ES IST ZU SPÄT
ES IST ZU SPÄT takes place online.
A camera, a microphone, screens: a YouTuber’s studio. In front of a live audience he films a monologue about the disaster that the world is heading towards and the theatre that can do nothing about it. Are online videos a more effective medium? Or is it time to stop altogether?
Tanzfaktur, Bühne
Language: German with simultaneous translation into English
“Hello. Hi. It’s nice to see you,” says Arne and beams into the camera. In his video he looks back for his followers on five years of theatre work on political material. Five years of documenting radical social change, five years of clarification, five years of working out his position, five years of living on the poverty line. He talks about the extinction of species, climate change, water shortages, forced migration, poverty, injustice, fortress Europe, war and fascism.
What else can anyone do but repeat this narrative of disaster? In the theatre we repeat everything all the time anyway. “The whole world’s a stage,” says Arne. “And watching it collapse is a pleasure.” So now he is trying this YouTube channel. A new kind of stage is opened.
Credits
Text and Performance: Arne Vogelgesang
Outside Eye: Marina Miller Dessau
Story: internil
Contact for touring enquiries: internil, interface[a]internil.net
Production
Produced by Theaterdiscounter Berlin as part of the Monologue Festival 2019.
Biographies
internil is a label for research-based and intermedia theatre and performance projects that was founded in 2005. For many years they have worked almost exclusively with material from the internet that they adapt for live events with the aid of digital hard- and software. As a result of their many years investigating post-political phenomena online, internil also operate as consultants. The group’s principal working method is live re-enactments using copy and paste dramaturgies. The presence of an audience is always included as part of the performance in one way or another.
Arne Vogelgesang studied Directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna and is a founder member of internil. Alongside his projects with internil he also works as a video artist, gives lectures and workshops on the aesthetics of radical internet propaganda, publishes literary texts and works in cultural education. He experiments with various composites of documentary material, new media and performance. Key themes of his work include political radicalisation, deviant practices and the digitisation of what is human. Since 2020 he has been a fellow at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund.