awp evening program hau3 may 2013

7/27/2019 AWP evening program HAU3 May 2013

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Ariel Efraim Ahbeland friends

ALL WHITE PEOPLELOOK THE SAME TO ME:Notes on the NationalPornographic

Technik HAU3

Bühnenmeisterin: Sabine Krien

Bühnentechnik: Sabine Krien, Marc Seiffert

Licht: Boris Meier, Anna Lienert, Marc Zeuske

Ton/Video: Ralf Krause

Dauer: 1:45 (keine Pause)

Sprache: Englisch und Deutsch

Produktion: Ariel Efraim Ashbel. Koproduktion: HAU Hebbel am Ufer, StoneNest

(London). Gefördert aus Mitteln des Hauptstadtkulturfonds und der Botschaft

des Staates Israel in Berlin.

Premiere: 30.5.2013, 20:00 / HAU3

Weitere Vorstellungen: 31.5.–2.6.2013, 20:00 / HAU3

HAUHAU Hebbel am UferProgramm und Tickets: www.hebbel-am-ufer.deTageskasse HAU2: montags bis samstags 15-19 UhrTel +49 (0)30.259 004 -27

HAU1 – Stresemannstraße 29, 10963 BerlinHAU2 – Hallesches Ufer 32, 10963 BerlinHAU3 – Tempelhofer Ufer 10, 10963 Berlin



All White People Look the Same to Me ist ein Experiment in „fiktionaler Anthropologie“. Inseinem Deutschlanddebüt untersucht der Regisseur Ariel Efraim Ashbel gemeinsam mit

dem Anthropologen Romm Lewkowicz und einer internationalen Gruppe von Performern

und Musikern, einem Hypnotiseur sowie einem unsichtbaren Chor die Erfindung von Alteri-tät als darstellerisches Mittel. In Ausbeutung einer Vielzahl von historischen, textuellen, vi-

suellen und musikalischen Quellen bedient sich das Stück diverser Formen derSpektakel-Inszenierung – von Völkerschauen bis zum zeitgenössischen Dokumentations-

theater – und verschiebt den Blick vom Betrachteten zum Betrachtenden. Geschäfts- und

Theaterleute, Voyeure und Wissenschaftler bilden ein Kabinett „weißer“ Kuriositäten und

werden ihrer ewigen Unsichtbarkeit beraubt. Im Schwelgen in den Wünschen und Gefühlen,die die Suche nach dem „Wahren“ entfacht, wird der Bildwerdungsprozess wissenschaft-

lich orientierter Unterhaltung in seiner fabelhaften Perversität entlarvt.

All White People Look the Same to Me (AWP) is an experiment in 'fictional anthropology'. In

his German debut, director Ariel Efraim Ashbel embarks on a journey with anthropologistRomm Lewkowicz and an international group of performers, musicians, a potato sack and

an invisible choir, to trace the evolution of the performative invention of alterity. Robbing a

wide range of historical, textual, visual, and musical references, the piece exploits variousmodes of spectacle-making – from Völkerschau (human zoos), through to lecture perfor-

mance, Disney and drag culture, to contemporary Documentary Theatre.

The show is set against the backdrop of the re-emergence of the “real”, “non-professional”

performers on the European stage brought by Documentary Theater. Like in the hay daysof the human zoos and the colonial ethnological expositions, the spectacle value of perfor-

mers lies, again, not in WHAT THEY DO, but in WHO THEY ARE. The crisis of representation

has pushed the search for the dramatic into a multitude of peripheries, where a reality un-contaminated by mediation, interpretation and narration is imagined. And as the “real per-

former” emerges, the Theatre maker subsequently disappears. For, the visual pleasure that

the “real other” performer generates, assumes degenerative effects to visibility of craft-manship and the labours of image-making.

In AWP, we shift the gaze back from the examined to the examiners. Five noted white icons,

Theatre masters, voyeurs and scientists, all board our cabinet of white curiosities, stripped

from their everlasting invisibility. But this is more than a mere flip in the power relationsthat white objectification constitutes. Read under representational logic, the show's title

turns out to be a misnomer; In spite of suggestion, the show is not about white people. In

fact, it is not about anything. It is not SAYING anything but, instead, it is DOING many things.The title is an image that stands on its own, amassed along other images that we create,

distort, transgress, and dismantle on stage. For as we indulge in the desires and passions

that the quest for the “REAL” image ignites, the image-making process of scientific and do-cumentary oriented entertainment is exposed in its perverse fabulousness.

Alona Rodeh (b.1979, Nahariah – Israel) is a Tel Aviv based visual artist. Graduating theBezalel Academy MFA program (2009), including exchange studies at RCA’s Sculpture

department, London - Rodeh's diverse practice relies on a wide range of media, con-

structing time-based installations, staging sculpture as action in space. Among others,Rodeh performed at 54th Venice Biennial, The Israel Museum, Plug In ICA, Winnipeg: She

presented commissioned projects at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon, Herzliya andPetach Tikva Museum of Art. She is currently showing a solo show at the Center for Con-

temporary Art (CCA) Tel Aviv and in 2013 will embark on a year AIR at Künstlerhaus Be-

thanien, Berlin. Rodeh designed sets and costumes for dance and theatre companies,

such as Yasmeen Godder, Yossi Berg and Oded Graf, Barrie Kosky and others. She hasbeen a leading collaborator on Ashbel's shows since 2003.

Sandra Fink (b.1979, Buenos Aires) is a costume and make up designer based in Berlin

and Buenos Aires. Fink studied Fashion Design in Buenos Aires University and Theatrical

Make up and Hair in the Colon Theatre. Her costume and make up designs had beenseen in theatre, photography and films. She was twice nominated for the Silver Condor

Award to the Best Costume Design for the films "La Mirada Invisible" and "A Través de Tus

Ojos".

Efrat Aviv (b.1982, Tel Aviv) is a performer in Tel Aviv's independent performance scene,

has constructed and performed in nine of Asbhel's shows since 2000. Aviv graduatedfrom the Nissan Nativ acting studio in Tel Aviv in 2005. She is a member of the “Tzipo-

rela” comedy company, founded with her classmates upon graduation. She has starredin numerous films and Israeli TV series, winning acclaim for her diverse acting roles inclu-

ding the National Theater (Habima) Best Upcoming Actress Award in 2007.

Jessica Gadani (b.1984, Feura Bush – New York) is a Berlin based singer/performer.

Holds a degree in classical voice performance from Ithaca College in Upstate New York.

Gadani sang in various opera productions as a Mezzo-Soprano in the USA, and for thepast four years has been living and working as a freelance singer and performer in Berlin

with various artists including Santiago Blaum and Jack Woodhead.

Dolores Hulan (b. 1975, Austria) is a performer, choreographer and docent living in

Brussels. Hulan studied Contemporary Dance and Pedagogy in the Anton Bruckner Uni-versity (Linz) and did the Performance Educational Program in Leuven. Has been dancing

and touring for various choreographers and companies, including: Esther Linley Dance

Company, Bob Curtis Dance Company, Die Tanzenden, Guillermo Horta, Willi Dorner, MilliBitterli, HushHushHush, Continuum/Brice Leroux and Mette Ingvartsen. She choreogra-

phed a string of solo shows and was awarded numerous project commisions including:

VGC's ‘trajectsubsidies’, Vlaamse Overheid and the DanceWeb Scholarship.



Ariel Efraim Ashbel (b.1982, Tel Aviv) is a Berlin based artist from Israel, who makes perfor-

mances. Noted by the Israeli press as “the enfant terrible of the Israeli Theater scene”, he's been

directing theater works since 2000. His work negotiates interdisciplinary offers for stage

events, widening the gap between theater, dance, music and installation. Was the associate ar-

tistic director of the "IntimaDance" Festival for contemporary dance and performance in Tel

Aviv's Tmuna Theater (2008-2010). Since 2011 he is based in Berlin, and has contributed to va-

rious projects in HAU Hebbel am Ufer, HZT (Uferstudios), Ausland, the Berlin Biennial, the Porn

Film Festival, Transmediale and more. He also collaborates with colleagues as a performer and

dramaturge. A graduate of the School of Visual Theater Jerusalem (2006) and holds a B.A. in His-

tory and Philosophy from Tel Aviv University (2010). Won the Akko festival prize for alternative

theatre in 2003, scholarships from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation in (2003–2007), the

Mayor of Jerusalem and the HaZira Performance Art Center prize in 2006, the 'Legacy' Founda-

tion scholarship in 2007, and participated in Goethe Institute and International Theater Institute

(ITI) residency programme for young theatre directors (2011). AWP is his first major show in Ger-

many. His next piece, currently being researched, explores performance in a post-identity and

post-human environment.

Romm Lewkowicz (b.1985, Bonn) is a London based cultural anthropologist and migrant rights

activist. Lewkowicz holds a B.A in European History from Tel Aviv University, and an M.Sc. in Cultu-

ral Anthropology from University College London. Between 2005-2009 Lewkowicz curated Tel

Aviv's Migrant's Day Film Festival, has written for Haaretz newspaper and Ha-ir magazine and wasamong the founders of the queer collective "Cinema Paradildo". Lewkowicz has held various re-

search and advocacy positions in migrant rights NGO's, including The Hotline for Migrant Workers

and the African Refugee Development Center (Tel Aviv), Detention Action (London) and Asylos -

Research for Asylum (Brussles). His research looks at the discursive, material, and affective

aspects of illegality in the life of East African asylum seekers in Israel in different points of alien-

state encounters. In 2013, Lewkowicz was awarded a five-year Graduate Center Fellowship at the

City University of New York (CUNY), and will begin his PhD at its Anthropology department this fall.

Maya Dunietz (b.1982, Tel Aviv) is a pianist, composer, singer, choir conductor, and sound in-

stallation artist. Her work ranges between solo performances, composing for various ensembles

around the world, writing for theatre, creating sound installations, building electronic instru-

ments, and singing in various styles such as heavy metal, kleizmer and contemporary music.

Throughout her work, Dunietz is in a constant search for new ways and methods to create her

music and art. In her work she combines new cutting-edge technologies with old and traditional

techniques for playing, singing, building things, and recording. Dunietz first collaborated with

Ashbel on the highly acclaimed “Garinim”. Since then, they have been working together creating

performances that stretch the borders between theatre, music, installation, and party. Among

their collaborations are “Gymanstics” (2004), “1982” (2005), “On the Relation of Kung-fu and

Ice Cream” (2006), “Jawz” (2006) “Guerrilla” (2007), “Chikos”, (2009) “Catastrophe clock”

(2007+2011), and many more.

“To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage.

I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desira-

ble to be civilised off the face of the earth. I think a mere gent (which I take to be the lowest

form of civilisation) better than a howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing

savage. It is all one to me, whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees

through the lobes of his ears, or bird's feathers in his head; whether he flattens his hair bet-

ween two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down

by great weights, or blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the

other blue, or tattoos himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with fat, or crimps it with knives.

A wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, mo-notonous humbug.” Charles Dickens, The Nobel Savage, 1853.

“Aber bald stellte sich ein ernsthaftes Problem ein: Nicht die Produktionskosten waren es, die

wurden bewilligt – aber die Bedingungen waren für mich künstlerisch untragbar. Die „Gloria“

verlangte, dass alle Darsteller, auch die Rollen der arabischen Sklavenhändler und die der afri-

kanischen Neger, mit den deutschen Schauspielern besetzt würden. Mir verschlug es den Atem.

Zuerst dachte ich, das ist ein Scherz. Es war aber Ernst, und die Herren der „Gloria Film“ be-

standen darauf. (…) - ich erinnerte sie an mein „Blaues Licht“, in dem ich schon vor mehr als

zwanzig Jahren die meisten Rollen von Laien spielen ließ. Und nun sollten weiße Schauspieler

schwarz geschminkt werden – ein unerträglicher Gedanke, der jeder Verpflichtung zur Doku-

mentation, noch dazu im ethnologischen Bereich, Hohn sprach.”

Leni Riefenstahl, Memoiren 1945-1987, 1995.

“Fascist aesthetics flows from a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior,

extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, ego-

mania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characte-

ristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the

multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful,

hypnotic leader-figure or force.” Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism, 1975.

“Although an ethnographer may not aspire to more than the discovery of relative truths (since it

is vain to hope to reach any final truth), the worst difficulty I have had to encounter was not at all

of that kind: I wanted to go to the absolute limit of the primitive; had I not got all I wanted in

these graceful Natives whom no one had seen before me, who would perhaps no be seen again

after me? At the end of an exhilarating search, I had my savages, I asked for nothing more than to

be one of them, to share their days, their pains, their rituals. Alas! They didn’t want to have me,

they were not prepared to teach me their customs and beliefs! They had no use whatever for the

gifts I laid beside them, no use at all for the help I thought I could give! It was because of me that

they abandoned their villages and it was only to discourage me, to convince me there was no

point in my persevering, that they chose increasingly inhospitable sites, imposting ever more ter-

rible living conditions on themselves to show me they would rather face tigers and volcanos,

swamps, suffocating fog, elephants, poisonous spiders, than men. I think I know a good deal

about physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying.”

Georges Perec, La Vie mode d'emploi, 1978.

awp evening program hau3 may 2013

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