The Performance

Herbordt/Mohren

What can theater be, what does it want to be, what shouldn’t it be? “The Performance” (“Die Aufführung”) is the performance of an institution: Duplicated, mirrored, simultaneously on several stages, interwoven by the machinery of theater and composition, fictional and non-fictional humans and things meet. “The Performance” is theater, congress, laboratory, research and concert in miniature: On the walk-in scenery, the audience meets performers, a musician as well as guests from science and art, while in the background, someone already prepares soup.
The artist duo Melanie Mohren and Bernhard Herbordt in their series of work “The Institution” challenge categories of the art- and culture industry and initiate processes, in which theater is a practice that still has to be invented. As audience, we are therewith moving in a space where words such as “institution” and “performance” are always in quotation marks: Is “The Performance” really a performance? Is “The Institution” still an institution?
“The Performance” is a refined game with categories and attributions, there’s no obligation to understand, as audience, you can keep the maximum freedom of choice, you’re allowed a lot, but you don’t have to do anything. It’s about experiencing relations, the majesty of diagrams, digging up your own memories. And it is about the possibilities of theater as a place of community.

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