THEM

Hey, I’m just a person reading this

Performance

“THEM is for the Teens what the early works of Superama were for the Eighties, and for the Nineties, the impossible couple Meg Stuart and Jerome Bel. And, not less. Thought through to the most minute detail, persuasive in the quality of the performers as in its dramatic execution and the integrity of the concept, THEM is ground-breaking, a pivotal moment of a young, contemporary, and socio-critical choreography.”

— Helmut Ploebst, AUSTREIBUNG DER PEINLICHKEIT, corpus Internet Magazin für Tanz, Choreografie, Performance; 12.12.2009

THEM is constructed as an open score with spaces for the ‘real’ and the actual to emerge. On two tribunes, two audience groups face each other and in this spaces two plays happen at the same time. There is no ‘stage’ in this performance but a small space between THEM. All spectators simultaneously watch and are being watched, they are inadvertedly being instructed by the performers that position themselves in a place of risk as an ‘informed’ audience, leading in a subtle way the real audience into action. Without being under the pressure of having to act or initiating something, the audience itself is used as medium and its active role becomes the issue.
THEM is inscribed in the tradition of the happenings of the 60’s and 70’s and proposes non-hierarchical instruction modes leading towards an active involvement of the audience in the performance. A sociological study that explores the limits of our relation with the other.

Dossier (PDF): concept/press/tecnical rider