For twenty-five years Impulse has been the platform for independently produced theater in the German-speaking world.

For the last edition under artistic direction of Florian Malzacher „independent“ for Impulse not only means that the works are produced outside the state theater system. It most notably means that they regard their independence as founded in the artistic possibilities. The works test theater as medium, expand it, question and strain it. They understand art as the space, where to repeatedly start from zero, where to confront the challenge to enact structures, hierarchies, roles, processes, and collaborations as continuation of the topical gesture of one’s work. Independence as freedom of form and content.

This is how independently produced theater sends impulses as to what theater can look like once it is not confined to specific spaces of staging and thinking. It sends impulses to not readily accept boundaries between genres as they are defined by application, market and marketing logics. It sends impulses to also claim the theatrical in visual arts, music, literature, film, theory, and politics as theater. It sends impulses to think theater as an art form differently.

Impulse Theater Festival accordingly regards itself as an interdisciplinary platform for a theater that withstands a doctrine of understanding ruled by the logic of ascriptions and one looking for moments of transgression.

In 2017 Impulse again will present the ten most remarkable independently produced theater pieces from the German-speaking world in Cologne, Mülheim/Ruhr and Düsseldorf.
We invite theater makers and other artists whose lives’ center in Austria, Germany or Switzerland to submit productions and projects to be presented during the festival in Köln, Mülheim/Ruhr or Düsseldorf from 22 June to 1 July 2017: a theater piece, a choreography, a performative installation, a collective performance, a musical sculpture, a public intervention…

This open call complements our ongoing research and screening and allows for a direct insight to current developments of independently produced theater offside the beaten paths. The review and discussion of submitted proposals will be conducted with support of our interdisciplinary advisory board until march 2017.

We are looking forward to surprising, provocative and consistent submittals and positions.

RULES

Proposals may be submitted for finished productions and projects (as touring performance or adaptation), which premiered no earlier than Januar 2016 or that will take place till the end of January 2017.

Please submit only one production per group/artist.

Please exclusively submit the following materials digitally:

- e-mail header: name of the group/the artist – title of the project
- project description of max. 3 DIN A4 pages in German or English *
- if adaptation is necessary please also provide first ideas regarding the feasibility *
- video documentation of the work (to the degree that is possible) as a vimeo link, or an explanation as to
  why the documentation is not possible or meaningful **
- budget proposal (considering possible adaptation costs) *
- contact information **
- vita *
- future performance dates **

Submission deadline is 15 October 2016.

Submissions to: ausschreibung@festivalimpulse.de

**Provide text documents and spread sheets as PDF.
**Provide this more vital information directly in the text body of your e-mail.

Impulse Theater Festival 2016 had a successful run, but throughout this summer some things continue, others can be re-lived online.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma „Germany Year 2071“
The Nature Theater of Oklahoma for example continued shooting their science fiction „Germany Year 2071“ until 17 July in Berlin. It will be premiered at Impulse 2017 in Cologne. Its making is accessible through the website of Monopol. arts magazine.
And the blog of directors Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska was also regularly updated throughout: www.germany2071.de

Materials on Independent Theater
Food for thought is also always ready at Impulse: On our website section „Material“ – a continuous publication in progress circling around questions of independently produced theater – we recently published texts by Hans-Thies Lehmann & Helene Varopoulou, by Talking Straight and and She She Pop reflect on their „relationship“ with members of the Ensemble of Münchner Kammerspiele.

Video Review 2016
Live is always best, but whoever missed the festival, now has the chance to review at least some of it.
The video clips that present excerpts of the production and everything around can be viewed here.

Public Movement „Make Art Policy!
Dana Yahalomi / Public Movement’s hotly debated project with cultural politicians of all relevant parties in NRW which took place in Düsseldorf city hall can also be re-viewed through Nachtkritik.
A conversation on the topic, the relationship between art and real politics – with among others Dana Yahalomi and Oliver Marchart – is available as audio stream through Voice Republic.

„Learning Plays“ at Voice Republic
Also available via audio file is our Symposium „Learning Plays“ on concepts of radical pedagogy. Participants were Markus Bader, Dirk Cieslak, Nils Erhard, Valeria Graziano, Stefano Harney, Florian Malzacher, Ahmet Ögüt, Alessandra Pomarico, Rubia Salgado, Mårten Spångberg, Nora Sternfeld & Dmitry Vilensky and others.

2017
The next live edition of Impulse – focusing in Cologne and for the last time under artistic direction of Florian Malzacher – will take place from 22 June to 1 July 2017.

The First Clip

With Gintersdorfer/Klaßen “Der Botschafter”, Rimini Protokoll “Evros Walk Water”, Ariel Efraim Ashbel and friends “The Empire Strikes Back: Kingdom of the Synthetic” and Nature Theater of Oklahoma “Germany Year 2071”.

The Second Clip

With impressions of the culture breakfast (Kulturfrühstück) of the FFT Düsseldorf, Public Movement’s “Macht, Kunst, Politik!”, She She Pop’s “50 Grades of Shame”, Julian Warner & Oliver Zahn’s “Situation mit Doppelgänger” and a lecture by Bridget Fonkeu as part of The Silent University Ruhr.

The Third Clip

With excerpts from “Noise” by Junges Theater Basel under direction of Sebastian Nübling and the presentation of the Silent University publication “Towards a Transversal Pedagogy”, edited by Florian Malzacher, Silent University initiator Ahmet Öğüt and Pelin Tan.

The Forth Clip

Including impressions of “Conversion / Nach Afghanistan” by COSTA COMPAGNIE, “Martin Luther Propagandastück” by Boris Nikitin, “untitled (look, look, come closer)” by Christine Gaigg/2nd nature & netzzeit/Klaus Schedl, the symposium of this year’s summer academy “Learning Plays” and the phenomenal closing party with SchwabinggradBallett & ARRiVATi!

for the clips
Realisation: Filmpunktart
Camera/Editing: Konrad Hirsch, Julius Günzel

“Once again the Impulse Festival is an exciting think tank with many different perspectives.”
(Dorothea Marcus, Deutschlandfunk)

Celebrations lasted into the early hours of Sunday morning at the Festival Center in the FFT Kammerspiele following a concert by Schwabinggrad Ballett and Arrivati to mark the conclusion of Impulse 2016. After an eleven day festival, the leading platform for independent theater in German-speaking countries had gained an extremely positive response: Impulse attracted 5,300 visitors from the region and all over Germany plus an audience of professionals from other countries to over 80 events. Box office returns of 92% also endorse the concept introduced last year of concentrating on one main venue – this year the FFT in Düsseldorf – while collaborating closely with our partners in Cologne (studiobühneköln) and Mülheim (Ringlokschuppen Ruhr).

Under the title ‘Start cooking … Recipe will follow’ Impulse presented remarkable work from the independent theater scene in Germany, Austria and Switzerland operating performance, theater, concerts, installations, lectures and parties. These included well-established and familiar companies such as Gintersdorfer/Klaßen (‘Der Botschafter’), She She Pop (‘50 Grades of Shame’) and Rimini Protokoll (‘Evros Walk Water’), as well as newcomers like Julian Warner & Oliver Zahn (‘Situation mit Doppelgänger’) or Ariel Efraim Ashbel and Friends (‘The Empire Strikes Back: Kingdom of the Synthetic’). Several artists focused their attention on the crisis which is moving ever closer in the Near East, for example Christine Gaigg with 2nd Nature & Netzzeit / Klaus Schedl (‘untitled, look, look, come closer’) or COSTA COMPAGNIE (‘Conversion / Nach Afghanistan’). A similar urgency could be felt in the search for areas in which individuals can be free agents pursued by Boris Nikitin (‘Martin Luther Propagandastück’) and Sebastian Nübling with junges theater basel (‘Noise’).
Impulse also initiated artistic works this year which involved themselves directly in social and political affairs. One of these was the Silent University Ruhr, an initiative by the Kurdish artist Ahmet Öğüt brought to life last year by Impulse and this year embedded in an international summer academy entitled ‘Learning Plays’: here four artist-initiated schools, academies and theoretical platforms came together for a week to exchange ideas at the Ringlokschuppen in Mülheim; the Performing Arts Forum – PAF from St. Erme, the School of Engaged Art by the St. Petersburg-based collective Chto Delat, die Vierte Welt from Berlin and the Silent Universities from London, Stockholm, Hamburg, Athens, Amman and Mülheim.

In her project entitled ‘Make Art Policy!’ Israeli choreographer Dana Yahalomi / Public Movement invited influential politicians from all the significant parties in North Rhine-Westphalia to Düsseldorf City Hall to outline their cultural policy positions while making use of the structural similarities between art and politics, the stage and the civic chamber. While 300 members of the audience watched proceedings inside the chamber, 1,000 more interested viewers followed a live stream of the events and 1,000 more have since watched the archived video. Recordings of other events in the festival were also archived, for example in audio form on Voice Republic.

In Cologne, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma shot a retro science fiction film together with local citizens at a series of locations all over the city, including the building site of the city theater at the Offenbachplatz. Several hundred extras participated with great enthusiasm in the partly public filming at the studiobühne as well as in the city center and the harbor on the banks of the Rhine. The completed film ‘Germany Year 2071’ will be screened as part of the Impulse Theater Festival 2017 in Cologne. Until then a Making-Of will provide impressions of the filming on the website of the magazine Monopol.

We are delighted that for eleven days Impulse was able to become an artistic and social laboratory highlighting the highly diverse aesthetics, strategies and approaches of independent theater. And we’re already looking forward to next year: Impulse Theater Festival 2017 will take place from 22nd June to 2nd July in Cologne.

Dana Yahalomi/Public Movement in conversation with Florian Malzacher and Kathrin Tiedemann

Already the name of your group – Public Movement – points at your interest at the role of public and political gestures, rituals, procedures. How would you describe what is in the center of your work?

Public Movement is a research and action body. We use specific terminology, often generic names – like Public Movement – that give us the freedom to act in various ways and be different entities. There are three ways you can read it. The first is when Public Movement members perform themselves. We are a trained group that has been working together for a decade now. For example, in our durational performance exhibition National Collection at Tel Aviv Museum of Art – which was activated and performed by the members – we created different rituals and choreographies that related to the museum and its historical role in the production of national identity and its current political agency.
At other times we rather create a situation, an arena for the audience to become a public and perform public movements, like in the action we created for the University in Heidelberg some years ago. In this incident, the audience engaged in a spontaneous performance of resistance that was triggered by the score of the action but the public became the performers of the event. Or with ‘Positions’, which was performed in New York as part of Performa 2011 and at the Van Abbemuseum: a choreography for a demonstration where the public has to choose sides on various political issues. Members of the audience are called to perform their own opinions by choosing sides along a yes/no line.
The third kind of activity is about observing different phenomena used in social and political lives: public movements organized in the streets, in squares, and in civic life. Maybe the best example would be ‘First of May Riots’ in 2010, in which we joined the riots in Kreuzberg. We did not change anything. We didn’t add more public movements to what was already happening in the streets of Berlin. We only added headphones: the audience could choose between five audio channels that would create different experiences or give commentaries on the situation. You had an experience and participated physically in a political event but this was framed and shifted by another layer of conceptual thinking.

Was there a particular political experience, a founding impulse that led you to the creation of Public Movement ten years ago?

I think there are two ways to answer that. When Omer Krieger and I founded Public Movement in 2006 there was no single reason or impulse but rather an accumulation of experiences. I’m not sure if it’s because we both were part of political and social movements when we were younger or because both of us studied history and philosophy or because of an unexplained interest in conflicts and the performances of politics. But this common background created a strong drive.
One formative moment was what happened when we did our first action. We were not yet a real group, just Omer and me, who wanted to create an action called ‘Accident’. It was a simultaneous, synchronized accident between two cars and two pedestrians. In order to do it we asked around ten colleagues and friends to join in and help. But when we were out in the street our friends objected to nature of the action and we couldn’t finish it as planned. There was a huge argument about the action looking too real. That the people wouldn’t know that it was art. There was a debate if it was ethically okay to create something which could not be immediately framed and understood as art. Because we couldn’t follow through with the action we understood that we needed to create our own cell of bodies and thinkers to continue to investigate exactly this question: how to blur more and more the differences between art and politics.

This means that most of your work is very site- and context specific.

We develop our method every time anew in response to the specific context and content of the work. We don’t really have “shelf products” that we can perform again and again. Over the course of ten years we have created perhaps five actions that can be repeated in other places. Most actions are made for one place and one specific discourse.

You sometimes use the term “service” to describe your work. Most artists would not like to consider their work a service for others. Can you describe this concept?

The idea of service comes into play due to how we work. The usual process is that we are invited by an institution – a museum, a biennale, a festival – to conduct local research and to come up with a specific proposal for this place. In this sense we come and offer a service, because through the research we try to understand what is acute in the moment in that very city, that particular situation or context. Where is the political unrest? What trauma exists? What are the taboos? What needs to be named or shaped? It is a process of thinking together and of giving a service.

In Germany but also in other countries at the moment there is quite a vivid discussion around the question of whether art should or could be useful. What are the responsibilities of artists in a fragile society, in heated political situations – and where is the danger of getting instrumentalized by politics?

I am interested in art that understands itself as a useful tool to generate discussions, generate awareness, and de-stabilize preconceived ideas. But we never identify clearly with a political course. So the service that we give is not a service to motivate and we are not motivated by a specific political course that we would channel all our actions towards. In that sense, there is a difference between activist art, meaning being in service of a concrete political course and of using art as a tool to engage with political questions. We do not take an activist position.

Do you see Public Movement in a tradition of artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles who created the concept of “Maintenance Art” in the 1970s, a conceptual, feminist art devoted to questions of common goods, care and service. Or the Artist Placement Group that also worked in NRW on the idea of situating artists concretely in political structures or economic businesses?

Yes, the actual involvement of artists as social workers within economic reality and as part of the offices that affect our public life is a huge achievement of the Artist Placement Group and is definitely an inspiration for us. Another thing that connects us to APG is the fact that though they are deeply engaged with politics, they don’t publicly take a political side. Similarly we see ourselves in the tradition of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ performances and manifestos – particularly with regard to physical touch, for example, when she shook hands with all the employees of the New York sanitation department over the course of several years.

’Make Art Policy!’ also works on blurring the lines between art and politics. It is perhaps the one action of yours that most obviously resembles a proper political event. But it is created by you. How would you position this project in the context of your work?

The aim is to create an event driven by a local desire. In this way it is useful, one could say it is aiming to give a service. It is based on a method I developed a year ago in Helsinki in conversation with the team there that was concerned about the fogginess of cultural agendas before the Finnish national elections. ‘Make Art Policy!’ is a performative, discursive event which creates short term relationships with politicians and hopes to help both politicians and citizens to gain a better understanding of the specific art agendas that are put forth. It is an assembly that invites people to set aside preconfigured political preferences and instead to listen closely to the proposals being made, to create a map of cultural policy in NRW, and to understand what the different parties are really suggesting.

For you it was clear from the very beginning that this event would have to include also the right wing AfD – a decision that was viewed very skeptically by some of the politicians involved. And even if we share the general idea that theatre should be – using Chantal Mouffe’s political concept as a metaphor – an agonistic arena where different political positions should be acted out, there was also quite a bit of discussion about this amongst ourselves. Why do you believe it is important to include the AfD in this evening?

The AfD is clearly part of the political landscape of today’s Germany. This is not surprising because of the rise of right wing parties all over Europe. The essence of ‘Make Art Policy’ is to create a sketch of the entire political spectrum in terms of art policy. It makes no sense not to show this part of the map. But also I believe it is essential that we as citizens understand what this party really stands for. Not discussing these positions will leave us in a much worse situation. We have to understand what motivates the right wing, what they are looking for and how they can affect our life. This has to be a part of the evening – but it is not an evening about the AfD. It is an evening for all political parties that are in the game and have the chance to be elected.