In the year of 2001, the author, playwright, performer, musician and human being Claus Beck-Nielsen, was declared dead. In 2002 Das Beckværk, a theatre and arts house, was opened in his name to govern and develop the life and work of Beck-Nielsen. The company had it's headquarters in a former reactor on the outskirts of Copenhagen. But in 2006 the name was changed to Das Beckwerk, now a trans-national corporation with the globalized world stage as its target and audience.

Through staging of world politics, public spaces and media Das Beckwerk seeks to establish an active link between the individual world citizen and the contemporary world history. In this way Das Beckwerk creates stories about the hopeless, but necessary attempt to daily intervene in world history. Stories that can take shape as walks, serial photography, novels, performances, concerts, installations, video, historic events and guided museum tours. Stories about the common man and his heroic, yet naive attempt to gain influence on the creation of world history.

THE THEATRE OF THE SPECTRE, THE MEDIUM AND HUMILIATION


Participants in this Laboratory will work with the director and dramaturg of Das Beckwerk and four British media/former actors to develop material that shall form the scenes of a new theatre - The Theatre of the Spectre, the Medium and Humiliation.

The Theatre of the Spectre, the Medium and Humiliation is a farewell to a theatre in which the actor stands before us and says that he is someone else.

The impending theatre is not the stage of art, not of mastery and magnificent performance, but the stage of humiliation. Instead of the actor, the medium comes on stage and becomes imbued with History and humbled by History. In the impending scene, the actor does not become one with the role and disappear in or behind the role. In the impending scene, the actor has been transformed into or replaced by a medium who does not disappear but who, on the contrary, appears in all his pitifulness and is put on show and humiliated by the spectre or spectres who speak through him. Or her. Or it.

In the impending theatre, the stage is the state of emergency, the non-place beyond the law, the camp in no-man’s land. On stage in the impending theatre, the medium is the exposed one, stripped of his rights, both local and regional – wage earners’ rights, citizens’ rights – as well as universal: the rights of the world citizen, of humankind. On the impending stage, the medium is like the Bengali in Dubai: stripped of his passport, caught in the state of emergency with no guarantee that he will ever be able (allowed) to leave it, the occupied body that can only express itself or be itself in an unforeseen breach of the prevailing order or on command. And even then, when he finally exposes himself to the audience and says his name and tells his story or simply says something, then the words are put in his mouth by others, by the spectre, by the one who writes what has to be said, by the one who has said how it has to be said.

In the impending theatre, History has re-started and walks the corridors again. But not as one story alone, as many stories. All times and all places cross the impending stage and wipe out this present, every place takes place here, in this place, which is no longer a place, but just a medium.

http://www.dasbeckwerk.com/

TO BOOK ONE OF THE LIMITED PLACES AVAILABLE OR TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE DIRECTORS' FORUM CONTACT US NOW -

phone: 01970 622 133
email: cprwww@aber.ac.uk

The Directors' Forum has been made possible with the support of a project grant from the Arts Council of Wales.