Title File type Publiseringsdato Download
Season program Teaterhuset Avant Garden the autumn of 2012 pdf August 2012 Download

What if time is?

What if time is? is a production by The End Foundation.

At the webpage of Bastard, the international performing arts festival of Trondheim, the following, among other things, is written about What if time is?:

"In Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe you may enjoy a nice meal with a good glass of wine while observing the end of times. During Bastard 2012 The End Foundation presents its fifth apocalyptic restaurant."

Information

(Objekt ID 30472)
Object type Production
Premiere September 14, 2012
Produced by
Coproducers Rosendal Teater
Keywords Performance
Running period September 14, 2012  —  September 15, 2012
Duration 60 minutes
Website AVANT GARDEN
More

At the webpage of Bastard, the international performing arts festival of Trondheim, the following, among other things, is written about What if time is? by The End Foundation:

"The aim of this restaurant is to provide the audience with a chance to enjoy the end of the world through a familiar ritual. In many ways this is also the function of the theatre black box.

The End Foundation (TEF) understands the apocalypse as the point where everything ceases to exist. By being the end of everything, it also becomes the point where everything becomes measurable. Thus the longing for the apocalypse really is a capitalistic longing. In this sense our religious heritage and capitalism may be combined to compose a specific Western idea about the human body based on a culturally constructed relationship to time.

The Black box is a space claiming autonomy from the western concept of linear time. Its architecture claims freedom from change and progress. This architecture suggests a space where nothing changes and it accomplishes this by ritualising time. Many contemporary artists have tried to question this refusal of modernity and have in their practise made attempts to claim that the theatre space has, indeed, a memory and thus a history.

The End Foundation started as an art project in Malmö with the question: What will art do in the moment of the apocalypse? The foundation for the company is the collaboration between the playwright Ludvig Uhlbors and the artist and performance artist Hanna Sjöstrand."

The End Foundation writes the following, among other things, about What if time is?:

"This body, manifested in the western artist body and in the collective and individual body of the audience, is a defined and rigorously moulded body which manifests its subjectivity through making choices between individualism and collectivism; always caught in a dialectical and commoditised notion of the self. This body, established and confirmed over time by crafts and ideologies that spring from a culture which bases its idea of progression on modernism, contains and reproduces the virus of the apocalypse.

(...)

So what of the black box? Is it a space connected with 'higher' values, a space whose craft and idea of transmission is in touch with unquestionable truths liberated from modernistic change and false concepts of linear time? Or is it a sad relic, a patriarchal anus swallowing any attempt to accomplish political change and promote views on the world as socially constructed through its refusal to accept advancements of contemporary philosophy?

What would happen to the black box if there was no future? What would happen to the ritualised space if the outer world would face collapse and things, really, were moving towards an End?"

Supported by:  Avant Garden

Source:

Avant Garden, avantgarden.no, 07.09.2012, http://www.avantgarden.no/program/what-if-time-is/


Contributors (8)
Name Role
Hanna Sjöstrand – Text
Ludvig Uhlbors – Text
Hanna Sjöstrand – Concept/Idea
Ludvig Uhlbors – Concept/Idea
Hanna Sjöstrand – Direction
Ludvig Uhlbors – Direction
Hanna Sjöstrand – Performer
Ludvig Uhlbors – Performer
Performance dates
September 15, 2012Teaterkjelleren, Trøndelag Teater, Trøndelag Theatre Show
September 14, 2012Teaterkjelleren, Trøndelag Teater, Trøndelag Theatre National premiere, Norway
Press coverage

Writer and date unknown, Kulturkritik [Sverige]:
"TEF poses moral questions, so that one can feel the heat. That is unusual."