Christoph Draeger and Bianca Hisse, NEWSbody, Bone Performance Festival, Bern (CH), Nov 29, 2019
Bianca is singing the headlines of the day to the melody of "The Girl From Ipanema" over Skype. Simoultanously, Christoph is holding up printouts of the headlines one by one and lets them drop to the floor.
The BONE Performance Festival from 27. 11. to 1. 12. 2019 in Bern, Switzerland, at the Slaughterhouse
Curated by Sibylle Omlin and San Keller
The 22nd edition should be the "Latest" edition and deals with the topic of actuality. Within media coverage actuality both refers to the submitted message as on the medium itself. Accuracy and speed provide objective criteria for the determination of the actuality of a message. Not to be neglected are subjective criteria like personal relationships or benefits. Actuality arises from an interaction of events and facts, whose transmission takes place via media coverage. This actuality, filtered through the media, consists in a reduction, a simplification or a snapshot of current affairs. As in performance art, actuality manifests itself in the “Live” act of the moment. Based on Slavoj Zizek's idea, that not every incident is an actual event (this has to be defined from different points of view, according to Zizek, from exactly six POV’s ), we’d like to ask: what is “actuality" and how does it behave? By means of which strategies finds actuality entry into the performance, or, what is the impact of the News on performance, the artistic medium itself? Under title NEWSbody, the upcoming festival edition is dedicated to formats and shapes of actuality and asks how it occurs in the media, but also in the artistic work and how it is passed on to an audience.
For the 22nd edition of the BONE Performance Festival Bern, we ask about the strategies that artists use to deal with topicality and how to get involved in it. We develop News formats that feature the performers. We draw on this from various sources - our media partners and our own network of correspondents, which we are building for NEWSbody.
News Body
The actuality knows no firm times. It happens constantly and unpredictably. Only in the narration of actuality arise formats, forms of time. In this context, media that report on political or natural events are important. This inherent openness is what the BONE Festival wants to express as strongly as possible. The nearly 24-hour operation of news editorial should formally give the direction. The slaughterhouse theater is open 24 hours a day for four days. The artists and correspondents work day and night on their themes: with news, with visits and walks in Berne. We invite visual artists, authors, media professionals - who are involved in the up-to-dateness with different strategies, and develop news formats that feature the performers. We draw from different sources. On the one hand, we enter into media partnerships and, on the other hand, we set up a network of correspondents.
Which aspects of actuality interest us?
- actuality as a social framework in which topics are weighted, negotiated and timed. These topics are getting windows and are hooks for our interest in media changes and the way we are informed about actuality and how different players are feeding these medial channels.
- actuality as a pattern of perception, which is shaped by the media.
- actuality that comes with constant social pressure.
- actuality and its expiry date: how long is actuality up to date and how long is it available?
- actuality and its communicability.
At this point, the performance comes into play and thus the question of whether the performance art is not the epitome of actuality, because by definition (situation, time, action) it refers to the now of the performance (availability, time limits and communicability).
Collaborative approach
We form a group working with actuality and develop communicative formats to reach the audience. The collaborative approach builds on the use of one's own abilities, not only within the framework of one's own authorship, but also in the service to others. Accordingly, the program of the festival will be developed participative and situative way by the artists in collaboration with the artistic direction at the Slaughterhouse and will be established into a fixed program of live performances.
The content structure follows formats such as the Meteo, district newspaper, panel, Campfire, summer hole, spam mail, etc., but without copying them. In the run-up to the festival, the artistic director sets thematic priorities and editorial guidelines for programming.
The festival includes various performative elements. At the center are performances that interfere with different strategies in current actualitiy. The second part of the program consists of performative interventions in specially developed formats for the festival. During the festival, the artists use their performative skills to implement the input of the correspondents. The performative actions are analysed by media partners. A further performative strand is the daily production of artistic content via internet and local radio.
