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Game Laboratory for intermediate spaces Laboratory for intermediate spaces Game Theatre Theatre

LivingTOgether

LivingTOgether was commissioned by the German Consulate General in Toronto.

The starting point was the fall of the Berlin Wall as an unfinished historical event. sideviews initiated a communication process between two groups of students in the cities of Toronto and Berlin. Separated by geography, language, and cultural experience, they shared issues of interaction and isolation. An internet platform was developed in advance on which the children from both cities could play a virtual game together. At the same time, they worked in theatre workshops on dealing with real and imaginary borders. The students developed strategies with regard to conflicts, obstacles and different levels of meaning that arise from the realities of living together. The Berlin Wall was treated simultaneously as fact, metaphor and current reality. The students were able to look at their own social situation and examine their certainties and prejudices through the contexts of others.

The working process culminated in an exhibition of personal objects in Toronto, which the students had chosen according to their emotional significance and to which they could tell a personal story. The narratives performed live formed the conclusion of the project.

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Game Game

Camping Marianne

Summer Academy

Social experiment part 1

Summer camp as a communal form of freedom was something of an obsession in the first half of the last century. It reflected the longing for the utopia of an independent social construction beyond the hegemonic order. Which ideal images of a community and its common experience can we construct and make visible today? Based on this question, a campsite was organized in the schoolyard of the Nürtingen elementary school on Mariannenplatz in Kreuzberg, Berlin. In the sense of a “system of giving”, all participants were invited to bring in material objects and their own diverse knowledge. The focus was on what a school is, what can be learned and who owns the schoolyard. We created an adventure camp of collective inventions while cooking and playing sports together. During dinner debates we discussed how we can live together in a new and different system. 

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Game Game Theatre Theatre

WORLDwide… New

Is the world reality or is the world just what we imagine? 60 children from the Nürtingen elementary school in Berlin-Kreuzberg spent more than a year looking for possible answers. In this urban ethnographic experiment, students examined the social diversity in their environment on the basis of video interviews. They were confronted with a wide variety of topics: asylum seekers, politics, drug dealers, immigration and government. 

Using dramatic methods and video documentation, the research was made visible and tangible. The information on a wide variety of life plans and identities acquired in the interview workshop was then staged: in a three-week game, acting, directing, storytelling, costume design, visual arts and music were the motor that set a major negotiation process in motion. It turned out that identities and realities can be reconstructed. And that the rituals, self-images and attitudes can be changed, as can the world.