals from the Nordic region of Europe. Based on research interviews – with art curator Taru Elfving, whose special interests are research-based practices, participatory and process-based approaches; Trevor Davis, director of Metropolis (Copenhagen), an “art-based metropolitan laboratory for the performative, site-specific, international art”, organised by Københavns Internationale Teater (KIT) which creates “temporary, mobile spaces”; and Hanna Parry, artistic director of Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival, who initiated the festival’s nature restoration project in Ähtäri in collaboration with climate and rewilding expert Snowchange Cooperative – the lecture seeks to find out what the guiding ideas and principles behind this new type of work are and how they are framed within an art festival.

Katalin Trencsényi (HU/UK) is an award-winning dramaturg, theatre-maker and researcher. Her areas of research are new- and expanded dramaturgies, dance dramaturgy, comparative dramaturgy, women and theatre, and political theatre. As a London-based dramaturg, Katalin has worked with the National Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, Soho Theatre, Corali Dance Company, Deafinitely Theatre and with many independent artists. Katalin is the author of Dramaturgy in the Making. A User’s Guide for Theatre Practitioners (2015); editor of Bandoneon: Working with Pina Bausch (2016); co-editor of New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice (2014); and a contributor to several volumes and professional journals. Currently, Katalin is working as a lecturer on the Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research programme at the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Eine Veranstaltungsreihe der Professur für Theaterwissenschaft in Kooperation mit der Hessischen Theaterakademie, dem DAAD und dem Forschungszentrum für Historische Geisteswissenschaften der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main.