Archinect - 16.08.2007
Architecture as Performance
International Festival, a theater troupe based in Sweden, seeks to blur the distinction between performance and architecture.

I had a chance to do a one question interview with Tor Lindstrand, known to the Archinect community as the leader of LOL Architects, about the project.

QR: What is 'The Theatre' and what are you hoping to accomplish?

TL:
International Festival's The Theatre is both an architecture and performance project. What makes architecture a performance in this project is the collaborative process, production and building of a full-scale theater to fit and accommodate differing programmatic and environmental contexts. The Theatre will then be used by others for diverse programs and activities, as a possible re-articulation of the circulation of performance practices in Europe and as a shift towards a more participatory way of conceiving architecture.

Furthermore, for International Festival the project is a questioning of subjectification, in relation to class, gender, age, ethnicity. The Theatre stems from a desire to understand how the theater, as a mechanism performs, and how these spaces are inherently politically biased. The Theatre will be realized in 2007 as a co-production with steirischer herbst and will be available for use until 2010.

The project will be up and running in Graz from 21/9 until 14/10 then it tour to TATE Modern in London in May 2008, Montpellier, France as part of a research project at the Dance Academy from July 2008 to December 2008, and then to Berlin and Stockholm in the autumn of 2009, ending up in Zagreb and Bucharest in 2010.

Tor Lindstrand also invites those of us that may be around Venice this Saturday August 18th to come out and join them for a pre-event show: The Pause.


Quilian Riano