DEAR SPIELART AUDIENCE,

The world is moving closer together: ISIS recruits, the Ebola virus, the conflicts in the Ukraine and the Mideast, the Greece crisis and the euro crisis. Refugees are dying on European borders and at the same time right-wing populist parties are growing, acts of violence against asylum-seekers are increasing, the standpoints are hardening, negative images are "in" again, the language is becoming militant. SPIELART will juxtapose a transnational cacophony with a monotheism of politics "without alternatives", propagandistic trends, simplified explanations of the world, and patterns of language. The artists invited to SPIELART will create for sixteen days a tableau vivant of our time. Diverse performative, installation-based, and participative forms of world- and self-assessment will convey and provoke discussions far beyond the usual political statements.


In the first part of the festival we will focus on non-European theater. The Congo artist Dieudonné Niangouna articulates his anger toward Europe and the corruption in his own country, and Akira Takayama articulates the unresolved occurrences of the catastrophe of Fukushima, which was caused by humans. The Lebanese theatermakers Rabih Mroué and Tania El Khoury relate in a very close manner life stories from the civil war. The Mexican Teatro Linea de sombra depicts a nightmarish flight through the desert to Texas, and Mamela Nyamza from South Africa traces in extravagant costumes clichés about African women. In the process the formats and stylistic devices couldn't be more different: They range from video installation with state-of-the-art 4K resolution to the explosive cascades of languages to voices from the earth to the encounter between artist and individual members of the audience at a secret location.


We will have two counterpoints to this non-European focus: The first is the Needcompany, which, based on the family trees of the members of the company, creates an alternative world history – a clear statement against nationalist reductions of history. The second counterpoint is, with the participation of curators and lecturers from four corners of the world, the examination of one's own often Euro-centric standpoint as part of the symposium SHOW ME THE WORLD.


There is a broad spectrum of themes and forms in the festival's main program ART IN RESISTANCE on the second SPIELART weekend. Since 2009 we have been inviting artists and activists to performance and discussion platforms focusing on different subjects. Diverse events on artivism and political art have also taken place elsewhere. This was an inducement for us to conduct once again fundamental research and announce a worldwide open call. Out of over 800 suggestions we will be showing 40 works produced for the most part especially for SPIELART in the lobbies and spaces in the Gasteig Cultural Center: installations, participative projects, performances, videos, lectures, discussions, photographs, and posters. Parallel to this there will be exhibitions of curated theater projects at other festival venues – including PROLETENPASSION 2015 ff., which will take us closer, starting from the bottom on up, to the history of class struggles with 65 songs; the epic projects THE CIVIL WARS and THE DARK AGES by Milo Rau; and a bedroom performance with psychiatric and police investigation files.


The second festival week is devoted in particular to new projects, which under the label "New Works" will present current artistic positions from Johannesburg, Pristina, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Berlin/Tel Aviv - and in addition there will be three world premieres of works by Ulrich Eisenhofer & Benno Heisel; Anna Konjetzky; and satellit production - all of them are from Munich.


Toward the end of the festival, in a mutual initiative with the Münchner Kammerspiele, we will invite the citizens of Munich to take on the roles of delegates at the WORLD CLIMATE CONFERENCE by Rimini-Protokoll, exactly fourteen days before the next world climate conference in Paris takes place from November 30 to December 11, 2015; one says that this conference will be the last opportunity to change course.


Between these festival stages Iggy Malmborg will show us how one gets an erection on command; Markus&Markus will show us what one should know about assisted suicide; Juha Valkeapää will show us how one winds up having a last meal; and on the last evening Efraim Ashbel and friends will give us a trip illuminated by a will-o'-the-wisp into an unknown utopia.


We are looking forward to seeing you!

Your SPIELART Team