DATA OF INTEREST

GUEST:
Maximilian Hanisch

HOST:
Juliana Rabelo


Synopsis:

This talk took place in between the rehearsals of a play in production. For Maximilian every research project and every subject is also a question about how society can be improved. Just as the relationships between humans has a political dimension, he seeks the same in his productions. Expanded theater is a transdisciplinary practice that can involve contemporary theater, object theater, dance, architecture, etc. Maximilian creates a theater proposal and then invites other researchers and practitioners into a conversation about its topics, because, for Hanisch, doing theater is a way of learning things about the world. Starting with what we know very well, curiosity drives us to learn about other disciplines, understand a little more and then ask ourselves: what can I do? The disciplines complement one another. It might be that other disciplines need theater to have a fresh perspective.

Hanisch considers that although activism is important, art is not activism; however, if you make art from a political perspective it generates a certain mistrust of this power of art. Maximilian tells us that the idea of conventional theater about the understanding of people´s psychology is suspicious to him because people make choices, but always within a social context. Maximilian gives us examples of ideas of politics and art and how they can connect in his own practice.

Theater can also be a way of creating community and political expression, he says from his experience in China where there is no freedom of expression. In some productions, Maximilian takes away the narrator and presents a series of possibilities, but without a narrative, and from there the audience must make their own connections. The other idea is to explore the paradoxes that make art possible like the idea that doing a performance to disappear makes me more visible. Depending on the context and the spectators, an issue can become merely psychological, or political.


Bio:

Maximilian Hanisch
(1988, Dresden, Germany)

A theater director and performer who has worked in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, China, France and the Ukraine. He studied direction at the Thomas Bernhard Institute of the Salzburg Mozarteum, and Expanded Theater at the Bern University of the Arts.

Important influences have included a prolonged stay in Beijing with the Papertiger Theatre Studio and the Living Dance Studio in 2012, and his participation in the Transcultural Collaboration Program in 2017 in Hong Kong. His plays often deal with the importance of urban planning, architecture and the flow of international capital for political participation in cities and have given rise to projects such as «Mmmh Burg», a tour of the city with experts for change in the public space and «Los contratos del comerciante de Elfriede Jelinek». In the dance piece «Muéstrame tus heridas», with the Living Dance Studio Beijing, and «Ataque aéreo a Halberstadt, el 8 de abril de 1945», by Alexander Kluge, he examined the purpose of grieving rituals and monuments for the prevention of violent conflicts.

In his projects he constantly seeks new ground in terms of form and content and chooses the use of artistic methods related to the subject. He organizes images and texts in accordance with musical principles, combining methods of contemporary dance, documentary theater, the fine arts and classical theater texts.

He regularly collaborates with the choreographer Jeremy Nedd in Nedd’s series about the political significance of music videos and more recently, in Sad Boy Culture, about melancholy in hip-hop, developed for the Friburgo Belluard Festival.

VIDEO

Political Theater

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