conversations in ten questions 21 : Stefan Kaegi

 

What is the spirit of theatre/performance in your opinion? How do you define contemporary theatre/performance? 

 It’s live art. It creates unique moments between people. But I prefer to make it instead of defining it! 

Do you believe in the transformative power of art? How?

It has the ritualistic strength for us to connect offline to our very direct surroundings. It establishes utopian relation-ships. This is certainly powerful but also quite unmeasurable in it’s effects. Which is great - finally something that doesnt need to be efficient!

How do you think that this pandemic which humanity is facing at a global scale today will transform performing arts in the future?

It has certainly slowed us down a bit in an overproducing world (also in an overproducing art world). Some of this new perspective may be good to keep. The toughest impact this certainly had for the generation that is just about to start their carreers now - they have spent more than a year of their education in lock down. Will they still look for that direct encounter with others as the immersive arts have been producing it? Will they trust their audience and will their audiences trust them and each other?

Is there any artist whom you can describe as "my master", or any person whom you think influenced your art the most? And if there is such an artist or a person, who?

My physics teacher impressed and inspired me very much. He spoke about highly complex invisible power relation-ships - and then he showed us amazing experiments trying to prove them!

When you are working on a piece, what sources inspire you? Do dreams play a role in your works?

Oh yes I dream a lot and actually also write down a lot of them, but my art very rearly relates to my dreams, but rather inspires itself in the reality surrounding me and my friends and collegues. We try to use theatre as a kind of microscope to zoom in on details that we normally dont take the time to focus on…

When do you decide to give a title to a work you are working on, if it already does not have one?

It normally happens when producers tell me: We need a title urgently!

For the Uncanny Valley you work with a humanoid robot of Thomas Melle; can you elaborate on your interest in putting a humanoid robot on the stage? Is there a difference between a robot and artificial intelligence, if so, what is that difference? Can you also tell us why you picked Thomas Melle, working with a writer and playwright for the first time, for this project and made a ‘copy’ out of him in particular?

I was fascinated by some humanoids i saw in museums but felt the power of an encounter in theatre where you are exposed to the robot as a performer could be way stronger. At some point i came across Thomas’book The World in my Back and I suspected that he could have an interest in replacing himself to avoid instabilities resulting from his bipolarity. Thomas quite immediately was inspired by the robot idea… We wrote the text together. It was quite a long process in shared online docs, then going into first recording sessions, sometimes improvising, then reworking on the text and re-recording and so on… The voice you hear is Thomas’s voice. There are even a german and an english version - they are slightly different in some parts. The mimicks and gestures were created following the words. A long and painful process - far from all Artificial-Intelligence-fantasies that you may fancy when empathizing or even identifying with the caracter. In your piece Remote X that Beykoz Kundura has recently invited to Istanbul, we are guided on our headphones by a female and later on a male voice generated by AI; why did you pick those particular voices with their particular qualities? I am fascinated by artificial voices. They are actually human voices, but chopped up into sillabels and re-assembled with others to form words this voice has never said before. An just like the robot in Uncanny Valley, these voices manage to make us feel empathic, to project humanity into them…. 

Can you share with us what sort of a coexistence you envision in the future for us humans and the world of AI?

The robot in Uncanny Valley is not an Artificial Intelligence - he is rather dumb - he can not understand or hug you. He only do exactly what we programmed him for: Perform this performance. Robots will never replace real artists - and actors and dancers have the potential to do a lot of things better than robots. And they always will. But if they do things that robots can do, then why shouldnt the robots do them. I enjoy inventing Artificial Intelligencies like the one in „Remote Istanbul“ because they do what theatre always has done: they try to anticipate human emotions. They stage human behaviours. As long as this is a creative process, I do enjoy it.

You mentioned in your zoom seminar the other day that you either take theatre into reality or vice versa reality to the stage/theatre; can you please tell us a bit more about what this entails?

Sometimes reality is so staged, that the best way to reflect on it through theatre is just to create a frame around it - a bit like Duchamp needed the museum around his urinoir to challenge the system. Some years ago I transformed a truck in such a way that 50 spectators can sit inside and look out of a big window on the left side. Wherever the truck stops, reality turns into theatre. And some years we trasnsformed the „annual shareholders meeting“ of Daimler AG - one of the most powerful car manufacturer in the world into a theatre performance, just by inviting audience to visit this place. You just need to buy a share to be allowed in, so we helped them to buy shares and visit this ritual of capitalism and look at it as theatre… Your last work is with an octopus – an animal for the first time if we are not mistaken; many people these days are talking about “My Octopus Teacher” that is on Netflix and in Germany there was Paul the octopus. Your work seems to take the challenge of commenting on the very present moment, the Zeitgeist; can you elaborate on why you decided to work with an octopus and how do you handle this challenge of talking about the ‘now’ and ‘documenting the present’? Our relation-ship with nature is very particular, because we normally try to do everything to make us different and forget where we came from. It’s about time we establish new relationships with animals - we have too long just looked at them as food or material or enemies. And the octopus is an animal that was often described to us as „extraterrestrian on earth“. We know they are highly intelligent, but we just dont know how to measure or to comunicate with this intelligence. The theatre is a wonderful place to make this encounter happen in a concentrated way. Much better than the zoo where people move along animals like they were products in a supermarket… In our play the octopus is the only protagonist and everything around him - lights, cameras, music etc. - tries to react to him. 

You have been to Istanbul with your others works in the past as well so you are familiar with them; is there anything you would like to tell the Istanbul audience before they watch the Uncanny Valley online or before they experience Remote X Istanbul once the pandemic allows it? 

Enjoy!

[The Turkish translation of this interview is published on art.unlimited]