I’ve been researching tents of late. Which ones offer the most space for as little money as possible? Which ones are the lightest? Which ones are comfortable to tow around? I came across polyester tents, exceptionally easy to set up and take down: a promise of full freedom in nature. I discovered luxurious safari lodges that offer more comfort than my own apartment. I encountered Corona test-center tents, and tents that offer—often lacking— shelter to people who find themselves on the run.Â
Metaphorically, a tent represents more than a home found wherever one takes one’s boots off. As a distinct spatial form, it places its poles within a space and raises a membrane between reality and fiction, between the external and the internal. It lets you enter your own ego: a place where the sounds of the outside world are never distant, and always keep you awake – at best, generating comfort as they tumble down like raindrops. The dancer Sarafina Beck often experiences the world as something that is detached from her, as if present on the other side of a tent wall. In the 10th cycle, she makes this perceptual distortion – stemming from a psychotic disorder – the subject of her dance performance Tele(your)vision.
Figuratively speaking, artists regularly pitch their tents at Gessnerallee. They stay here temporarily, only to move on. Some return, but nearly all remain briefly. In the 10th cycle, theater maker and curator Pankaj Tiwari literally pitches a tent on Judith Gessner-Platz, thereby expanding the stages of Gessnerallee. TENT: A School of Performative Practices is a temporary mobile institution, in which three artists from diverse backgrounds live and work together. TENT is a space of negotiation and an appeal for coexistence. It reflects the voices of outsiders and explores how authority responds to them.Â
Dear audience, we invite you into an enlarged Gessnerallee. Community can be as temporary as a home. It need not always be a stage, through which new perspectives are communicated and boundaries are explored. Sometimes a tent – as a home for collectivity, integration, and diversity – is enough.
– Alexander Wilms
The artists Raunak Khan (India), Akshay Gandhi (India), Giulia Savorani (Italy) will each work on these issues in a studio for two weeks. On the last day of the residency they will open the doors of their studios.
| Thu1.1. |
The song Toxic by Britney Spears and its corresponding stage choreography are performed 16 times delayed in the performance Slowburn.
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Thu12.5. | |
| Fri13.5. | |
Together with a live female musician, she and two additional dancers will create an energetic and sensuous evening dance performance.
| Fri13.5. | |
| Sat14.5. |
This solo offers a place of being with each other: with oneself, with what is uncertain, invisible, dead, with what has not yet appeared.
| Thu19.5. | |
| Fri20.5. |
| Thu19.5. |
| Sat21.5. |
Protokolle Tilo Frey – «colonial Walk» is a performative meander through the streets of Zurich exploring the subjects of colonialism and racism.
| Next 2 Dates | |
| Wed25.5. | |
| Thu26.5. | |
A kind of security conference on the goodness of Switzerland with an uncertain outcome.
| Fri27.5. | Ticket |
swamps - Die Neue Internationale III is a narrative play about three internationalists.
| Sat28.5. | Ticket |
It will also foster slowness, solidarity and a sense of community through informal meetings, moments of rest, readings, events and food, turning the city hosting the festival into a muse.
| Mon30.5. |
"What does food do to us and what does our diet do to the world?" the young players from LAB ask themselves.
| Thu9.6. | Ticket |
The event of the newly founded NETZWERK TANZVERMITTLUNG SCHWEIZ is aimed at dance mediators, dance professionals and interested people from all over Switzerland.
| Sun12.6. |
Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is a form of popular education (multi-day workshop) that uses theatre as a vehicle for fundamental social transformation.
| Sun12.6. |
With her piece, the artist wants to create visibility and space for mental illnesses with perceptual disorders.
Five cultural practitioners will meet for five days in the South Stage of the Gessnerallee. On the last day of the residency, they will present the results of the residency as a collective in the form of a symposium.
| Sat18.6. |